Putting the “short” in “shortstop.”
Many teachers and coaches who use TAGteaching—Teaching with Acoustical Guidance—get resistance from parents or colleagues for “clicking” kids. Isn’t that what dog trainers use? Are you treating my kid like an animal? Humans are different! The palpable fear and anger get in the way of good instruction, both by introducing hesitation on the instructor’s part and defensiveness on the learner’s.
Of course, to “treat someone like a dog” does normally mean you’re treating that person poorly.[1] Maybe you’re “shutting them out” or “keeping them leashed” in some way. Maybe you’re using commands or dominance in a disrespectful manner. Or assuming they’re of lesser intelligence. Because of such associations, the pioneers of using positive auditory reinforcement for humans early on needed to steer clear of “clicker” language. But TAGteach involves none of that ugliness. Quite the opposite.
Instead, TAGteach takes the best of positive reinforcement science with other animals and applies it to the particular world of humans. The stuff works on any animal with a nervous system, from “scallops to scientists” as one colleague put it this past weekend. Specific instruction and precision feedback work best to instill long-term learning, period. Here, “feedback” doesn’t mean critique or pointing out how something went wrong, but, rather, simple yes-no information about whether a goal was reached.
But we’re not animals. We can use words. Why do we need a “click” to tell us when we’ve done the right thing? Well, for one, we are animals. Getting a “yes” message directly to the amygdala helps show us Oh, this is the behavior we want. In that way, words often actually prove detrimental to learning. They activate cognitive processes that interrupt simpler, more immediate absorption. An “Attagirl” for my shortstop accidentally invokes my social approval (and suggests her need for it). There may be a time and place for that but it’s not at the moment of integrating a successful learning. A quieter “OK, mm-hmm” that follows a more enthusiastic “AWWWRIGHT!!!” can prove more confusing than reassuring. A simple “yes” can lose all its power when converted to a “yes, but”—and we as teachers so often want to add in that “but” to demonstrate our superiority or confirm our value. When offered by itself, the “click” serves as a marker that communicates a job correctly done, without variation or emotion attached. The information remains clean and pure.
Importantly, TAGteach demands as much improvement from the teacher’s side of the equation as much as, if not more so than, from the learner’s side. To use the method well, a TAGteacher has to improve his craft by going after several questions:
What behavior or ability, exactly, am I trying to develop?
What smaller skills or behaviors make up that larger goal?
Why should this matter to my learner?
How can I explain what I’m looking for cleanly and concisely?
How do I get better at marking successes precisely?
And, then, how do I get out of the way of my student’s progress?
“The TAG point is: proper cover hand.”
A teacher who asks these questions starts to shift from sage to coach. Her job is not to be the center of attention or the server from which a kid downloads information, it’s to help set clear goals and deliver the methodology and information needed to reach those goals. It can all sound a bit dispassionate and removed—What happens to being a cheerleader?—but there’s an elegance and a beauty when it’s done well. The learning itself provides the reward. Then, at the end of a TAGteach sequence, the teacher offers praise to celebrate the process used to get the result rather than the result itself.
Most parents would blanch at using a drug or a treatment for their child that hadn’t first been tested on animals, but somehow this idea of “clicker training” kids still raises hackles. TAGteach co-founder Theresa McKeon offers a useful reframe that can ease minds—“I’m going to use a short sound instead of my voice to say yes so I don’t break your concentration”—but in the end, we do rest on the success of the animal behavior science.
If you flinch to hear that I’ll use a clicker to help your daughter improve her softball game, you’re right in one sense. I will treat her like a dog. More specifically, I will use positive reinforcement. I will signal when she’s earned the reinforcer. And I will regularly increase my expectations of her performance so she can maximize her potential.[2]
Over time, I promise that you will be astonished with the results.
[1] Unless you’re with my friend Melissa, in which case being treated like a dog means getting the platinum-level, luxury service: long walks in beautiful places, nightly grooming, a steady stream of belly rubs and cuddling, and the like.
[2] Thanks to TAGteach colleague Josh Pritchard for the phrasing of this sequence.
that’s great!!! I ask your permission to translate it into Italian and to pubblish it in my website; www,tagteachitalia.com. Obviously all the references will be yours.
You can email me at; info@tagteachitalia.com
Great great great article!
Luca Canever
TAGteacher
Hi there, Luca. You absolutely have my permission to translate it for the tagteachitaliia site! I’m actually coming over to Italy this month and would love to meet you and any other folks doing this work. I’ll be in touch directly!
I personally like my reward routed thru my amygdala. My cortical region has had too many overloads from my youth in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Routing anything thru there is like trying to get a lace doily to hold soup. Also, I have many traits that are dog-like, so being treated like a dog goes down OK with me. My own dog is so spoiled it is unreal, but she still likes it when the clicker comes out. So do I. I have tag points for my golf swing and it really helps. In the case of most of my friends, being treated like a dog is a pretty high-end lifestyle!
Thanks so much for your thoughts, Andy. Tagging for sports applications makes so much sense to me; I think we’re only beginning to tap (or tag) the possibilities there. I won’t be surprised to see it be the norm in 20 years or so.
Nice Ted! I’m hoping to find a snowboard instructor who uses TAG.
Cool, Anna! If you go to http://www.tagteach.com, you can find contact numbers there to link you up with folks who use TAG. This past weekend, one man did ski patrol work and was planning to use TAG for helping teach his rescue team.
As someone who uses clicker training all the time with dogs , I wanted to add one other thought…the *click* goes directly into the joy part of the amygdala. It is faster than an *attagirl* so you can catch the EXACT thing you want. The amygdala remembers way differently than the cognitive part of the brain. I once was working with a dog to learn sitting and clicked when he sat at an angle to my right foot. He would go run around and then come dashing back to that spot and that exact angle and sit his little butt down right there. So clicker/tag makes the coach a better coach cuz yah gotta WATCH and be precise. The clicker lets you catch it.
I’ve been a devout clicker trainer with my dogs for about a decade now. It all started with me reading about it, and deciding to try it on my dog to teach him fetch: things had not been going very well with me jabbering at him, pointing, prompting, etc. I free-shaped a perfect fetch in one session after struggling with it for months! No one could shatter my confidence in the method after that, and I’m baffled at trainers–even famous ones with media empires–who still insist on the old “be the alpha” bull-pucky. Well, I am now trying to find a tennis instructor who will click me: my current one half-heartedly tried it, but I can tell he doesn’t really like it. He’s used to the method of 90 percent “what you did wrong” feedback and lumping multiple movements together rather than breaking them down. Frustrating! I have looked on the TAGteach site and elsewhere, but with no success thus far trying to find a tennis TAGteacher. Any suggestions of where to look or what to do would be helpful. I really hope TAGteaching catches on everywhere: I want us humans to have as much fun when we learn as our clicker-trained dogs do!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Lisa.
Right on for hour approach with your dog training. I recently had a friend ask on Facebook for help with handling a situation with the dog she’d just gotten at the shelter. I cringed to read several of her friends suggest the “show the dog who’s boss” approach. Fortunately, she’s choosing a more positive reinforcement method.
As far as TAGteaching with tennis, try the resources page go the tag teach website (http://tagteach.com/TAGteacher_directory) and/or jioin the newsletter and ask the folks there. If worse comes to worst, you can find a “plain old'” tennis teacher and introduce them to TAG and you can learn together.
Let me know how it goes!