Ep189 The 4 Stages of Learning

[00:00:00] episode 189, the Four Stages of Learning. There are lots of ways we can define learning, but these four stages I think are gonna be helpful. If you've ever wondered, well, we worked on it last time, why doesn't he understand this time? Or why does he need to practice this? , there are lots of things that we can do better if we understand how dogs learn.

[00:00:21] Welcome to the Creating Great Grooming Dog Show. I'm Chrissy Neumyer Smith. I'm a master groomer behavior specialist. I'm a certified professional groomer, a certified behavior consultant for canines, a certified professional dog trainer, a fear-free, certified professional, an instructor at Whole Pet Grooming Academy.

[00:00:37] I am the Happy Critters owner in Nashua, New Hampshire. This, my friends and colleagues, is the show where we talk about teaching pets to be calm, comfortable, and cooperative for grooming and other types of pet care. I wanna talk about the four stages of learning. Now, there are lots of ways that we can define learning and lots of different venues that we can look at, but I kind of like these four stages.

[00:00:58] I think that this will help us, as we try to help animals learn about the grooming process. Now, the first stage is acquisition. How do you learn the thing? How do you break it down into small, easy parts, introduce new ideas or maybe a new object, or introduce a new movement? Maybe it's something their body needs to do or our body needs to do.

[00:01:22] I'm gonna use lots of examples for us. How do you introduce new sounds? All sorts of things. This is the beginning. This is the very basic part, acquiring a new skill now. We can come up with all sorts of examples, but I'm gonna come up with some that I think we can all relate to.

[00:01:42] When we first learned to talk right across, across cultures, we watch babies start mimicking sounds, and we don't start off with the biggest of words. We start off with small words. We start off with tiny little bits of what the finished product would be, and there's a reason for that. The reason is that we want small approximations.

[00:02:08] We wanna work toward the bigger picture. It's not gonna happen all at once. So when we start thinking about like baby talk, right? Baby talk small approximations, and for our dogs, think about going through an entire grooming process. Probably not super helpful for learning bits and pieces of the grooming process.

[00:02:34] The acquisition phase is where they're learning about all of the tools, all of the equipment, and maybe that's at home when someone is talking about massaging their feet. , the very beginner stuff that we often do with puppies, get them used to being touched all over. That could be part of the beginning, the first little approximation, that little step toward being touched all over with stuff in things that make noise and blow air and, you know, the, the bigger picture, the small little bits.

[00:03:05] So I'm gonna come up with a couple of examples. Here's another one. When I started playing flute in the fourth grade. You don't just hand a fourth grader a flute. In fact, what we did was we used the mouthpiece and just learned how to blow into the mouthpiece. So a whole bunch of fourth graders just going into a mouthpiece.

[00:03:25] , we didn't even put the flute together. That's an approximation. If you don't know how to blow into the flute, you're probably not gonna be really successful with the other things that you're going to need to learn as you learn how to play a flute. Here's another example, an average dog training example.

[00:03:43] We teach dogs to sit pretty common, one that we do, but sometimes we're guiding them into a sit by, luring them up, luring their nose up, and they're bummed down. But we don't teach them how to do precision heel work and everything all at once. We usually start with something small like a sit. In fact, when I was still doing regular dog training appointments, which I no longer have time for, um, most dogs, I, I very rarely had a customer who needed me to teach their dog a sit or a down because it's really owner level stuff.

[00:04:16] Most of them have been playing with that since they got their dog home. They're like, woo, we're working on to, on treats and working on sits and downs. So it's another example. Something small. It may not look perfect yet. That's okay. We're working toward a larger chain of behaviors, a larger set of learning skills.

[00:04:37] Lemme give you another example for acquisition. What if you're learning to groom? Did you learn to groom by grabbing just one dog and doing a standard poodle start to finish? Or did you learn how to do a lot of baths? Most of us start off with just getting that dog wet, learning how to do a nice bath.

[00:04:56] That's part of breaking things down. Smaller approximations. You learned how to do brushing. You learned how to do clipper work. You learned how to do scissor work, but you learn them all at different times, and you focused in on just one tiny aspect for a while. That's the acquisition phase. Okay? So we wanna think about breaking things down into smaller pieces, and this is where a lot of groomers worry about.

[00:05:22] Well, what is the final picture? If a trainer is telling us that we can't do this, dog's nails today, but his nails need to be done because we're trying to work on him being comfortable with his nails being done in the future. In the future. So things that we do today might not be getting the nails complete.

[00:05:40] It might be learning how to have your foot held. It might be lining up the tool, it might be playing around trying to figure out which tool this dog prefers. If they have a preference. Some dogs prefer the grinder and some dogs prefer, the nail clipper. Some dogs prefer a file, so thinking about breaking it down into its smallest pieces, even if it doesn't look like the finished product.

[00:06:06] That's the acquisition phase. That's the I am learning a new skill right now. The second phase is fluency. Now fluency is when the learner, the dog, the cat, the person, it might be an employee, right? Can now do the thing. They can use that skill now, fluency. So as a flute example, that's when you, as a fourth grader can put your flute together.

[00:06:36] Blow into the flute, make two different flute sounds 'cause we started off with a low, then A, and you can probably play a B natural, maybe an A and a G. Right? You're starting on your fluency. The things that you now know you are practicing a lot to, to be able to do them. Exactly. And precisely. You still don't have a whole lot of skills, but you are fluent in the skills that you have.

[00:07:02] Let me give you another example of that. When you think about, if you ask a dog to sit and they understand that cue now, and they respond consistently, fluently, every time someone says sit, they do a sit. If you give them the hand, signal for a sit, they can do the sit. Okay, that's fluency. It means I now understand this cue, and this response fluency could be when your brusher bather is now doing wonderful baths, and you're thinking maybe it's time to move on to another approximation, an additional skill, go back to that acquisition phase and build on it and add another skill.

[00:07:43] So fluency. Fluency is a big part of what we're looking for. I want the dogs to know how I'm gonna hold them, how I'm going to touch them, what tools I'm going to use, and for them to start understanding that, oh, okay, this is normal. Be fluent in this. And one of the things that we can have owners working on is we can have owners working on touching their dogs all over.

[00:08:07] Have them fluent with that. Yeah. People touch me all over. Nothing is taboo. People touch me all over, and then when they're fluent with that, people can touch me all over while I stand. Maybe people can touch me all over while I stand on the sofa next to them. They can touch me all over with some stuff and things, stuff from the coffee table.

[00:08:26] We've talked before about the coffee table game, but the coffee table game is where I just start picking up things on my coffee table, the jar candle, a box of tissues, a pen, and touching them all over just with random stuff and things to better prepare them for other work that we're going to need to do.

[00:08:46] That's part of our fluency. Can they remain calm, comfortable, and cooperative while we do stuff? And can they be fluent in that before we move on, before we do more stuff? Okay. So the first two stages of learning acquisition where we learn something new, we start finding out about this new process, right?

[00:09:10] And fluency, which is when we now understand the part that we just learned. The part it doesn't need to be the whole thing. It needs to be that part. Do I understand that part? Can my fingers find an F natural on the flute, which after many, many years of doing it, yeah, pretty much they can. So acquisition and fluency are the first two.

[00:09:34] We're gonna take a quick break, and then the next part, we'll go over the next second two. But if you are enjoying the show, please remember to tell somebody else. Find another groomer who needs some help, or an owner or a trainer. But tell somebody else. The third stage is generalization, and that is when you start helping a dog understand that no matter where you are, those things are all the same.

[00:10:02] Now I'm talking about generalization in terms of. The grooming setting right now. So for a dog to say like, oh, well, I'm used to being touched like this on the sofa, but does it mean the same thing in a different room? That's generalization. Can that fluency now be applied to a variety of places? You might think, well, of course, but we have so many people who say, well, he's really, really good, but only in the kitchen.

[00:10:31] He ignores me when we're on a walk. Dog can't sit when we're on a walk and, and they think he's being defiant. Right? That's really, really common. When in fact a lot of these dogs have only practiced, sit in the kitchen. Sit is a kitchen trick. My last border colleague was very, very literal. She had to learn, sit in so many different places before she ever generalized.

[00:10:56] She's a very, very specific girl. So you know, we used to kid around like, what does sit mean? The same thing in a room with a red chair. Does sit mean the same thing on mulch? Does it mean the same thing? If your eyebrow did that thing, what does it mean when you say sit in these other places? Because she hadn't yet generalized, okay, so generalization.

[00:11:16], dogs that don't sit on walks as reliably as they do in the kitchen, they might still be fluent in sit, but now they need to generalize that SIT is always gonna mean, sit wherever we ask for it. , so you have to think about where do you practice, what kind of difficulty levels are you working with.

[00:11:33] And that's where we start off with that acquisition phase, with those approximations little, tiny, tiny steps. We're usually when we're learning something new, we're doing it in an atmosphere that is calmer in an atmosphere that is not as difficult. Right? You know, when we think about, um, puppies, we often do puppies as a shorter visit.

[00:11:55] That's one of the ways that we can manage a difficulty level. The duration of a visit of a grooming visit is part of a difficulty level. So if we think about like, all right, how can we make this easier? Then, when we get into generalization, we start adding some difficulty or maybe closer to what the real world is gonna throw at us, right?

[00:12:16] 'cause grooming is the real world and what it's gonna throw at us, which might be, , lots of dogs in the room. Right. It might be a dog that's barking, it might be a dryer, whatever it is, but we're adding difficulty levels. So, I'm gonna add a couple more examples in here. So the flute difficulty level, maybe you do know how to blow into it now and, you know, a bunch of notes, but now we start adding a piece of music, the generalization.

[00:12:45] Can I, while I learn a piece of music, make those notes all sound good? Can I, can I keep a tempo while I learn how to get, my fingers to get those notes? It's trickier than it sounds. , another example so I also dabble in archery, and I'm not necessarily the person who needs it all to be quiet, but archery range is almost like watching golf, and people have to be like super quiet.

[00:13:13] Meanwhile, I'm hanging out with my friends and we're telling each other knock, knock jokes and stuff, and we get asked to be quiet on the archery range. So we tend to hang out together on the archery range so that we don't have to be super quiet because being noisy is a difficulty level. So when a bunch of archers are like,

[00:13:34] You know, when they're playing golf and someone's like, woo, you know, basketball players don't ask everyone to shush. Can you quiet down? We're trying to dribble the ball. It's just different difficulty levels. Okay. And I want you to think about generalization is when you can start doing the thing that you've learned and that you're now fluent in with some difficulty levels, learning how to do it, in real time or in the real place, or with a new person.

[00:14:04] For a lot of our dogs, the owners have been working on something, and now they need to generalize, oh wait. And my groomer can do those things to me, too, and she can do it on a table. Lots of unfamiliar things. So that's the the third one: generalization. Now the fourth one is maintenance, and that's because practice makes perfect.

[00:14:27] Keep doing the things. Keep doing it, and I think maintenance is the one that we sometimes forget about, especially in grooming. We think, well, I taught him, and now he knows and we worked him up to a point where he could do this thing, and then maybe we don't see that dog for a couple of months. Maybe We worked on it like every other week for a little while, and now we're like done.

[00:14:52] But is training ever really done? There are things that we just need to practice. I. I'm gonna give you some more examples. So flute, I picked up my flute the other day. I haven't played in a long, long time. My fingers know exactly how to get everywhere. My mouth is not as good at making good tone anymore because I do not practice enough.

[00:15:14] That's maintenance. I do not play as often as I used to use it or lose it right now, much like riding a bike. I can easily get that back because I used to have it because I used to play every single day, and I started playing flute in the fourth grade. So, um, I have many, many, many, many, many hours of playing flute in my background, so it'll come back faster.

[00:15:40] But maintenance is an important part of the four stages of learning, of continuing the things that we do. Um, for instance, with dogs, when we're grooming sometimes up here in the northeast, we have people who go away to Florida for the winter, and then they come back in the spring, and maybe they haven't had a groomer that whole time.

[00:16:00] And I'm like, we're gonna have to start over with some of this stuff because your dog hasn't been groomed by me in five months. Now, maybe he's been groomed by somebody else, so I don't really know what to expect. Maybe. He had learned all the things, acquisition, he acquired his knowledge, and then maybe he was fluent enough that when he went down to Florida with a different groomer, he was able to generalize, oh, this person seems to be wanting to do the same things that the last person did.

[00:16:27] I know how to do this. But the maintenance still needs to be done. Okay. And I think sometimes it's really easy for us to think, but he knows it Now. We'll hear that from owners. Didn't you work on that last time? How many times are you gonna work on teaching 'em to be good for nails? Um, my answer is, and as long as it takes, as many times as it takes, we are gonna keep working on that.

[00:16:52] Because we want 'em to be calm, comfortable, and cooperative. That is our goal. And your dog is always gonna need nail trims always. Okay, so if we start thinking about maintenance as an important part of these four stages, and sometimes we forget about that part, sometimes we forget. Sometimes, we forget to tell a dog how well they're doing.

[00:17:15] Maybe they still are really kind of. Worried about a particular part of the process or they still find it unpleasant or tedious. There is no harm in telling them what the boy you're being right, bring it to his attention. He is doing well. I think sometimes we just take it for granted that they've been groomed for a long time, and they know better.

[00:17:35] But maintenance is important. So the four stages of learning acquisition, I acquire my knowledge, I learn a thing through small approximations. , and I just slowly built up that skill set. Fluency, I can do the thing, cue and response, you know, sit and I do the thing, , generalization where when everything is happening around us, and difficulty levels happen, I can still do the thing and then maintenance continuously working on the thing.

[00:18:09] I know that, there are lots of other ways to look at learning, but I think these four stages are really, really helpful to break it down into those four. , I think we want to teach dogs to be good, and sometimes we forget that it's not all gonna happen in the grooming salon. And sometimes we're a little bit worried that, well if it's not happening in the grooming salon, how is it gonna happen?

[00:18:33] But what if an owner is successfully teaching a dog? How to do a lot of the things they're gonna need to know. And we get them at a point where we're just working on generalization and maintenance. Ooh, didn't think about that. Did you, like, wait a minute, what if they're in a training class and the trainer is teaching them the new skill?

[00:18:54] What if that is something that's going to be applied to the grooming setting, and that's why we need to think collaboratively. That's why we need to think about this as teamwork. , there's a lot of things that owners can do. There are lots of times where a trainer could be working on something and then when we get into the grooming setting, applying it there.

[00:19:15] So, like I said, acquisition, fluency, generalization, and maintenance, the four stages of learning. If you enjoy the show, please remember to tell a friend. You can find me at creating great grooming dogs.com. This show is anywhere you can find podcasts, and you can find it on YouTube, creating great grooming dogs.com has all of that stuff there, and that's where you can find the transcripts.

[00:19:40] So again, Chrissy Neumyer Smith and I teach the Master Groomer Behavior Specialist Diploma program at WholePetNH.com.