ep 60: prerequisite skills
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, or teach dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as I share key insights on all things related to dog agility and help find your team's path to excellence and unlock your best year yet. Let's get started.
Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna talk about prerequisite skills and give some ideas for in-person agility instructors to help their students develop these prerequisite skills before their first group class. A couple of episodes ago, this came up in my conversation with Sarah [00:01:00] strumming about dogs that tend to get labeled over aroused.
Megan Foster-1: When you take a puppy or a young dog, or especially dogs and adolescents into a chaotic overstimulating environment and they are lacking certain skills, frustration can leak in to your training because of this lack of clarity, and we can produce those. Dogs that we tend to label over arouse that Sarah and I were discussing in that episode.
But this is also true for dogs that lack focus and engagement. Dogs that might rather sniff than train dogs that might rather visit their dog friends or their people, friends. All of this can be avoided by focusing on the prerequisite skills first. And in my mind, the [00:02:00] prerequisite skills are the essential skills needed for clean, clear training sessions and training loops.
Things like focus and engagement. I just wrapped up. A free call in my fans of FX community, all about focus and engagement, and that conversation was also released on the podcast. So you can go back and find that conversation because we can encourage our students to start that conversation and start that concept of building focus and engagement in way easier environments.
And then they're going to encounter during group classes the next prerequisite skill. Is definitely going to be interacting with your reinforcers. Can you eat? Can you eat from my hand? Can you eat [00:03:00] a tossed treat on the ground? Um, do you have toy interest? Do you want to tug with the toy? Do you want to bring the toy back?
These skills are really hard to teach in a chaotic environment, so if they're focused on first ahead of time and you bring those reinforcer skills. Into the group class setting, you're going to be way ahead of the game and avoid potential fallout.
Your next prerequisite skill is leash skills and collar skills. So what does your puppy do when you take the leash off? Do they run around and visit, or do they hang out and wait to see all the great things that you have for them? If we teach the skill first in more neutral environments, it will more easily show up in.
[00:04:00] The group class environment, and you'll be able to build on something they already know rather than trying to teach them a lot of new things in a very challenging environment. So we're going to avoid rehearsing a lot of potential mistakes like running off to SN F, or visit or steal someone else's toy or insert any potential problematic puppy behavior that you can think of.
I, so I want my puppy to know what to do when I remove their leash, and I also want them to be comfortable with me putting a leash back on them. One prerequisite skill that I think can help a lot of dogs is how to move throughout a training space. And one way that I do that with young puppies is putting their leash on and moving with them.
With the help of the leash so that we're learning how to move together through space from one [00:05:00] fun thing to another. Another prerequisite skill would be holding your collar, uh, for any type of moving them around more precisely, or even being held by someone else. We can teach that first rather than the dog having to learn how to be held.
While you are using it for the skill that you need it for, right? More prerequisite skills would be calm, waiting, stationing or crate, things like that. Just giving the dog an idea of how to do this in less arousing situations so that the dog can at least remember that they sort of have that skill in more exciting situations.
But these are all prerequisite skills to. Good learning and setting them up for success later on that if we are trying to teach these skills [00:06:00] at the same time as the agility skills, we are likely to run into some problems. That can be really confusing and frustrating for both team members, especially when you are working with people that are new to dog sports or new to agility.
Making them responsible for teaching the prerequisite skills and the agility skills at the same time is likely six too many spinning plates, right? We want to do our best to split things down for both of our learners, and so focusing on these prerequisite skills ahead of time in some way will really make your students more successful.
It will increase your retention rate. Your students will have a very clear picture in their minds about what training should look like. So how can we set this up to make this a reality? [00:07:00] One idea is that you have a hybrid model that maybe your first puppy class or your foundation, a deleted class, whatever, is the first set in your class series is.
One week online, one week in person, one week out online, one week in person. If you needed to fill that time every single week at your facility, you would have two groups so that they were alternating between online and in person. So basically they would be coming in every other week, so they would have time to.
Teach the prerequisite skill at home and then come practice that prerequisite skill in class with your help. How much online support you give in a hybrid model just depends on how much capacity you have for that type of training. Another option would be that your first class that they take with you is online only.
Of course, [00:08:00] this would need to require some feedback, so you would have to have the capacity and technology to do that. But then that first six or eight weeks that you work with them, you are helping them with these prerequisite skills, helping them pick out environments outside of the home and the training facility that they can train in and feel safe.
So not only are you going to prepare those dogs better for your class, you're also teaching those humans about getting out and training in the wild and training on the road and not. Only focusing on training in two places at home and in their training class. Obviously you can make your very first set of classes in person.
Just these skills, the prerequisite skills. I did this in my in-person coaching program. We called it essential skills. Um, it was eight [00:09:00] or 16 weeks depending on. The experience level of the handlers. If they were brand new to dog training, we tended to stretch it out for them, and it would take a couple of eight week sessions to get this done.
But if they were experienced trainers or it wasn't their first time through the program, we could get these skills pretty solid and move those dogs along in six to eight weeks time. A lot of pushback that I get is about student retention and thinking that we have to. Get dogs on equipment or get dogs doing fancy things in order to keep the people returning to our class.
However, my experience was the exact opposite when I was first starting to teach. I also had these feelings, so I was always trying to justify why I wanted to. Break this down even smaller or add this new skill or slow this progress down just a little [00:10:00] bit to focus on the details. I would always try and add, you know, there's a method to my madness and I would kind of qualify why I'm doing it.
And one of my students just finally said, Megan, we trust you. We're here. We keep signing up, we keep coming back. And. That really is the truth. If you present teaching these concepts as normal, they have no reason to question you. They have come to you because you are an expert in this field and they want to learn from you.
So if you present the prerequisite skills as skills that everyone teaches, they have no reason to doubt you and seek elsewhere. The other thing that. I like to keep in mind is even if someone does decide that this route is not for them and they do go elsewhere, they will likely find you again [00:11:00] because we all know that a lack of focus, a lack of engagement, and a lack of some of these other skills will catch up so that if they do run into trouble later on.
They will come back to you because they will remember that you were advocating for teaching these skills. And you know, if they go elsewhere and they are successful, that is fantastic for them. They were meant to go elsewhere. So those are the things that I like to remind myself when I'm teaching and what I like to remind the instructors that I mentor.
So while this episode did focus on what agility instructors can do, I also want to remind those that are not instructors that just have puppies or young dogs, and you're looking to get them into a class, I want to remind you that you don't have to enroll [00:12:00] them until they are ready. There is nothing that says you have to take the eight week old puppy to the puppy class.
There's no rule that says you have to take them when they're six months or eight months or 15 months. If we focus on taking them to class, when they're ready to cla ready to go to class, you will have far more success than trying to fight with them on who they are in that class environment. So if you.
Can't find the perfect class that you know is just right for them and focuses on the skills that they're ready for. Teach those skills at home. Take them out to different places to train and enroll them in the class when they are ready for the class. Because every single class out there has some prerequisite skill.
And if you aren't sure what those skills are, I really encourage you to have a [00:13:00] conversation with the instructor about. How the class is set up, what are the skills you're gonna be learning in that class, and maybe even ask if you can observe one or two classes so that you can have a better idea of what your dog needs in order to be successful in that group class.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I really appreciate some feedback. You can leave me a review, engage on social media or share this with a friend. I hope you'll be back to listen to my next episode. In the meantime, you can find all of my offers on my website, fx agility.com. Happy training.
