Click to Train, Praise to Maintain

People who are new to clicker training often believe that a Good Girl or Good Boy will work just as well as clicks and treats. While praise can be great for maintaining an existing skill, the click (or verbal marker) is simply the smartest, fastest way to teach new skills and cues. And dogs love it! 

The click provides the information that’s essential for the learner. It’s a unique sound that says You are doing the right thing and a reward is coming. The click makes it very clear what behavior earned the treat, so it can be repeated. A marker is short and snappy, preferably unique, always sounds the same, and is always followed by a reinforcer.

Reinforcement makes behavior stronger. Treats work best for teaching new skills and cues, but once the behavior is installed, you can use anything your dog loves or wants in that moment, including praise and petting, a toy or game, or opening the door to go outside.

Praise cannot be a marker, and that’s why it’s not great for teaching new skills.

Click for Behavior 
Clicking or verbally marking (YES!, Yip, or mouth-clicks work well, just pick one) at the moment of the desired behavior makes very clear to the learner what she did to earn the reinforcer. How do we know this? Because she will do it again immediately—and again and again. The more repetitions, the faster the dog learns to connect her behavior to your cue, whether it’s a signal or a verbal cue, or both.  

A skilled positive trainer knows how to get a behavior started without using force or pressure and without saying a word. Clicker trainers use three techniques:
* Capturing (marking offered behaviors)
* Luring (briefly)
* Shaping (marking incremental pieces of the desired behavior).
The cue is inserted once the behavior is predictable.

Teaching with praise instead of a marker usually takes much longer because it is nowhere near as clear. Praise is usually two words, like Good Girl. The way that phrase sounds can vary a lot (in volume, tone, emphasis, and duration), potentially causing confusion to the learner. And it sounds different coming from different people. Moreover, praise is not always followed by another valuable reinforcer like food. Sometimes it’s followed by rough petting, which not all dogs enjoy—or not in that context. If your dog does not, that kind of touch would not be a reinforcer, even though it’s meant to be.

Click, Praise, Treat
Praise can easily become a reinforcer, especially if you praise before presenting the treat. That builds value for praise. But when teaching new things, we need the marker in order to be super-clear. Praise and markers have different roles. So when training, please mark, then praise, then treat. Only when the desired behavior is strong and reliably on cue should we start fading out some treats and gradually replace food with praise and real-life rewards.

Behavior science tells us that reinforcement maintains or strengthens behavior in all species. The only way to know for sure whether praise IS reinforcing for your dog is how she looks when she hears it (happy?) AND if her response does not deteriorate. Consequences are what drives behavior. Does she respond just as reliably when you reward with praise, as compared with food rewards? Alrighty then, that’s great! But don’t eliminate treats completely if your dog loves them.

Timing Is Everything
With a clicker (or verbal marker), we can be very precise in our timing, so there’s no confusion. Without a clicker, the reward is usually not delivered quickly enough to connect it to the desired behavior. An animal will assume that whatever it did immediately before the reward appeared was the reason for receiving it, which can lead to misunderstandings. 

For example: During house-training, some people will treat the puppy for eliminating outside when they are back in the kitchen. How can she understand that what she did outside 30 seconds ago is what the treat is for? Without a marker, treat delivery needs to start within a couple of seconds to be effective. With a marker, the time between the behavior and the reward can be longer. (When we don’t have a clicker in hand, that’s when we use our verbal marker.)

Also consider how often we have inadvertently reinforced jumping up or barking with immediate attention. Attention is a real-life reinforcer, even (for some dogs) when it’s negative attention. That's how certain undesirable behaviors become bad habits. We need to pre-empt those bad habits and reinforce an alternative incompatible behavior rather than “correcting” the misbehaving dog with poorly timed attention.

The Joy of Learning
Clicker-trained dogs and other animals show great focus and enthusiasm for learning! With all that positive feedback, they learn very quickly and become really attentive, confident, and cooperative, which certainly rewards US! That’s why clicker training has replaced coercive “traditional” methods for training all sorts of working dogs.

I first heard about the clicker method in the early 1990s, when I was seeking training for our first dog, a Bull Terrier named Barley. This was a revolution in the dog-training world then, and I immediately rejected it as some kind of gimmick. I wish I had gone to a clicker class back then. Little did I know that I would eventually become a clicker trainer myself, almost 10 years ago, and totally embrace this method for teaching everything from good manners to (emotional) behavior modification. 

One Tool for Many Species
Marker training started several decades ago, with whistles for teaching marine mammals to carry out military tasks, as well as for entertainment like Sea World. Thanks to the Karen Pryor Academy, countless trainers and handlers are using clickers with horses, birds, cats, other small pets, and even exotic species for cooperative care in zoos and labs. Can you imagine training a chicken to peck a certain object or go through a little agility course? For many years, trainers wanting to sharpen their timing and observation skills have gone to “chicken camp.”   

Want to learn more about the fundamentals of clicker training? Go to the Library and the Videos at www.clickertraining.com.

For a demonstration of clicker training or to help your dog learn better, call me. (If you live near Easton, Maryland.) I love to show how effective yet fun it is, and I love for people to see how smart their dogs are!  

Copyright Lisa Benshoff 2018, revised and updated February 2020