The Five Times Challenge: Week 1 Update

It’s been just over a week since I started the Five Times Challenge. I still really like it; my biggest difficulty has been tracking the sessions. I don’t have the best memory, and though I’ve been trying to make a hash mark on my training board when I complete a session, I’ve forgotten to do this a lot. The upside of this is that Maisy has probably gotten more than five sessions on several days.

There have also been days where we haven’t been home much, either because we’ve been at a friend’s house, or because we’ve been at training class. On these days, I’ve tried to work in sessions, either while waiting for my husband to run an errand, or while in the waiting room at the vet’s, or even while waiting for pizza to be delivered! So, on those days, we may get fewer sessions in, but we get the added bonus of a new environment.

This is the beauty of the Five Times Challenge: since it’s so quick, it’s easy to sneak in some practice in other environments. I’m taking advantage of those natural times in life where you have to wait for something. There isn’t time for a full 20 minute session, but a few steps of heeling? No problem!

The progress Maisy has made has been amazing. I’m getting some very nice attentive heeling, and my instructor even commented last night that Maisy’s heeling looked really nice.

But, my favorite moment happened on Monday night. My husband needed to run to the credit union, and we tagged along. It was beautiful out, so instead of waiting in the car, we hung out on a busy street corner in downtown St. Paul. Since we’d been in a hurry to leave, I’d forgotten to bring treats (bad trainer), but luckily there was a ball in the car. Normally, I don’t train with the ball; Maisy is borderline OCD about balls, and when she sees them, it’s like her brain falls out of her head.

So here we are, on a busy street corner at rush hour, in a location Maisy has never been before, outside a credit union, which means people are coming and going, and I’m holding a ball. An exciting, enticing ball. And my Maisy was able to take one whole step of attention heeling.

I know that doesn’t sound like a lot- one step? That’s it?- but trust me, for a fearful dog with reactivity and a lot of difficulty with focus on concentration, it was absolutely beautiful.

Trying not to take it all for granted...

Something amazing happened yesterday. Something so amazing that I ought to be shouting it from the rooftops, bragging about it to everyone I come across, something that I could never have imagined happening only six months ago. And yet, it barely registered in my consciousness.

Maisy and I went to PetSmart yesterday, something we do on a fairly regular basis. It's a good opportunity to work on our Control Unleashed skills if the store is busy, and if it's quiet, it's a chance to work on our obedience skills in a different environment. Yesterday, I went with the idea of working on heeling in mind. In fact, that idea was so firmly in my head that even upon seeing all the dogs and chaos, I didn't revert to working on CU stuff instead. As a result, I almost missed out on appreciating just how far my reactive dog has come.

So, we were in the store, and there were two women with adolescent yellow labs in the store. They were dragging their people around the store, jumping and leaping in some rather impressive displays of acrobatics, panting heavily, and just generally being adolescent labs. Adding to that, there was a large, darkly colored mix of some sort- the sort that typically guarantees a reaction out of Maisy- as well as a few small dogs, about Maisy's size. In other words: lots of distraction, lots of chaos, and prime breeding grounds for over-arousal and reactivity.

And yet my amazing dog never once growled, barked, lunged or even initiated playing Look At That (which she normally does when feeling stressed). In fact, at one point, we accidentally came within ten feet of all of these dogs at the same time, and Maisy's only response was to solicit play.

She solicited play.

Her response to a huge handful of crazy, to what only six months ago would have provoked an over-the-top reactive episode, was to give a play bow.

That is so amazing I can barely believe it, and yet at the time, I was frustrated that she wasn't in heel position. Here's Maisy, being the most amazing dog in the world, and I'm worrying about something as stupid as heeling.

Sometimes, I'm just as amazed at my own foolishness as I am by Maisy's progress.

Training and Retraining

Maisy graduating from her puppy class. She's about five months old in this picture, and clearly thinks that wearing a hat is stupid.

When I first got Maisy just over three years ago, people who knew me were shocked. Crystal? With a dog? As much as people who know me now can't imagine me without a dog, people who knew me then couldn't imagine me with one... because I hated dogs. Well, maybe hate is a strong word, but I did not care for how ill-behaved most dogs are.

Despite my strong dislike of dogs, Maisy somehow wormed her way into my life and my heart over the course of approximately thirty seconds. Still, I didn't like ill-behaved dogs, so I swore that Maisy would never become one. I signed her up for training classes before she even came home.

Now, three years later, I wish I had known more before bringing Maisy home. If I were to do it all over again, I would do many things differently, not because Maisy isn't a great dog, but because I was haphazard in the way I taught her.

Take, for example, heeling. Since I never planned to compete with Maisy, I figured that if Maisy was more or less close to my left side, that was good enough. I didn't even know the concepts of forging and lagging existed, much less cared about them. Maisy learned that the behavior of heeling was to get on my left side and walk the same speed as me.

A year later, when we went to classes at a local training club, I learned that heeling was about a particular position. I began to tighten up what I expected of her, and as a result, Maisy has passable, though not spectacular, heeling.

After our last two trials, though, I realized that Maisy's heeling needs to radically improve, so I began to work on attention heeling with her.

All of which is to say: I never had a very clear picture of what I was teaching until long after I began teaching it.

So, I've set out to retrain heeling, and since I finally know exactly what my criteria is, I've been using my five daily sessions to work on attention heeling on both the left and the right.

Oh my god, you guys. The difference in retraining something and in training it properly in the first place is astounding. Although I am starting to get some nice attention with heeling on the more traditional left side, I am getting way more attention and focus on the right. This shouldn't be surprising- learning something new is obviously so much easier than trying to fight against prior learning and muscle memory. And I'm not surprised, really. More like amazed at the degree of difference I'm seeing.

So, elementary training lesson of the day: Know what the end behavior looks like before you start.

What do you wish you had trained differently? What have you had to retrain? How successful were you? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Training Schedules

What’s your training schedule like? How often do you train? How long do you train? How many exercises do you work on at once?

I have always treated training like homework- you sit down, do what you need to do, and then go to the next task. So, I’ve always trained in one daily chunk, generally about 15 to 30 minutes. And in that daily chunk, I’ve worked on an average of four to six items. This has always worked well for us, although sometimes it's hard to get my lazy butt off the couch.

Then, my dog training “crush,” Patricia McConnell, posted in her blog about a book about people who had strokes, and how they made more physical progress when they were immersed in their therapy than when they did the more traditional daily chunks. Learning by immersion has long been considered the best way to learn foreign languages, and based on the science, it makes sense: you can form new neural pathways better if you’re immersed in what you’re doing. And why wouldn’t this been true of our dogs, too? After all, their brains are very similar to ours. Trisha decided to set a learning immersion goal for her and her dog: she would work with her dog five times a day.

Call me a hanger-on, but I decided to try it, too. I thought it would be really difficult at first. How do you find the time to train your dog five times throughout the day? At 30 minutes a pop, well, you don’t. Plus, Maisy hates drilling, so I decided to do very short sessions: two minutes.

I’ve done this a couple of days now, and I’m surprised by how much easier this is! Before, it was a struggle to find 15 minutes all at once. But two minutes? That’s the length of a commercial break. It’s easy to fit in while cooking or doing the laundry. It only adds marginally to a bathroom break between chapters in the book you’re reading. Before you know it, you’ve done five sessions!

And the learning seems to be faster, too. Maisy and I have been working on heeling. We spend one minute on attention heeling, and then one minute on right-side heeling. I throw a few right finishes in there, too, to help her understand the difference between a right finish and a right “get in heel” command (which I desperately need a cue for- any suggestions?). In only a matter of a few days, Maisy has almost mastered the “get in heel” on the right side- my body movements are less extreme, and she’s almost sitting straight every time now. Her attention, on both sides, is much better! And she seems to get the difference in my hand signals for right heel and right finish.

Maisy seems to be enjoying this new schedule, too. She loves training, and now she gets to do it five times a day instead of just once! Could life get any better? She still needs to entertain herself between sessions, but stretching it out like this seems to be more stimulating, even if we’re spending the same amount of time (or less!) actually training. Plus, it’s so much easier to keep her attention the entire time and end on a good note when the sessions are so short!

I’ll report back in a couple of weeks, but I think we’ll keep working like this. It will be easy to add in fronts, moving downs and back up in heel. Of course, the more I add in, the less time we can work on each skill, but I think I could easily increase the session length to three minutes while simultaneously reducing the amount of time on each skill to 30 seconds or so. After all, 30 seconds is really quite a long time.

So… what’s your training schedule like? Are you ready to take the Five Times Challenge?

Asking the Wrong Questions

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week thinking about no reward markers and keep going signals. In fact, I’ve thought so much about it, that I just had to post about it again.

In the comments to my last post on this topic, the point came up that there is a huge difference between shaping and competition. This is absolutely true. Shaping is about teaching a new skill, while competition is about testing a skill which is, presumably, under stimulus control. This means that you can’t really compare how a dog interprets silence from the learning stage to the performing stage; they’re two completely different contexts.

More than that, though, I realized I was also asking the wrong question entirely. When it comes to shaping, the question should not be How does my dog interpret silence? Instead, the question should be Why is there silence at all?

Think about that for a moment.

Now think about your last shaping session with your dog. How much silence was there? And why was there that much silence? For my last session, there was about thirty seconds of silence. Why was there that much silence? Well, because Maisy didn’t meet my criteria, of course.

But is that true?

My job as a clicker trainer is two-fold: split the task down into many small steps, and give a high rate of reinforcement when my criteria is met. These two things are interrelated. If a task is properly broken down into small, achievable steps, your rate of reinforcement will naturally be quite high. Likewise, the inverse is true: if you lump the steps together by setting the criteria too high, it will take your dog longer to figure it out, and thus your rate of reinforcement will be lower.

So why was there that much silence? Because I failed to do my job as a trainer. I lumped when I should have split.

Clicker training is difficult to master. To be a truly efficient trainer, you need to not only be able to split the task up into small steps, but you also need to be able to analyze your dog’s response, assess whether that means your criteria is too high, too low, or just right, and then adjust that criteria… and you need to be able to do all of that in a matter of seconds!

Thankfully, clicker training is also easy to learn. Even if you never move beyond the basic "click the behavior you like and give your dog a treat" stage, your dog will still learn. That's what I love about clicker training: regardless of your skill level, it has something to offer to everyone.

Because it's too funny not to share

Maisy must have been a retriever in her past life, because she is obsessed with tennis balls. I wake up with them in my bed, I get them dropped in my lap constantly, and the first thing Maisy does, well, ever, is run to get her ball.

Recently, she's begun to do something absolutely hilarious with her ball, and though it really has nothing to do with training, I just had to share.

See, usually when we play ball, she'll chase it and bring it back for five to ten minutes, at which point she'll flop down on her belly to chew on the ball a bit before bringing it back to start the game again. For the past week, however, when she goes to flop down on her belly, she does so right in front of the couch. Of course, it often goes under the couch, at which point she goes nuts trying to get it out.

At first, I thought this was an accident. But when it began to happen again... and again... and again, I remarked to my husband that for such a smart dog, she sure was acting stupid.

Tonight, I realized that this is all part of some crazy game. Over and over again, she has flopped down by the couch, very purposely pushed it under, and then gone crazy trying to fish it out again with her too-short legs or by trying to shove her too-big body after it.

And this is one of the reasons I love my crazy dog: she always makes me laugh.

Clicker Theory: No Reward Markers and Keep Going Signals

I apologize in advance to any readers who are not familiar with clicker training, or who are just beginning to learn about the learning theory behind it, as today’s post concerns more sophisticated clicker concepts.

About a week ago, someone on a mailing list I belong to posed a very interesting question: If the click means “yes,” then what does no click mean?

The poster, a teacher, mentioned that when she has her students play the“clicker game,” in class, they initially learn faster if they receive feedback for both yes, that’s what I want you to do, and no, you’re going in the wrong direction. In other words, a no reward marker. She went on to say that once her students understood the game, they learned that the absence of a click or verbal marker was basically the same thing as being told no. Once they figured that out, they could figure out the task just as quickly with only the positive marker.

She wondered: do our dogs understand the absence of a click the same way? Do they interpret silence as “no”? If so, why do they keep working in trial settings, where they receive neither clicks nor encouraging verbal feedback? Wouldn’t the silence inherit in a trial tell our dogs that they are doing it wrong? If so, this would have dire consequences on our performances.

The general response was that silence should not- cannot- imply that the dog made an error. Instead, we must teach our dogs that silence is a keep going signal- that they are on the right track, and that if they keep up with what they are doing, they will earn reinforcement. That is the only way that our trial performances will hold up.

So, if silence means “keep going,” then how do we tell our dogs they’re going off track? As Clicker Trainers, we don’t use corrections (defined here as anything that causes the dog pain or stress) to tell the dog they’re wrong. The logical response would be the use of a no reward marker- an emotionally neutral way of saying no, try something different… but some people on the list argued that this would actually slow learning down.

I disagreed. I shared with the group that when Maisy begins to get off track during a shaping session, I tell her “Nope! Try Again!” in a cheery voice. I wrote that I felt my dog learns faster this way, but that even if she doesn’t, it helps me feel better to be giving the feedback.

Still, in light of the conversation, I decided that I would test my theory, so I sat down with Maisy to work on a shaping project. First, I just worked with her like normal, not really thinking about what I say or when I say it. Although I did say “Nope! Try Again!” perhaps three or four times in the course of five minutes, I found that I said it more as conversation and less as information. Interestingly, I discovered that I was saying it at times when we were in the midst of a long period of silence. That “nope!” served to fill the silence until she finally got the click for doing what I wanted.

Next, I worked with her, but remained silent. I didn’t speak; I simply clicked or didn’t. Maisy continued on, doing well until we hit one of those long periods of silence. She kept trying things, but after about thirty seconds of neither a click nor a “nope!”, she laid down and looked at me as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do.

Finally, I tried using the no reward marker more regularly. We continued shaping, but I tried to think in terms of right and wrong. I clicked when she got it right, and said “Nope!” when she got it wrong. This led to rapid-fire clicks and “nopes,” and after she got three “nopes” in the space of about ten seconds, Maisy again laid down with her chin on the floor. This time, though, I had to encourage her quite a bit to re-engage with the shaping game. But when she again got several more “nopes,” she laid down and refused to play any more.

I began to feel frustrated; this is not how it’s supposed to work! She’s supposed to want to play! My frustration came out in my voice, and I began to tell her to get up with an edgy tone. When she didn’t, my feelings of frustration gave way to anger. Since I didn’t want to take that out on her, I ended the session to evaluate what had just happened.

The first thing that I decided was that I was wrong: Maisy does not learn faster with a no reward marker. In fact, she gave up so quickly, and was so difficult to persuade to re-engage with the task, that I believe she found it punishing. True, she also gave up when the silence went on too long in the second scenario, but she worked approximately three times longer, and was much more willing to re-engage when I asked. As a result, I think she found the lack of any feedback confusing, but not aversive.

Still, I concluded that the complete lack of any kind of feedback was also not the best way to help Maisy learn. Instead, her learning is most efficient when she gets lots of reinforcement over a short period of time. This means my job is to break the shaping task at hand down into as many pieces as possible so it is easier for her to progress through each step of the task. However, sometimes it is difficult to figure out how to break a task down any further. As a result, if I cannot figure out how to make the task easier, and if it’s been fifteen to twenty seconds without a click, I need to give Maisy a “gimme” click- reverting to the previous level of criteria for a few moments before trying the higher criteria again.

I also suspect that my initial use of “nope!” wasn’t actually serving as a no reward marker. Given the way Maisy responded, I think it actually served the purpose of a keep going signal for her. This means that for tasks that haven’t had a sufficient amount of duration built in yet, she depends on verbal encouragement to know that she’s doing what I want. (Interestingly, though completely off topic, I haven’t been very good at building duration past 30 seconds or so, which was Maisy’s threshold for silence during these tests. It makes me wonder if my inability to build more duration in her behaviors is due to her threshold, or if she’s developed that threshold because I have neglected to put in the work necessary to build more duration. On second though, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that.)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I learned that I don’t like it when I have to tell Maisy she’s wrong. I became frustrated and then angry as she continued to fail, even though that “failure” was behaviorally no different than when we did silence only, or when I used the keep going signal. Maisy was going about the shaping task in the exact same way in each scenario. She wasn’t any more wrong when I told her she was than when I didn’t. In other words: focusing on the wrong behavior rather than the right one changed the way I viewed and felt about the training session, and it took all of the fun and joy out of playing the shaping game with Maisy.

In the end, doing this experiment not only taught me that my initial supposition was wrong, but it also reaffirmed my commitment to positive training. Focusing on what I want her to do helps Maisy learn faster, but it also makes us both feel better.