If you’ve spent any time training animals (or humans, for that matter), you know that things don’t always go as planned! Particular steps may end up taking much longer or shorter than your initially anticipated. And at certain steps, the animal may behave in a way that you didn’t expect at all. You should always […]
Concepts and Terms RSS feed for this section
In this section, you’ll find articles about important concepts and terms related to the science of animal training and animal behavior. If you’re new to positive animal training, I recommend starting with the articles in my Top Posts section.
Where are you going? The importance of objectives
As I mentioned last month, I’m currently redesigning the undergraduate behavior analysis class that I teach. One big part of the redesign process is deciding exactly what I want students to get out of the new version of the course. That is, at the end of the course what should students know and what should […]
Building confidence with backchaining
I’m in Denver currently at the 43rd annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis International. This is the seventh year that I’ve attended the ABAI convention. It’s a huge affair that brings together several thousand individuals who are interested in the science and practice of behavior analysis – with both humans and other animals. […]
When teaching doesn’t equal learning
I do several different types of teaching and training. In addition to working directly with animals, a huge part of what I do is teaching people how to train their pets. I also teach a class for undergraduate students in the behavior analysis department at our local university. The same basic principles of learning apply […]
A few thoughts about poisoned cues
This post is part of my notes from the 2017 ClickerExpo conferences. You can find more of my ClickerExpo notes on the Conference notes page. At the Portland ClickerExpo and again at the Stamford ClickerExpo I attended Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz’s lecture on poisoned cues. You may be asking: Why attend the same lecture twice? Poisoned […]
Thinking about lateral thinking
This post is part of my notes from the 2017 ClickerExpo conferences. You can find more of my ClickerExpo notes on the Conference notes page. During the 2017 Stamford ClickerExpo I attended a session by Terry Ryan on lateral thinking. The session was called: “When nothing is working: Lateral thinking for dog trainers.” This session […]
