30/04/2024
In 16 years of training dogs, coaching thousands of clients, teaching hundreds of trainers, and employing my own training teams—I’m struggling to recall ever using, or needing to use any of the actual terminology connected to operant conditioning or classical conditioning.
Is it because I’m unable to comprehend these concepts and the language used to convey them? Nope. I just find them ponderous, clunky, restrictive, pretentious, and terribly far from being the most helpful way to convey the ideas I most want to land with others.
If you find yourself rambling on and on about the 4 quadrants, and diving perilously deep into the proper articulation of the framework of classical conditioning—and you’re not teaching a formal class on these subjects—you might want to pause and more carefully examine your motives.
PS, understanding these concepts is one thing, hiding behind them is something very different.
PPS, if you get off nerding out on this stuff with colleagues, or as an enthusiast, knock yourself out. But if you’re a teacher in anything but an uber formal context, this is no place for prioritizing your “stuff”, whatever it might be and why, over what the student needs.
PPPS, the training industry is currently deeply entrenched in a fad of attempting to present itself as terribly (and falsely) sophisticated. It used to largely be the realm of the positive only/force-free disciples, but as social media has enabled the messaging of those disciples to reach larger and larger audiences, and the social pressure to conform/compete/look good has deepened, we’re finding more and more in the so called “balanced” community who are playing the same game—both linguistically and ideologically. Balanced trainers, afraid of looking or sounding unsophisticated, have taken on much of the PP/FF window dressing. Instead of creating more diversity of thought and practice, social media has caused the weak of character (which is the vast majority) to move closer and closer to a single, non-thinking, non-individualistic, hive-mind. Which is precisely why we see (and hear) so many balanced trainers who sound strangely similar to the PP/FF fanatics. Don’t be part of the hive.
