So you’ve become a clicker trainer! Naturally you are very excited. You want other people around you to stop using punishment-based methods and start clicking. So you introduce

In April 2010, TIME magazine ran a cover story about paying kids cash to get better grades. The objections to cash ‘rewards’ for schooling have been around for a long time and

Be my Valentine? February means Valentine’s Day, a happy time for me as a child. I lived with the principal of our school, Mrs. Sturley, who set up

The limited hold is scientific terminology—laboratory slang, really—for a good way to use the marker and reinforcer to speed up response to a cue. We’re all used to sluggish responses. You call folks

At an annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis, where over 2,000 behavioral scientists gather each year, a woman professor with whom I was acquainted told me she had

When do I fade the click? How do I fade the click? We hear those questions all the time. The smart-aleck answer is “Never.” Because we don’t “fade”

When we first start out clicker training, we tend to get very excited about the fact that we can teach the dog a new behavior in just a few clicks. Suddenly,

Unlocking Animal Creativity What if you could ask an animal to invent something new? The “creative” game, an application of operant conditioning, was first developed with dolphins at

Below are The Ten Laws of Shaping, as included in Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. Since it was first published, we have learned more about the