It’s tempting to want to jump in and start training a behavior. However, if you spend some time planning, this will pay off!
As Dale Carnegie once said,
“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.”
When you start with a well-thought out shaping plan, your animal will be able to learn faster, with higher rates of reinforcement and less frustration. You and your animal will both feel more successful.
I designed this shaping plan template in 2020.
It is based in part on the template and approach to writing shaping plans that can be found in The PORTL manual. (What is PORTL?)
When I use this template with my students, we practice looking for the component actions that make up a behavior and identifying teaching strategies that will make it easy to teach each component.
Download it: You can use this link to download a copy of the template.
