Category: Training Owners ¤
  Author: Dani Weinberg ¤
   Title: Beginning A Clicker Class ¤

Kylie,

You write about your first-ever clicker class in W. Australia.  First, 
let me congratulate you on taking on this huge challenge, especially 
under such difficult circumstances:

>>These people have been coming to this class for up to 8 weeks, on and off,
prior to me taking over, so they had lots of baggage.  Class structure at
this club is not defined (and this is not unusual in WA).  You turn up and
when the instructor thinks that you are ready for the next class, up you
go, regardless of where the rest of the class is at.  This is great for
fast movers, but a nightmare for the others, and especially for the
instructor because there are also constantly new people starting, so
effectively you re-run the first week all year <G>>>

>>I have written a plan of classes and whatnot, and will present it to the
club at the committee meeting tomorrow.  Hopefully that will help in some
ways, but I still don't know why I couldn't get through to these people.
Maybe I'm not cut out to work with such a big class??>>

It would certainly help if you started fresh, instead of trying to fight 
this impossible situation of constant drop-ins.  As for the class size, 
*I'm* not cut out for teaching a class of 15 effectively either!  And I'm 
an experienced and competent instructor.  Back in the Bad Old Days, when 
all you did was have people "heeling" around the room endlessly, with 
dogs nipping at other dogs' rearends, getting into little skirmishes, 
owners frustrated as all get-out, etc. etc. - it didn't matter how many 
dogs were in the class because it was chaos anyway!  I now limit my 
classes to 10, though I prefer 6-8, and I usually work alone, without any 
assistants.  One thing you might consider doing, along with starting 
afresh, is looking for one or two people who are also interested in 
clicker training and start grooming/training them to help you, even if 
all they do is keep an eye out for people who might be having problems 
and need your attention.

>>Anyway, for what it's worth, what I would like to do is have a short
session without the dogs (bearing in mind that these classes are outdoor
all year round, at night)  To get across the principle of OC and clicker
training,>>

If this idea applies to the new class you're designing, fine.  The only 
suggestion I'd offer you is to keep the session SHORT SHORT SHORT - like 
10 minutes.  That's really all you need.  And remember that, when 
presented with new information, people, on the average, take in only 10% 
of what's said, especially considering that very few people learn best by 
listening but, instead, need to be watching (a demo) and doing (trying it 
themselves).  So don't worry too much about teaching  basic principles at 
the start, since you'll have to repeat them a number of times anyway.

In the meantime, here's another suggestion.  Maybe you can split your 
group of 15 into 2 or 3 smaller groups and meet separately (during the 
class hour) with each group, doing whatever explaining, guiding, 
hand-holding you need to do to get them started.  You can work with a 
small group for 20 minutes, asking the others to watch, drink coffee, or 
whatever you think best.

I think what I'd do, with students coming and going, is choose a single 
behavior to work on in each class meeting, taking the students through as 
many of the steps as possible in one session (even though the dogs might 
not be ready for the later steps, such as VSR).  My goal would be to 
teach the handlers how to train Behavior X during the week, just getting 
them started in class.  Training simple tricks is very suitable for this 
approach and also very motivating to most people.  You'd have to have a 
good demo dog so that you could show them later steps in the process even 
though their own dogs might not be ready for those.  IOW, I'd treat the 
class not like a continuing class at all but, instead, like a one-time 
demonstration of clicker training and how it works.  If some of the 
students really stay with it and keep coming back regularly, you might 
set that group aside and run more like a real class, maybe by having them 
come 15 minutes early or stay late.

Please keep us posted on how it all works out.  I'm very interested.

Dani


Dani Weinberg
Albuquerque, NM
71044.3715@compuserve.com