Dr. Martin Levy is the Director, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery Orthopaedic Residency Program at the prestigious Montefiore Medical Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Levy knows a thing or two about training surgeons and students vie for places to learn from him. He’s a visionary at the forefront of surgeon training who’s leading the way to modernize the field.
Along Came Penny
In his other world, Marty is a competitive frisbee dog participant and instructor. He learned from his dog Penny, that the best way to motivate and create an effective learning environment is to avoid reprimands (even at their most mild and unintentional), to create opportunities for success at every step of the learning process and most of all, to have fun and cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. He began to explore the world of postive reinforcement-based dog training and discovered an entire community dedicated to this excting and efficient way of training.
How do you feel when you try something and make mistakes over and over? How do you feel when it seems that you are disappointing the person trying to teach you? Do you feel energized and excited to be “learning from your mistakes” or do you feel frustrated and discouraged? Do repeated failure and “just one more”s make you anxious, frustrated and wanting to escape to do something less stressful?
Sometimes the result of too much pressure to try something too hard results in a full-on meltdown or a complete shut down of the learner. Once this happens, there is no more learning.
This is why we suggest the three try rule. If a learner fails three times (or fewer) to meet the specific learning goal (the tag point), go to a past point of success and move forward in smaller increments.
A point of success is something earlier in the learning process that you are 100% sure the learner can get right. By starting at a point of success and moving forward in small steps you build on existing success instead of searching blindly for a good starting point. Of course the ‘three try rule’ isn’t really a rule. The learner doesn’t HAVE to fail three times. If it is clear the learner will not likely achieve the tag point criterion after the first failure, or the learner is very sensitive to failure, jump right in and break the skill down further and change the tag point.
TAGteach and Precision Teaching go together like ice cream and apple pie. Each makes the other even more awesome. Add TAGteach to your Precision Teaching and watch your acceleration lines soar. Add Precision Teaching to your TAGteaching and you’ll see exactly what’s working and what tag points are the most effective.
If you’re a TAGteacher and you’re wondering “what’s Precision Teaching”, watch Amy Evans of Octave Consulting explain it in 11 minutes:
If you’re a Precision Teacher and you’re wondering “what’s TAGteach?”, visit TAGteach Online Learning for a free course: A+ Tag Point – How to Create a Perfect Learning Goal and additional paid courses.
What’s a Tag Point?
A tag point is the goal behavior in a TAGteach session. The teacher tags (marks) the desired behavior with a click sound (tag) when the behavior occurs so the learner knows the exact moment that they got it right. A tag point has four criteria (WOOF):
What you want: the tag point must be phrased in positive terms
One thing: the tag point can be only one behavior
Observable: the tag point must be observable
Five words or less: you must be able to articulate the tag point in five words or less
In my pursuit of excellence (for myself and my students) I discovered TAGteach. This teaching approach has added many effective new tools to my tool box and has provided me with ways of becoming a better instructor. The first three (of many) things which pop into my head when I think about how TAGteach has helped me are:
observation
breaking things down and;
reinforcing successes.
I tend to prefer the term instructor over the term trainer when talking about teaching people to ride. For the purpose of this article, I’ll use “instructor” when talking about teaching people, and “trainer” when talking about teaching horses.
Reprinted from Visionary Magazine, April 29 Edition
I have worked with visually impaired people for the past 15 years, and guides dogs for the last 10. We have to the train people how to work with their dogs in order for then to have the best mobility possible. There is a lot to learn so I have been using TAGteach to really break down these processes and turn them into easy to learn chunks.
TAGteach was great for me as I didn’t have to process a lot of words. I just knew if I hadn’t heard the click, I had something else to do. Thank you for understanding me.
Vision Impaired Client
TAGteach stands for Teaching with Acoustical Guidance and it’s teaching and communication method that combines positive reinforcement with an acoustical event marker. It’s an application of behavior science that makes the science of positive reinforcement accessible.
TAGteach relies on breaking behaviour down into small pieces, looking for desired behaviors and giving positive reinforcement to increase those moments of great behaviour. In that regard it is the same as guide dog training, or all animal training.
For me it’s like telling a story or painting a picture. Teach a single tag point, and then add on one more part and then another until you have the whole picture.
One client I recently worked with has memory issues and finds it difficult to process information. When she qualified with her dog, she said to me “TAGteach was great for me as I didn’t have to process a lot of words. I just knew if I hadn’t heard the click, I had something else to do. Thank you for understanding me.”
I was hesitant to use it at first. it seemed complicated and to be honest I was not sure of the benefit. Anyway, as a huge advocate of anything positive-reinforcement based I decided to put myself through the course, so I could really learn about it and apply it correctly. It’s far more than just “clicking a person”.
It’s primary use has been with sighted people, and children in particular. It has also had success with kids with additional disabilities such as autism. In order for me to use it successfully with the guide dog client base I had to make some adaptations. My first adaptation was to mostly drop the demonstration stage. Obviously this is not so relevant, but there are still times when I manage to do a form of demonstration by utilising a sighted guide or something similar. My second adaptation was on what to use as a marker in the presence of clicker savvy guide dogs! TAGteach puts a lot of emphasis on the potential emotional baggage a vocal marker can bring so I opted for a shoulder tap. Since then I have found an alternative acoustical marker that is different to the clicker.
There are no mistakes for the person to make, only opportunities for success.
Tony Harvey
The advantages I have found using TAGteach have been really positive and not just based on the clicker but on how I now really break down tasks into small chunks. There are no mistakes for the person to make, only opportunities for success. If people are not getting the tag points, all we have to do as practitioners is adapt our tag point, no telling them it’s wrong, just a new opportunity for successful results. We all know behaviour is driven by successful outcomes. I do a lot of work prior to the dog being involved, this means I can really hone the skills first. Then the client is more fluid and confident when the dog arrives and he dog experiences a more similar style of handling to what it is used to and so hopefully less stress. It creates fluid sessions as there is no conversation required during the learning. Once they hear a tag the know it’s right and can continue. No tag means keep trying. I have found quick learning with great retention using this method, as well as as added bonus of increased focus on the tasks which I think is due to lack of conversation and task orientation once you say, “The tag point is….”
So why isn’t everyone doing it? It’s fairly new, some people see the clicker and think it would patronise people using a “dog” training device on humans (although I have never found this when I have used it). People like what they know and it’s a leap of faith for us to try something new, also people are good trainers and coaches so they already do a great job. Anyone with reservations, I would advise them to go to tagteach.com and youtube.com/tagteacher where there is a collection of information and videos on its application.
Learn Tony’s Best Training Tips
Join us for a live webinar with Tony to learn all his best secrets for top level training. After the live date it will available as a recording at the same link.
She never listens! He’s lazy. She’s not smart enough. He has ADD. She’s from a single parent family. He’s stubborn. She’s a Libra. He’s got special needs. She’s too smart. His dad’s a lawyer. Her mom is a feminist. He’s from Boston.
There are lots of labels and excuses to explain why people don’t do what you want or why they behave in certain ways. Let’s just put all those aside for now and think about the most important thing. Which of course is you getting what you want. Sometimes you need others to act in order for you to get what you want and sometimes it is you who needs to act.
The internet knows that the way to get stuff done is to set goals and work on one small thing at a time. Look it up. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and all that other irrefutable wisdom. Productivity experts agree that we need to break big tasks into smaller ones. Ironically the instruction “break it down” is itself ill-defined. It is particularly vexing for people with no training in behavior analysis to come up with goals that are easily achievable and upon success can be reinforced. This is the reason that most New Year’s resolutions have failed by the end of January (if not sooner). Most people want to do too much at once in order to save time, but the result is that everything takes longer, seems increasingly impossible and is more frustrating for all involved.
Managing the reinforcement for a group of people is one of the major difficulties that we may encounter. Especially if the people in question are 20 kids, 11 years old, with interests and personalities different from each other.
For the last two months I’ve been working in a school as a teacher. For the first time, I have the chance to use the marker with a large group — a group with no particular desire to be at school! How can we reinforce them? Some of the kids enjoy candies, some others like beads or extra time for recess. There are (they exist!) students who find study itself reinforcing, but, they are very, very, very rare.
Once I had a student come to me late in the season, having missed some of the lessons due to an injury. She was a pre-teen, self-conscious about her weight and worried about her sore leg. I had lots more to deal with here than just teaching riding skills! I needed to help her boost her confidence, overcome her fear, and proceed slowly and carefully.
In my pursuit of excellence for myself and my students, I discovered TAGteach. TAGteach is a leading edge science-based teaching approach used in many disciplines, including training for elite orthopedic surgeons (as reported by Scientific American). This teaching approach will add many effective new tools to your tool box and provide you with ways of becoming a better instructor. TAGteach helps elite surgeons learn faster and better and it can help you teach your students faster and better too. It certainly prepared me to better help learners like my stressed out pre-teen student.
Here’s how it works:
You tell the student the goal (a very narrow and specific action for the next turn)
You mark the correct action with a sound (a click sound or a word)
The student self-assesses based on this very clear and immediate feedback
The first three (of many) things which pop into my head when I think about how TAGteach will help you expand as a instructor are:
Improving your observation skills
Encouraging you to break skills down into manageable pieces
Improving your timing in reinforcing successes effectively
Find out more in this 1 hour webinar with Level 2 TAGteacher and riding instructor, Jane Jackson. For less than $20 you will get knowledge to change your life. Money back satisfaction guarantee!
Have you wondered how to apply TAGteach in a classroom setting? Will it be too noisy for the learner to hear the tags? Will the learner be too distracted by everything else going on the room? Will you need to give too many food reinforcers? Can you use TAGteach to manage aggressive and dangerous behaviors? Is it OK to let the child use the tagger and be the teacher? Listen to this month’s interview with a TAGteacher and watch the accompanying videos to get answers to these and more questions.
This month’s interview is with Anne Wormald. Anne is one of the first TAGteachers and has extensive experience from both ends of the tagger, being the daughter of Joan Orr, one of the TAGteach cofounders. Anne is working on her BCBA and is a Level 2 TAGteacher. She has many years of experience working with special needs kids and at the moment is working in home and school settings with children with autism.
Teachers talk too much. Coaches talk too much. Managers talk too much. Parents talk too much. You probably talk too much when you are trying to explain what you want someone else to do. In a teaching situation, particularly, when the learner is focusing and trying to learn something new, fewer words are better. The only thing they really hear and remember are the last few words that you say.
To see a humorous example of what we call passion talking, watch this video that explains the 24 different components of the golf swing:
