Are you an Active Learner?

Or: Are you getting your money’s worth for online courses?

It would not matter what subject we are talking about: cooking, shopping, playing golf or training your dog if you are not working at getting better then you are getting worse. Cruising without paying attention is a sure way to let your skills slip. Driving by habit with no recollection of the journey: did you see that waving potato by the road?

Telling yourself to pay attention does not cut it, you need to find a way to activate the thinking. I upgraded to a car from a van about 10 years ago; Van had left me with really sloppy habits mostly associated with “going round the corner like a boat”. Not good. After doing the test drive and enjoying a week in my sleek new car, I returned to the dealership and asked the 26 year old sales guy (who also races these cars in rallies) to give me some tips to improve. Wow, I did not know what I didn’t know. Hell he must have been sucking teeth on my test drive. Poor boy.

Passive learning

It is easy to cruise along as a passive learner, whilst it may have value for learning by association: puppy gets food when near people, we can also be fooled that we have “attended” or “done that course” by just listening to the podcast, reading the pdfs or watching others do the work.

Training does not always translate into effective learning

We tend to think these things are the same, they are not. I work through Todd’s repertoire of behaviours on verbal cues, fading out the signals and only be passively present. It seems to be training, but I was not:

• actively evaluating each movement for consistency,
• planning the next movement relative to previous strengths or areas needing more attention,
• making an effort to include some jeopardy (saying Cheese on Toast instead of Hup-Sit to check his auditory discrimination skills)
• evaluating current response relative to previous sessions: was he getting more fluent?
• asking him to upgrade his learning.

I am not sure the session was of any value to either of us except that I felt I had “done some training with the dogs” and he got grub.

When we are actively learning our minds should be asking questions at every step: both of us.

A purpose to this session

Whether this is your purpose: driving around the bend in a four wheel car and not a boat (which means gripping on for dear life) or for the dog to improve engagement of their back and pelvic muscles as they sit tall. There needs to be a goal, a focal point of the next few minutes.

This will need preplanning as a part of the whole curriculum for the dog or your course. Once we begin to make this a habit you will find cruising round the bend has changed: learning is happening. I most certainly experience a dopamine flush on a good bend and seek good bends to test me.

Tune in before the training

Whether this is a refresher of the notes from the last lesson or seeking some extra background material, being mentally tuned up will make a difference. If you are enrolling on a course then find material or pre-reading for background.

For your training sessions go through the notes from the last session before the dogs are aware it’s training time. No winging it for fun, getting them all excited and just having a grub for all session.

Prime the engine: the active brain.

Make connections

How does what you are learning relate to other areas in your life?

Consider the brain priming: before you next hit the supermarket, walk all the usual aisles in your mind and re-write your list in the order of what you need. This means you will be less inclined to impulse grab or leave without anything for dinner. Marketing Gurus will hate you.

This is an example of how brain priming, tuning in BEFORE the activity makes the activity, in our case the learning, more efficient and better retention.

What do you need to learn?

Stretch the questions

Those small thoughts that got you wondering: bring it up, ask a friend, explore and ask YouTube. Is this really what I am seeing or is something else going on here? I see Collies superbly responsive to cues when working sheep but not getting obvious rewards. So what is happening, why are they so good?

This is how we learn to move forward often as a collective.

Our early days of clicker training back in the 90’s we had a new term: “training by committee”: one dog, one clicker, but lots of active watchers and note takers. Give the dog a break and we would thrash out 92 different “what ifs….? Those dogs never had training days with so much sleeping in the agenda.

We may not be training in the same room today, but we are still a collective reaching around the world and down the street. We have a larger committee seeking the future of learning.

Strengthen neural connections

This will comes from doing the doing but also from watching other doing the same doing. By asking our brain to engage in the activity we are forging new pathways which can then be extended as we see others working on the same activity. This does not work if you have not engaged in the work yourself: think about that video you watched where you saw inspirational training and then wanted to give it a go yourself. Experience of that activity will awaken.

Just passively watching a gymnast do a back flip does not engage my brain except as a spectator: because I have never been through the learning for that skill.

This is where the do as I do philosophy breaks down, we need the firsthand experience of the doing to make connections with another doer. Nothing about Cirque du Soleil makes we want to do it.

Bridge the gaps

If I have been actively learning about driving my super-car around a corner then I should able to pop into a tractor, bus or lorry and apply the same understanding. Yes please!

If I have been teaching my dog to Sit Ready: a way that engages the pelvis and back muscles and I understand how this differs from Sit Back, slack and resting then I should be able to apply this new learning to a Down position: the down and poised for movement is not the same as a down and settle for a while.

My learning from teaching different Sits: my understanding through luring, reward placement, assessment of muscle engagement and overall postural differences, the skills, knowledge and understanding, will be enhanced by working through how to apply this to new but similar situations. Lateral application.

If your brain is now bridging the gap you may be thinking about how your dog sits, but my examples of going round the bend presented no usable information, I doubt you can bridge that gap? All you will have learned is that I had a new car.

When learning happens we need to consciously seek evidence of learning for ourselves and our learners: be that for clients or dogs.

So what happened?

This is nicely drowned under the term “reflect”. Blah, sounds a chore, but when we prepare a series of questions in our brain tune up, the post work brain filing is easier.

What changed? BIG question.

• Was it the way you view a process?
• Was there a new understanding of a past experience?
• What would you do if you had the chance again? (Load Van permanently with a paving slab not a bunch of liquid dogs trogging from side to side.)
• What do you want to remember next time?
• Where are you going to keep the notes … and make sure you will find them again.
• Can you explain what happened to another person: this is an excellent form of active recall and makes sure the brain library is properly labelled.

A Warning

Attending any of my courses is a learning experience. I do not want a passive audience, auditors or just readers, but people with active engagement seeking opportunities to learn.

Passive attendance will be ended, that does not mean you have to go first, but you will have to have a go and do the doing.