TAGteacher Spotlight - Keri Gorman

Keri Gorman is a Certified Level 3 TAGteacher, Senior TAGteach Instructor and Education and Behavior Consultant. She was formerly an animal trainer at Sea World, California where she worked with a variety of animal species including birds of prey, river otters and parrots and performed in daily shows. It was there that she began using marker-based teaching methods and it carried over into her work at the Humane Society for Southwest Washington where she worked as the Director of Education and Behavior. While at the Humane Society Keri developed Project Click, an award winning at-risk youth program whose foundation is based on the TAGteach methodology and clicker training. Keri is currently implementing TAGteach into the Juvenile Justice system and also uses it in the fields of rock climbing and horseback riding. She also owns an equine behavior consulting business where she employs clicker training as a way to help people develop positive relationships with their horses and solve behavior problems. She works with a variety of clients conducting seminars, presentations and private consulting.

Visit Keri's website for more information

Basics Article #5: Incorporating TAGteach into Daily Routines

TAGteach is not just for lessons or teaching physical skills, it can also be very useful for reinforcing daily routines during class and at home.

Behavior Management

Sometimes to promote conditions for optimal learning children need to sit quietly in their seats and pay attention to the teacher, wait their turn or cooperate in group activities. You can tag a learner who is being attentive, standing quietly, using an inside voice or any other behavior that you would like to have continue or be repeated. It is tempting to think that the children “should” do these good behaviors and so it is unnecessary or even wrong to reward them. In fact if you use the power of positive reinforcement and tag the behavior you like and ignore the behavior you don’t like you will quickly find that there is more and more good behavior and less and less disruptive behavior and this becomes reinforcing on its own for everyone involved. At first the learners may specifically “try” to do the behaviors that earn them the tags, but eventually these will become the norm and you won’t need to reinforce with a tag as often.

Defining Tag Points

Tag points for behavior management can be very specific and described to the learners. For example you could say, “today while I am talking, the tag point is eyes on me ”. A more general tag point could be, “today the tag point is use caring words with the family”. Alternatively you can just tag anything that is within the realm of acceptable behavior and not specify exactly what you are looking for. Let them try to figure out what earns them a tag.

Involve the Learners

Involve your learners in selecting tag points and allow them to tag each other. For example they could tag another person every time that person smiles at them or does something helpful. If there is animosity between learners, they could just tag if the other person is ignoring them or staying in their own space. This may seem contrived and artificial and maybe a bit silly at first, but soon the good behavior will start to creep in and become the norm and the tag frequency will drop as the tags become unnecessary for the maintenance of the behavior.

Use Other Markers

It is not necessary to use the click sound tag for everything. Sometimes it works well to use the TAGteach philosophy (reinforce the desirable and ignore the undesirable behavior) and use something other than the click sound as a marker. For example, you could put tickets in a jar, beads in a cup, tally marks on a white board or use other ways to mark and track incidents of desirable behavior.

Next time we will talk about using TAGteach to create and maintain focus even for the most inattentive of learner.

We invite you to join the TAGteacher discussion group at www.tagteach.com to meet others who are implementing TAGteach in various disciplines and to see the list of upcoming TAGteach seminars.

TAGteach Certification Seminar in IA in Feb

TAGteach comes to Iowa! TAGteach is featured in Karen Pryor's new book "Reaching the Animal Mind" and is now being applied around the globe. TAGteach uses the same positive reinforcement platform applied in clicker training and incorporates professional coaching skills to provide an inspiring teaching and learning technology! Persons involved in education, therapy, training and managing will come away with the ability to:speed learning and increase retention, acquire the full attention of students or staff, and reduce frustration (both leader and learner). This seminar uses interactive video, lecture, special guests and lots of hands on practice to insure attendees gain the foundation skills needed to bring TAGteach back to their individual fields and begin using it.
	Facility:	Canine Craze Performance Center
	Location:	3101 104th Street, Suite 3 Urbandale, IA
	How to register:	Register Online at Urbandale, Iowa
	Registration fee:	375.00Earlybird or $425.00Std
	Website:	http://www.tagteach.com/events

Praise for TAGteach from Autism Author

Mary Lynch Barbera, RN, MSN, BCBA, Author of The Verbal Behavior Approach: How to Teach Children with Autism and Related Disorders had this to say about TAGteach...

TAGteach has great potential to help children with autism learn complex skills. This new technology is built on an entirely positive approach so learners feel successful while being taught important life-long skills. Every teacher and parent (of children with and without autism) would benefit from learning about TAGteach!

I just completed the e-learning TAGteach program and I was extremely impressed! I believe the e-learning program is very comprehensive and a great starting place to learn more about TAGteach. After completing the course I feel I'm ready to use Tagging in many different areas of my life including helping my 13-year-old son with autism write better and my 11-year-old son improve his soccer skills! I feel every parent, teacher, and coach would benefit from the TAGteach e-learning program.

Find out more about the TAGteach online course

TAGteacher Spotlight - Maggie Ouillette

Maggie Ouillette is a nurse, a dog trainer and a certified Level 2 TAGteacher. Maggie volunteers at the Michigan Humane Society helping to implement the Pawsitive Start Program. This is an enrichment program for shelter dogs to help them develop life skills that will make them more adoptable and will also improve their lives at the shelter. The dogs are trained using clicker training by volunteers. Before the volunteers can work with the dogs they must learn the necessary dog handling and clicker training skills.

Maggie has worked to develop tag points for the various skills that the volunteers need to learn. She presented the results of this work at a TAGteach seminar in Tonawanda NY in August 2009 for completion of the requirements for Level 2 TAGteach Certification.

You can download Maggie's project report from the files section at the TAGteach Yahoo discussion group to see all the tag points, what worked and what didn't.

Here is a video that shows some of Maggie's presentation:



Here is a video showing how TAGteach is incorporated into handler training. The dog gets a click for looking at the handler. It does not matter what else he is doing, if he looks he gets a click. He gets a treat after each click. The handler places the treat on the floor and after doing so, takes one step forward. The targets on the floor are to guide the handler so that she know where to step. After placing the treat on the floor, the tag point is step on the target. The tag sound for the handler is a different sound from the clicker used with the dog. The handler does not get a treat after each tag, her reinforcement comes from knowing she did the correct thing and from seeing the dog improve.



Here is what the finished skill looks like. The handler does not need to be tagged here, because she knows the skill (dog looks, click, treat on the ground, walk on):



For more information about Maggie please visit Serendipity Dog Training.

For more videos visit Maggie's YouTube channel and the Pawsitive Start YouTube channel

And the Oscar Goes to...

Paula, Miranda and Tracie

We have a ton of fun at our TAGteach seminars! This is partly because TAGteach is fun by its very nature and partly because of the terrific people who come to these seminars. People come from all kinds of different backgrounds and so everyone has lots to learn from each other.

There is lots of time for hands on practical application of the TAGteach techniques and those who wish can demonstrate to the group. Participants at the seminar held in Tonawanda earlier in the fall particularly enjoyed the antics of the group from Purrfect Paws Animal Behavior Center (who also hosted the seminar).

The assignment was to come up with some tag points to help teach something from your daily life or work that has posed a challenge. The groups had some time to work on this and then they demonstrated to the rest of the group (if they wished). Check out these Oscar-worthy performances...





Thanks again to Miranda Workman and everyone at Purrfect Paws Animal Behavior Center for putting on a fantastic seminar!

TAGteach YouTube Channel

Hey, we figured out how to create a YouTube channel. Check it out!