instructing

At our club we don't exactly do instructing any more. We all understand the safety issues and get on very well so we just set courses and all make suggestions for each other. It works pretty well, although I suppose we might want experts in from outside from time to time.

I had the job of setting some courses last lesson, so in the age old tradition I nicked some ideas from the internet and the last competition I had been on.

The top diagram shows some exercises. The top part is nicked from NAWS on Sunday, and people got on well with it, finding it flowed nicely. I had particular problems with the weaves, but the dogs were just out of practice.

The bottom bit confused people a bit. It was supposed to teach positioning, and it did. It's just that there was a huge variety of ways people found to run it which worked in varying degrees.

The bottom diagram was a quick alteration to create a course. The a-frame part of it is much simplified, but they get onto it at speed from slightly off centre. Still the people that ran it found it OK.

Last NAWS

We managed a record breaking 8 Es in NAWS! Spectacular! Some understandable stuff, and some laziness on my part. However, I think we are set up for a good year, with Ben stopping on his contacts and really trying hard. Still goes into a spinning flap from time to time, but I just down him for a second to calm down and things pick up after that. Spike blew a contact or two, and nailed the rest with me running.

They both popped out at 10 weaves continually. I think we have failed to practice it and need a bit of repetition, we are normally fine on weaves. Judge suggested maybe I turned in and put them off, but last run I was perfect on shoulder direction and Spike still popped out. We just need a session or two with lots of weaves. I have been meaning to proof their weaves with me running diagonals and behind and in front, as well as teaching them 2x2 entries, but have not got round to it. There's a lot of work there and I don't want to flatten them too much.

Instructor training

Last weekend I went to an instructor training course. It was very well run and I learned loads from it. I would love to run an agility basics course because I have benefited from other people running them and I believe that Spike's good performance is due in the main to covering the foundation thoroughly before trying to run segments of courses. The course covered from basic foundation up to some simple straight line jump exercises, contacts and weaves.

A couple of issues came up, these are things that occurred to me, not from the course as such:

1/ People expect a lot from their first agility classes. They come in expecting to show how their dog has some intrinsic ability to do agility, and to get it doing everything on the first lesson. The trainer wants to leave it 4 months before they even go over the contacts. There is a tension here, and I think if I were running a solid basics class I would have to find answers for people as to why this is.

2/ Any instructor is going to have to stick to their own comfort zone as far as methods go. For example, I train a stop and back chain it to complete the contacts. The course got us teaching something similar but with a touch to a target and continuous touching until the release command. Neither uses a touch command, and there is an emphasis on not doing the whole piece of equipment too early. Very similar you would think, but even that difference caused me some difficulties as I could not answer much concerning the targeting part of it.

Similar with the weaves, we were taught to use channels (which I don't like) and always to use 12 weaves (I would start with 3). However the methods were less technical and this presented less problems than the contacts method.

I really liked all the basics, circle work, rear end awareness etc and would love to teach this as a semi-trick class, come agility foundation.

I'm still mulling over what we learned, and I expect I will put other stuff up here later.

Great training

Ben seems to understand contacts (A-frame and dog walk anyway, the seesaw did not come out last training). He is sticking them and tolerates a certain amount of movement from me. Great! I'm still pulling him inside jumps sometimes (my fault). The new surface at training is good, and the poles are not being dropped so much by either dog. We had a very hard weave entry, which I have been working on, but have only just started.