Clean Run Magazine - March 2007 - 79

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JUMP TRAINING PROGRAM FOR THE CLASSROOM Jump training in the classroom can
be challenging depending on your situation. If you are teaching at an
agility club or for a dog training center, you only have so many weeks
with students before you have to send them on to higher levels to make
room for your next set of students. The situation may be different if you
own your facility but you still may have some sort of time limit in which
to graduate students to make room for the next group. The other classroom
challenge is that there are other obstacles you have to teach so it is not
feasible to spend every week on jumping alone. In my beginner classes the
level after agility foundation training , I have progressed to teaching
the weave poles, table, and one contact obstacle at a time until the
obstacles are mastered and spend the rest of the class teaching jumping
and shadow handling. By the time the new team has started sequencing, each
individual obstacle, including jumps, has been taught to a degree that the
dog completely understands the performance required. My goal for each team
is for the dogs to understand what is expected of them. Having had a dog
with a severe jumping problem consisting of stutter-stepping, bar/jump
crashing, and the inability to find the correct takeoff spot, I educated
myself with as much jump training information as I could get my hands on.
After several months of training, I was successful in eliminating the
problems my dog was having. This article explains what I do in my beginner
agility classes where I have limited time with my students yet want to set
up the best foundation. My students are required to first take an agility
foundation class, which I feel is vital to their performance. My
foundation work consists of a number of hind-end and body awareness
exercises. Dogs training in agility have to learn how to use their bodies
correctly, and being mindful of the placement of all four legs in space is
quite helpful when learning collection and extension over jumps with
crosses and turns. I use a combination of training methods while keeping
in mind that not all dogs have the same natural jumping style and that the
need to troubleshoot is essential for every dog. By Mary Champagne WEEK 1
» Shaping the jump I n my agility foundation classes, new handlers learn
how to teach their dogs with shaping exercises. The handlers learn to
shape their dogs to many non-agility objects such as boxes, milk crates,
flower pots, flying saucer sleds, and so on. When Linda Mecklenburg’s
recent jump training series, “Developing Jumping Skills,” was
published in Clean Run from January through September 2006, I found this
would fit into the class structure perfectly. After six to eight weeks of
pure shaping, applying this method of training for jumping in the beginner
class is a breeze. March 07 | Clean Run The students first get a
demonstration of shaping over a jump. Instructors may use a student’s
dog or their own dog. It is typically more informative to use a
student’s dog since the student can then see exactly how the dog learns.
Instructors may choose to use their own dog to show the final product so
the students know the goal they are working toward. I then set the
students up in pairs, two students and one dog per jump. For example, I
might have eight students so four jumps are set up as shown in Figure 1.
Then two students go to a jump with one dog. The nonworking dogs are
reinforced 1 Two students go to a jump with one dog. While one student
shapes her dog over the jump, the other observes to be sure the handler is
rewarding her dog correctly. 79 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Clean Run Magazine - March 2007

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