Join us as we kick off the incredible journey that will be ClickerExpo LIVE.

Animals, Start Your Learning Engines! Where to Start Training with Any Animal☆

Ken Ramirez

Course Type:  Learning Lab
Skill Level: Foundation
Topic: Other Species, Skill, Veterinary

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately six (6) Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams. Animals participating as part of an Animal/Handler Spotlight Team should eat readily from handler.

Attendees who are not part of an Animal/Handler Spotlight Team can still participate alongside the teams with their own animals from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That's fine, too!

Description: Whether you are working with a dog or a cat, a horse or a goat, a tiger or an eagle, training has to begin somewhere. But where? What do great training session starts have in common, regardless of the species? What skills should you master to get started training? What should you teach your animal first? Get ready to discuss answers to these questions and to put those answers into practice in this unique hands-on working Lab.

Let Ken show you how to get a trainer and animal off to a successful start together, through the exercises and steps he uses—and that you can use, too. Then, you and your animal, no matter the species, will have the opportunity to practice many of these very same exercises. This Learning Lab will cover, and provide opportunities to practice, both core trainer skills that are needed before you work with any species and skills to teach your animal (skills like stationing, targeting, capturing, and more). The goal is to set a strong foundation for a positive reinforcement program.

Six (6) participants may sign up to receive live feedback from Ken during practice times. Everyone else in attendance can practice right from home with their own animals—or just watch others, listen to the lively narrated feedback, learn, and ask questions during Q&A. Join Ken to learn how to help animals start their learning engines!

Building Behavior: Shape the Future - Live🗲

Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Course Type: Dem-OH! Session
Skill Level: Foundation
Topic: Skill, Other Species, Shelter & Rescue Work, Teaching Others

Description: Some of the most common questions about clicker training are about obtaining new, desirable behavior to mark and reinforce. Luring, modeling, capturing, and prompting can take you only so far, and shaping seems like such a complex challenge. But it doesn't have to be.

This Dem-OH! Session is all about shaping—splitting a behavior into many tiny steps and progressing smoothly through a training plan to a goal behavior. With shaping, animals discover their own creativity, power, and desire to work with a trainer, and trainers can teach behaviors too complex for luring. Shaping is fun for both trainer and learner. It builds a strong relationship but it requires awareness and comprehension of the game by the animal and both conceptual and mechanical fluency in the trainer. This Session will discuss how to get started and solutions to common pitfalls. You will see live shaping (and troubleshooting that process!) of a husbandry behavior (teeth-cleaning with a dog) and fun behaviors with other species. There will be time for Q&A, too.

Real Skills, Fake Dogs - Live🗲

Theresa McKeon & Laura Monaco Torelli

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: Foundation, Intermediate
Topic: Teaching Others, Human, Skill

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately 6 (six) Spotlight Participants. Spotlight Participants should have the following items available during the Lab: stuffed animal, if available; clicker; treat bags; fake treats (beans, buttons, etc); two dice; ball (tennis or other bouncy ball); and an animal mat or facsimile (like where a dog would station to).

Attendees who are not Spotlight Participants can still participate from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That's fine, too!

Description: Practice real training skills risk-free as we substitute stuffed animals, puppets, props, and helpful humans for live animals. Why? To build both your skill set and your confidence. Practice to your heart’s content knowing that your learner will never get full, tired, confused, or stressed out, and ask questions during Q&A.

Sound silly? It's totally fun but totally useful. With forgiving fake animals you can practice beginner skills like cueing and clicker timing and develop advanced skills like working with multiple animals in a training session.

If you have ever said, “I understand the theory. I just need a chance to practice the practical,” then this is the Learning Lab for you! Join Theresa McKeon and Laura Monaco Torelli in this virtual Learning Lab to get real skills, with fake dogs!

Clever Hans was Right - The Art of Adding and Clarifying Cues☆

Sarah Owings

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Skill

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately six (6) Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams. Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams should have two to three simple behaviors on cue. If dogs already have a nose target to an object behavior, that will help us jump ahead to the cueing part. Equipment that Teams should have available during the Lab include: a plastic water bottle as a target; clicker; treats; pen and paper.

Attendees who are not part of an Animal/Handler Spotlight Team can still participate alongside the teams with their own animals from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That’s fine, too!

Description: In Part 1, we will conduct a series of tests that ask animals the question: do training cues like "sit" or "down" really mean what we think they mean? We will discuss ways to clarify cue confusion, how to teach an animal to pay attention to only a narrow set of stimuli when needed, and why it may sometimes be perfectly fine to use the body language and contextual cues animals often find much more relevant anyway.

In Part 2, we will go through the steps of adding a formal training cue to a simple targeting behavior and discuss how to teach animals to wait for that cue without the use of extinction.

This Learning Lab will include time for Q&A.

Reward Location Communication Live and Unfiltered🗲

Michele Pouliot

Course Type: Dem-OH! Session
Skill Level: Advanced
Topic: Competition, Skill, Other Species, Teaching Others

Description: Discover more potential in your training through the power of reward “location communication.” Clicker trainers should understand and take advantage of the power of location. Delivery location affect learners in different ways; it can raise energy, prompt stillness, reset the learner for the next repetition, support a specific position, and much more. The thoughtful use of reward strategies can take training beyond what most trainers imagine.

In this Dem-OH! Session, Michele shares her ongoing experiences applying reward strategies. Over the past decade, Michele has discovered new ways to take advantage of specific reward locations for training and maintaining basic skills and complicated behaviors. Michele will work live in a variety of training scenarios using specific reward strategies for each goal behavior. Results will show how a well-applied strategy results in very fast learning in an amazingly powerful way. Behavior examples will range from foundation skills to complex trick behaviors.

Join Michele live as she shares the available power of reward-location strategies and enlightening moments of discovery and ask questions during Q&A.

Let’s Talk Other Species☆

Lindsay Wood Brown, Susan G. Friedman, Ph.D., Alexandra Kurland, Melissa Millett, Ken Ramirez, and Laura Monaco Torelli

Course Type: Let's Talk! (Panel Discussion)
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Aggression & Behavior Management, Equine, Other Species, Science, Shelter & Rescue Work, Skill, Veterinary

Description: Join this discussion with moderator Ken Ramirez and panelists Lindsay Wood Brown, Susan G. Friedman, Ph.D., Alexandra Kurland, Melissa Millett, and Laura Monaco Torelli on working with other (non-canine) species. Ready for lively discussion, unique perspectives, and the expertise of some of the best trainers of other species? Let’s Talk!

After a long day of learning, join us for a fun game of trivia. Get to know some of your fellow attendees virtually and work together for a chance to win prizes.

Pick one of the two Social Events during registration. The Friday and Saturday night Social Events are free, but pre-registration is required. Spots are limited!

New Perspective: Moving Away from Eye Contact - Live🗲

Emma Parsons

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Aggression & Behavior Management, Shelter & Rescue, Skill

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately six (6) Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams. Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams should have a notebook to write in, a shoe to tie, a bottle to put the cap on, and an area in which they can walk about 5-6 steps with their dogs (if you need to switch directions, that’s fine!).

Attendees who are not part of an Animal/Handler Spotlight Team can still participate alongside the teams with their own animals from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That’s fine, too!

Description: Eye contact can become a huge contextual cue in just about every behavior that we teach dogs. Inadvertently, trainers watching the dogs all of the time can become a huge crutch for the dogs. What develops is a situation where dogs do not respond to the cue unless you are watching. For some behaviors it might not matter, but for others it can be downright dangerous!

Handlers of reactive dogs need their dogs’ behavior to be as reliable as possible. Trainers must be able to turn away from their dogs and partake in other activities like talking to someone else or signing a document.

In this fun and challenging Learning Lab, we will work on asking dogs for behaviors that we think are reliable, and testing to see whether or not eye contact is actually part of the behavioral context. We will also work on preliminary exercises so that the dogs are less likely to be hypnotized by our eyeballs!

During the training sessions, watch Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams go through the exercises with Emma coaching on screen and/or take this time to practice these exercises with your own dogs at home. In between, there will be time for Q&A.

Join Emma for this Lab and for a new perspective on training eye contact.

Problem Solved!☆

Theresa McKeon and Chirag Patel

Course Type: Dem-OH! Session
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Skill

Description: Have you heard the John Lennon quote “There are no problems, only solutions?” It may be true, but those solutions can be elusive. Beginner or expert, we've all had training challenges that left us stymied and thought, “It would be great to get another perspective on this problem.” Well, here is your chance!

Chirag and Theresa will collect a list of “training problems” from attendees and offer fresh perspective, new strategies, and solutions.

Whether the challenge is with training the animal or teaching the human, you can bring your list to this Dem-OH! Session. Let’s see if we can get that problem solved!

This Dem-OH! Session will also have time for Q&A.

Bonus Time with Susan G. Friedman, Ph.D. & Kathy Sdao☆

Susan G. Friedman, Ph.D. & Kathy Sdao

Course Type: Bonus Time
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Aggression & Behavior Management, Human, Science, Skill

Description: Experience more of your favorite trainers in this informal, open discussion. Bonus Time offers a unique window into the training minds of Susan G. Friedman, Ph.D. and Kathy Sdao. Ask your questions or be a fly on the wall and listen to spontaneous and candid conversation about behavioral science, the use of behavior technology and it’s human application, training skills, aggression and behavior management—and anything else that comes up!

Deep Impact III: Husbandry at Home for Real-World Applications 🗲

Laura Monaco Torelli

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: Intermediate
Topic: Health & Wellness, Skill, Science, Veterinary

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately six (6) Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams. Spotlight Team members should have basic, intermediate, or advanced training skills and be able to work their dogs effectively in a distracting environment with props nearby. Animals should be familiar with and comfortable with basic targeting and general body tactile (head, ears, eyes, mouth, torso, paws, legs, tail). The animals should also be familiar and comfortable with a variety of grooming and veterinary props (scale, resting a body part on an elevated surface, capped needles, nail trimmer, presence of and sound of a dremel, scent of ear cleaning solution, basket muzzle, gauze, nail file boards, etc.). Laura Monaco Torelli will email Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams simple training tips to help prepare for this Lab.

Attendees who are not part of an Animal/Handler Spotlight Team can still participate alongside the teams with their own animals from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That’s fine, too!

Description: This popular hands-on Learning Lab is back with a new chapter! What makes this a unique experience is that our guests join us virtually from the comfort of their home environments. Husbandry is a part of the everyday interactions with the animals in our lives. Since owners serve as eyes and ears for the veterinary teams, it is what we observe and teach at home that set up the environment for success when we take it on the road.

Laura will cover a broad range of husbandry topics including, but not limited to, injection training; eye, ear, and paw care; and blood-draw preparation tips. Plus, we will take a closer look at what defines consent under specific environmental conditions. Learn how to set and quickly adjust criteria for husbandry behaviors, as well as how to observe canine and handler communication to gauge the dog team’s comfort level and readiness for the next step. Our Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams will receive live coaching from Laura, while other attendees can watch or practice along at home. Laura will add demonstrations with her own dogs to supplement the learning.

The flow of the virtual Learning Lab will be:

• Set-up, explanation, demonstration, and instructions
• Working and practice time for Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams and for other attendees in the audience
• Feedback and coaching for Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams, which other Attendees can listen to and absorb
• Q&A

Let’s bring husbandry goals to the next level as a team!

V-PORTL: Your Virtual Portal for Learning to Play PORTL☆

Mary Hunter

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: Foundation
Topic: Teaching Others, Skill

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately four (4) Spotlight Participants. Each Participant should have a “standard PORTL kit.” If you do not have a standard PORTL kit, click here for an alternative list of items. Each active Participant will also need another person available for the duration of the Lab, someone who is willing to play PORTL with you. To play PORTL, you will need an uncluttered tabletop space, approximately two feet by two feet. Your video camera should be zoomed in so that we can easily see the hands and arms of each person as well as the PORTL objects in between. We do not need to see your faces. Please test your camera set-up before the Lab, so that we don't lose valuable time. We also ask that Spotlight Participants log into the Lab 15 minutes early so that we can work on camera placement to allow viewers to see you playing the game.

Attendees who are not Spotlight Participants can still follow along from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That’s fine, too!

Description: What does it take to be a great shaper? What is the best way to practice and improve your skills? How can you try out new ideas or techniques without frustrating your animal learners?

This Learning Lab will introduce you to one tool that can help you accelerate your shaping skills. PORTL (the Portable Operant Research and Teaching Lab) is a table-top game played with a collection of small objects and a clicker. PORTL provides a structured curriculum of exercises to teach you about shaping and other behavior-change principles.

Through a series of videos, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, you will learn the basics of PORTL and even have the opportunity to utilize it to shape several behaviors and ask questions. You will experience the power of PORTL and leave this Lab eager to play more of the PORTL game with your friends and clients.

At the Saturday night Social Event, mix your favorite drink, kick back, relax, and join our faculty members for cocktail hour! Attendees will be assigned to a room with one of our incredible faculty members for casual conversation about training, life, and everything in between.

Pick one of the two Social Events during registration. The Friday and Saturday night Social Events are free, but pre-registration is required. Spots are limited!

Writing SMART Shaping Plans: A Component Skills Approach☆

Mary Hunter

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: All Levels
Topic: Skill, Teaching Others

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately ten (10) Spotlight Participants. Mary will provide handouts for the Spotlight Participants to print out in advance.

Attendees who are not Spotlight Participants can still follow along from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That’s fine, too!

Description: Expert trainers spend as much or more time planning their shaping sessions compared to actual training time. The planning process includes much more than just writing a list of steps. The trainer selects certain props and pieces of equipment strategically, decides how to arrange the physical environment, develops a reinforcement strategy, runs through potential problems that may arise, and much more.

In this Learning Lab, you will learn how to craft a shaping plan by breaking a complex behavior into components. You will practice identifying the actions and movement cycles that make up a behavior, designing an optimal training environment, and picking a starting point to set up an animal for success.

In addition to examples and case studies, this Lab will include guided practice exercises. Spotlight Participants will work in small groups, allowing for collaboration, discussion, and instructor support. You will also learn how to use worksheets and checklists that will help after the Lab as you continue to practice and improve your planning skills.

During the lab, the audience can watch Spotlight Participants practice crafting shaping plans with Mary coaching. They will also be able to follow along with their own copies of the worksheets and handouts. This will be an interactive session, with plenty of time for discussion and Q&A.

You Are Not Uncoordinated! (Just Not Fluent—Yet.) - Live🗲

Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Course Type: Dem-OH! Session
Skill Level: Foundation, Intermediate
Topic: Other Species, Skill, Teaching Others

Description: Technique is critical to efficient and effective training. On the surface, clicker training is simple! Just click and hand out a treat. How hard can it be? But when you start considering accurate timing, balancing a leash or lead, carrying and picking out those treats, a target stick, walking… suddenly there are late clicks, slow or dropped treats, inaccurate target placement, and a host of other “coordination” issues that slow or frustrate simple training. The nuances of split-heartbeat timing and value-added treat delivery are easy to explain but require a lifetime to master—don’t they?

Trainers typically spend far more time discussing theory and application than the basic mechanics of operating a clicker, leash, treats, target stick, treat bag, poop-bag dispenser, and verbal or visual cues all at the same time. This can leave clients—or trainers themselves—feeling overwhelmed and always a half-step behind. It can frustrate animal learners when timing is imprecise or reinforcement late or confusing.

But the art of handling the clicker and lead rope at the same time is not limited to a few masters! These skills are merely fluencies to be learned and there are tips to make them easier. If you have ever tried to help a client who is fumbling with a clicker and a leash, or if you have ever wished for an extra hand to avoid clicking when the leash goes tight, or if you just want to be sure your timing and rate of reinforcement are as precise and effective as you can make them, come to this interactive Dem-OH! Session with Laura and be ready to play along! To play along, it will be helpful to have the following items handy: a clicker, treats, treat bag, target stick, leash, and two 6-sided die (you can borrow them from a Monopoly game). You will practice methods of holding multiple pieces of equipment without accidentally clicking, ways to hold a leash more comfortably and more securely, and techniques to keep your clicking and delivery clean in any training situation. There will be time for Q&A, too. With Laura, the undisputed queen of the annual treat-tossing accuracy game at ClickerExpo, you'll soon feel like a contender, too!

Love It!: Effective Non-Food Reinforcement - Ken Ramirez

Ken Ramirez

Course Type: Learning Lab
Skill Level: Intermediate
Topic: Aggression & Behavior Management, Competition, Equine, Other Species, Science, Skill, Veterinary

Spotlight Spot Prerequisites: We will have approximately six (6) Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams. Handlers must be experienced learners. Dogs should be clicker-savvy, have a robust behavioral repertoire, and regularly and effectively use toys or play as a reinforcer. Dogs should have a good stationing or other default behavior. They should also have fluent behaviors that can be done easily while working in front of their handlers, such as targeting, sit, down, spin, paw, and bark. Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams will need at least five of these behaviors to be trained fluently. The animal should also eat readily.

Attendees who are not part of the Animal/Handler Spotlight Team can still participate alongside the teams with their own animals from home, but without faculty feedback. Prefer to sit back and observe? That's fine, too!

Description: The effective use of non-food reinforcers is a critical skill that all trainers will likely use or need at some point in their training careers. Non-food reinforcers are extremely useful, but they require both an understanding of their role in training and a well-thought-out training approach.

This Learning Lab and Session combination focuses on how novel stimuli like clapping and verbal praise become reinforcers. Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams will have the opportunity to start training novel stimuli as reinforcers and gain valuable insight from Ken about how to maintain the strength of these unique reinforcers. Observers and Animal/Handler Spotlight Teams will all gain valuable tips and strategies for making non-food reinforcers more effective. The Lab will include some example demonstrations, including a step-by-step demonstration of how to teach new reinforcers to an animal, and time for Q&A.

That's a wrap! Join us as we celebrate all the special moments and exciting “aha!” moments from the weekend.