If you enjoy listening to Karen Pryor's stories and lectures (and who doesn't?), you will be interested in her latest talk, on the development of clicker training and TAGteach. The introductory address to a TAGteach seminar took place at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in July 2012.
Karen talked about the first time clickers came on the scene twenty years ago…
"That was the first time any of us modern [animal] trainers spoke to that group, the behavior analysts. And it was the also the first time I ever spoke to a bunch of dog trainers. It was also the time when clickers were introduced. We brought clickers and we gave them to everybody. And the entire Hyatt with its atrium, psychologists were going click, click, click, click, click, on all eleven floors around the atrium. It was really a novel experience. The dog trainers adopted the clicker immediately. The psychologists are still working on it."
...and how marker-based operant conditioning swept through the dog training world…
"But in the next 10 years, the use of a conditioned reinforcer began really infesting the dog world. Like a germ, it was spreading… It was spreading for 10 years and right about the 10-year point, Theresa [McKeon] and I met and Theresa began using the clicker with her gymnastics students."
...and the challenges of bringing this technology into the world of human teaching and training:
"Now, one of the problems then [was that] there were already enough dog trainers using the clicker that people knew that clickers were for dogs. Don't use this on children! There was so much concern and prejudice about comparing or even in any way treating children the same way you treat dog that we had to separate them entirely."
Karen talked about the separate development of TAGteach, and how clicker training and TAGteach are now coming back together again after 20 years of clicker training and 10 years of TAGteach.
"But now it's twenty years later and the two fields are coming back together again. …The prejudice against using actual operant conditioning with children has vanished and more people in education-oriented fields are seeing the benefit of using these old principles, science-based. It doesn't really matter whether it's an adult or a child or a human or an animal because they are universal and they all work. … I think a more mature technology is appearing here. And indeed some of the applications are thrilling, just thrilling!"
Enjoy a clip of this talk, taken from the video of Karen's presentation. The complete address is available for sale in the TAGteach store.
