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.