Review of Dr Epstein's lecture - from Alex K

Core Competency #3: Broadening The pigeon video showed how the pigeon was able to connect several independently learned behaviors to come up with a solution to the banana puzzle. As Epstein put it: good training makes diverse repertoires available to compete.

For ourselves that means not just learning new things, but learning things out of your current area of expertise. As you broaden your knowledge base, you'll see connections you hadn't thought of before. Diverse training creates interconnections.

Think about the horse world. Sally Swift changed the way riding is taught by bringing the Alexander technique into the horse world. Linda Tellington-Jones' developed TTEAM Training by combining her horse background with her study of Moshe Feldenkrais' work. And of course, there's clicker training itself. We literally went to the dogs (and the dolphins, rats, pigeons and other assorted creatures) to create a dramatic change in the way we train horses.

Broadening explains why I am focusing this post on Epstein's work. Every one of the presentations I went to at the conferences had important elements that are worth highlighting and discussing, but Epstein's was the most out of our field. My antennae zoomed in on his talk because I know how valuable it is to look outside my current area of expertise/experience.

My reading list these days tends to have very few horse books on it. That's not because there isn't a lot I need to learn from other horse trainers, but given the limited time I have for reading, I tend to choose books about things that I know less about. Neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and Jane Austin were the subjects of the last three books I had with me for airplane reading. I understand the value of broadening.

Epstein shared another creativity game with us. You choose three people out of a group to talk about a subject in which they have some expertise. Now this doesn't mean you have to be an expert in some Nobel prize winning subject. If I were chosen, I might well speak on stall cleaning. Someone else might talk about the right way to roll up a garden hose. And someone else might speak on Star Wars action figures produced before the year 2000.

After we've each presented our talk, we'd be given a task. We might, for example, be asked to come up with an idea for marketing a new style of clicker. These three diverse and unrelated talks might just trigger that new idea - that new connection which transforms that clicker into the next great idea.

The membership of this list is filled with experts - experts in fields that would add enormously to our understanding of training and teaching. When you're out in the barn musing over your day and you see a connection between your "day job" and your horses, it would be wonderful if you practiced your capturing skills. Jot it down on a scrap of paper so you'll remember it. And next time you're on the computer, share your notes with the list. That's a great way for all of us to become introduced to ideas outside our common clicker training interests. It helps to be pointed in the direction of new things to explore. You never know what is going to generate the next innovation in horse training and care.

I should add before moving on that I used my the capturing skills to get this last section written. I had just started working on this section when I ran out of computer time. I had to head out to the barn, but the ideas were still running, so in the middle of stall cleaning, I grabbed a note pad and jotted down the rest of this section. It's a good thing I did because when I got back to my computer that easy flow wasn't there, but my notes were. I would have lost the continuity of the discussion if I had not taken the time to write down these last few paragraphs.

And before I move on to the fourth core competency, let me add that broadening is one of the reasons I so enjoy the Clicker Expos. It's easy to get in a rut in training. What began as yesterday's creative innovation is now mainstream, everyday training. Watching dog and dolphin trainers helps me get out of any ruts I may have fallen into. Seeing how others problem solve similar training situations helps me see new possibilities, new connections. So apart from the fact that the Expos are great fun, they are also a tremendous learning experience.

At Portland we had quite the herd of horse people in attendance. I loved seeing that. I'm looking forward to another "herd" at Lexington. However, if you were thinking of registering for the Expo, it's already too late for this year. Lexington is sold out. And Portland was sold out ahead of time, as well. So next year, as soon as the dates are announced, I would encourage all of you who want to go to register early.

Hopefully some of the people who attended this year's Expo will send in some reports. I know many of us heard Kay Laurence's talk on self-control. There was much there of value. Steve and Jen White's talk on "Dip It", a systematic problem solving strategy, is very relevant, and as always, there were some real gems coming out of the presentations by Jesús Rosales Ruiz and Ken Ramirez. And I'd love to hear about the presentations I wasn't able to get to.

Core Competency #4: Surrounding This one relates to managing your physical and social environment. As Epstein put it: multiple or ambiguous stimuli can stimulate novel behavior by causing behaviors to compete. Katie was getting to this point when she was asking for creative suggestions about shaping with positive reinforcement. Yes, we can stand back and simply observe our horses in their all too familiar paddock hoping we'll see something worth capturing. Or we can manipulate the environment. We can do what Heike suggested, we can roll some treats into a bit of carpeting and see how quickly our clever horse figures out how to unroll the magic carpet. We can take Ken Ramirez's training advice and create an ever-changing environment for our horses to work in.

When it comes to creativity, Epstein embraces confusion and uncertainty. These are great emotions for jump starting competition between behaviors and generating new connections. With horses we just need to keep this in balance for the emotional and physical health and safety of our flighty animals. One advantage of living in a busy boarding barn is horses are exposed to a great deal of change. In fact change becomes the norm. If you keep your horses at home, you may want to think about how quiet and peaceful is too quiet and peaceful. The good news is it's your own place. You have the freedom to make changes in your environment. If you want to hang confetti from the rafters, you can.

When it comes to creativity, having the perfect set-up isn't necessarily what you're looking for. The real question is what do you do when conditions are against you? How do you deal with an environment that is filled with training obstacles? That's what most of us have to deal with. For example, I teach the beginning steps of clicker training using a stall. It's no accident that I use stalls a lot for training. I live in snow country, and for years I kept my horses at a farm that didn't have an indoor arena. Every winter we'd have at least a couple of weeks where we'd be completely iced in. If I wanted to do anything with my horses, I was confined to a narrow barn aisle or the stalls. I learned early on to take full advantage of Peregrine's double foaling stall.

So what are the ideal conditions to train in? They may not be what you think. The ideal conditions may not be that perfect barn with the indoor and outdoor arenas, the groomed trails, and the pristine paddocks. It may be that old cow barn with run in sheds instead of stalls, and no place to work in the winter except an old milking parlor. That's when you become creative and come up with out-of-the-box solutions that make you a much better trainer.

This has of course become a long post. I asked a lot of questions in it. Some of them were rhetorical. I'm not expecting a response. But some really would make good projects for this list. I would encourage you to go back through this post and look at the questions and exercises that each of the core competencies presents. What are the component behaviors that you need for the tasks you want your horse/dogs/children to perform? How best should you shape those component behaviors? Do you want to: free shape them; use targeting; pressure and release of pressure; food lures, etc.? Can you think of multiple ways to train them? Do you keep a notepad at the barn? Or maybe your cell phone doubles as your recording device. Take the time to jot down the component behaviors you think are important and share them here on the list. And if you aren't sure, how about presenting the goal behavior and we'll see what this group thinks might be good building blocks for it. And remember in the capturing stage you are simply gathering ideas. Evaluating comes later.

Go through the other core competencies and look at the questions raised. What are some of the techniques you've discovered that help you manage stress? For yourself. For your horse. How about sharing stories where you turned a failure into the next creative step. We saw a great example of this in the pairs figure skating at the Olympics. As a young competitor appearing in his first international competition, the current Chinese coach failed horribly. But he took that failure as his inspiration, and this week at the Olympics his pairs skaters won both the gold and silver medals. That's a great story for all of us to learn from.

Broadening: I do hope people share their expertise from other fields. Share experiences from your "day job". Share interesting books you've read. When something makes a connection, share it. And for surrounding: what are some of the clever ways you've set up your environment to make it work for you. If all you have is a muddy paddock and a run-in shed, how have you managed to clicker train a herd of horses? If you keep your horse at a public barn, how have you managed the social environment so you can explore clicker training? Do you wait until no one is around to bring out the treats? Or have you managed to build a supportive network in your barn?

That's lots of questions I'm asking. What I know is I'm not very good at following up on these posts I write. I send them out, and then I get buried in the next project, or I head off on an airplane and can't keep up with email. But even if I get out of the loop of this conversation, I hope some of you follow through and post your responses to these questions. It would be an interesting experiment to explore via this list some of Epstein's creativity exercises, and then to ask Katie's question again: what are some creative ways to generate new behavior in your horses using just positive reinforcement. I suspect we'd get a lot of things added to the current list. It's certainly worth the experiment.

Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com