-
Another ‘off the top of my head’ — Suppose you’re teaching ‘charging the marker.’ How about something like this: We’re gonna start showing Fido the stuff we want him to do — like sit, down, heel — by using food in front of his nose, when he’s good and hungry, to get him into whatever position we’re teaching. But we’ve got to let Fido know he’s done the right thing. How do we do that? By marking the behavior as soon as he gets it right. But how do we mark the behavior? We mark the behavior by saying ‘Good Boy!’ But Fido doesn’t know what ‘Good Boy’ means. So we have to teach him what this marker word means. How do we do that? We do that by standing near Fido, saying ‘Good Boy!’ in just the right tone of voice and giving him a small treat. It’s called charging the marker. Think, ‘charging a battery.’ Once Fido associates ‘Good Boy’ with something good, we can use ‘Good Boy’ whenever we want to let Fido knows he’s done ‘the right thing.’
Mike sez break it down to stuff a kid can understand. I hope the spiel just above does that.
