I'm a teacher biology at a school in the Netherlands. It is what you would call a highschool. Our school is giving extra classes for younger children age 11/12 for 10 hours in 5 weeks. It is to show them that our school is different from te groundschool where they are now. And to get them intrested in our school.
I'm also a veterinarian and my favorite patients are those with behavioral problems. I solve a lot of them by training the owners in using the clicker. I do so for the last 14 years, my dog trained me.
So now I'm having the oppertunity to teach children what I want, clickertraining. The only problem is I don't have animals. Except from my fifteen year old lurcher.
I think I can create an intresting lesson session by using a lot of video. I also planned to let the children click eachother. And I'm inviting a dancing dog.
If someone has a nice idea for my lessons please let me now. There are going to be 15 children.
Of course there will be lots of treats for them.
Greetings (Groeten) Jansje
Hi Jansje, Sounds like a
Hi Jansje,
Sounds like a GREAT opportunity for you and the children.
Letting them play the shaping game and click each other would probably be something they would really enjoy. You can also play variations on the shaping game to demonstrate other concepts. For instance, you can play the "NO" game, where the trainer says "no" everytime the person playing the animal goes in the wrong direction. Really good for showing how fast people (and animals) shut down when they are only getting corrections.
There are lots of neat videos on youtube with a variety of species. Will you have access to a few computers? One fun thing would be to demonstrate to them that ALL animals can be clicker trained. Fish, birds, dogs, horses, cats, zoo animals, etc! You could even make this into a game. Let them go on an internet scavenger hunt. Put them in small groups and give them half an hour (or so) to search youtube and find as many different species being clicker trained as they can. Tell them to just search for different animal names. such as "clicker training dogs" "clicker training horses," "clicker training chickens," "clicker training fish," and so on. Which ever group finds the most species, wins. You could also let each group show the best video they find to the whole class.
Preparing for vet care is a great application for clicker training. You could use your dog and model all the different behaviors we can teach to make our dogs more calm and cooperative for veterinary care. How about picking a new trick to teach your dog (and that wouldn't be too complex) and work on it for five minutes here and there during the length class. If you can find time for enough little sessions like this, it would be neat to show them how a trick progresses from planning it out, to starting teaching, to getting the final behavior (or an approximation of it.)
Another idea, explain shaping and then find a few more complex videos to show them with more complicated skills or chains of skills. Have them try to break the skill down into component parts or approximations and brain storm the best way to teach it. Or, pick a more simple skill, such as lie down or go to a mat and have them come up with as many Different ways as possible to teach it.
Some of these ideas might be a bit complicated, depending on how much the kids understand about training, so you might want to tailor them or modify them depending on your class. But, I hope some of this helps or at least gives you ideas for other things to do!
cheers,
Mary Hunter
http://stalecheerios.com
teach children clickertraining
Hello Mary,
It took me a long time to answer your writing. But I want to let you know how it and that I very much apreciate your answer. Ik decided to buy 5 chickens (Serama's) and let the children clickertrain them.
First I took the children, 16 eleven and twelve year old girls and boys, in the classroom and explained, classical and operant conditioning. I showed them the pavlov dog (found it on youtube) and pigeons and rats in the skinnerbox (also on youtube).
Next I explained the clicker and how it worked. I did this in a very interactive way, and I was suprised by the children how rapid they were in finding examples from there own pets. I know this is a lot of information given in a hour.
I ended the first hour with a video that showed what we were going to teach the chicken (Terry Ryan). Colordiscrimination.
The next hour we were using the chickens. First I show the how to handle them. I wondered how many children are afraid of touching the chicken, but not forcing them into anything this was disapearing when they saw how nice they were and that the other children were not afraid.
We only handled the chicken and conditioned the chicken to it.
In the following five weeks we started every time with the first hour watching video's of very different species getting trained tradionally and then how they were trained the same things with the clicker.
It didnt took long and the childeren talked about how they were clickertraining there own pets, rabbits, lovebirds, horse and of course there dogs and cats. Some of the children could make plans to solve problem behaviors that the other children brought in, telling where the wrong reinforcements were made, or unneccesary punishment. For example the horse of one of the girls that started to run when she was riding it and then got hitten if it was slowing down and standing stil. They thought about why it was running (pain from the saddle or in its mouth?) And told how stupid it was to hit the horse as it was showing the behavior you wanted. (the girl was told to do so by her trainer).
All of them showed me in there behavior that they were nog easily going to use punishment in training ever again, and they were all more aware that traditional ways of training animals can be cruel for the animal. We talked in particular about the training methods of some dutch amazones.
After the five weeks the chicken had also learned a lot. The most beautiful event was when one of the chicken called Nougat escaped from the girl holding her to bring her to the table. She flew to another table where already a chicken was on it and started to pick on the target that was lying there waiting for her click. "She really wants to work", commented the girl. All the children succeeded in learning the chicken to pick the color they chose for there chicken.
We had a closure afterwards, some children couldn't make it to come but they sent there parents giving me bottles of wine and flowers, because they loved it. And so did I.
The chicken are now walking in my garden and are almost a bit of a nuisance because the are following me around wherever I go.
So Mary thank you for your ideas as you see I took some of them in the lessons. Sadly enough I could not take my dog into the class because he wasn't healthy enough he died in may at the age of 15 years.