This week has been exciting! As it was my first week actively working on training my dogs, I am very excited to share my initial progress. In this post I will be detailing my new learning from the week and this week’s progress.

New Learning:

As I had set out a plan for training last week, I wanted to give the sources I picked a fair chance to work with each of my dogs. So, instead of researching more tips on the tricks I am training, I chose to dive deeper into rewards during training. In the past I have always found positive reinforcement to work best with my dogs, making me want to research this further.

During my research, I came across the article Positive Reinforcement Training from the Humane Society of the United States Website. In this article is is suggested to use praise, treats, and toys as rewards for positive behaviours. I had always known that dogs respond well to receiving some pets or a treat, but I did not know why. Through this article I discovered that when a dog receives something they like for behaving in a certain way, they are more likely to repeat the behaviour. In training it is my goal to associate the tricks I am teaching with positive things, so I think positive reinforcement is definitely the way to go.

Though the reason why positive reinforcement works for training might seem common sense, there are many other factors in correctly executing this training strategy. I learned that understanding the philosophy of positive reinforcement does not exactly teach how to do it. I decided to practice following a few of the factors from the article, I have listed them below:

• Timing: When rewarding a dog it is important to reward immediately after they preform the behaviour, otherwise they might not associate the reward with the behaviour.
• Consistency: It is important to only reward the good behaviours in order to continue the positive association.
• Rewarding Shaping Behaviour: Along with rewarding certain behaviours, in the beginning behaviours that are close should be rewarded too. This helps move dogs towards the target.

I found this website about halfway through the week, so I did not begin keeping these factors in mind until then. I found this new knowledge about positive reinforcement to cause my dogs to progress much quicker than they had been previously.

Progress Update:

Scout: This week Scout began to move through my legs with a lead (a small training treat). In the beginning he was apprehensive and would run around me, but he quickly caught on. I found asking him to sit and then leading him through my legs worked best.

Chex: This week I worked on holding my hand in-front of her and waiting for her to sniff it. As soon as her nose touched my hand I would say “boop” and give her a treat. Though she did not respond to the command, she very excitedly sniffed my hand each time I put it out.

Apollo: This week we worked on using his name as a command. If he looked at me when I used his name I would give him a small treat. Though I was not working on him coming to me from a distance, I did notice an improvement of his response to his name in the yard.

I have created a short video of each dogs progress for the week! Please note that the presence of a camera caused a bit of a distraction, making the video only a partial representation of their progress.

In the next week I will continue to work with each of my dogs following the outline I had set out for myself in last weeks post.

Bonus

In my EDTC300 post, Technology in the Classroom: Exploring iMovie I chose to look into iMovie to use in my learning project. I was able to use this tool to create the video I have added to this post. While creating, I took a screen recording! I have included this recording with a voice over in that post, so feel free to check it out!