Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Shaping Success

I recently finished Susan Garret's Shaping Success.

Lots of chew on and a good read. Here a few things that popped out right away for me.

Susan says not to add a cue until the behavior is really proficient. That was interesting for me. Most of us start using the cue once they start understanding the behavior.

Overstimulation. Buzzy and Wyatt have this in common. I wish she talked more about how she helping Buzz with this. I think I am finally getting a handle of what gets Wyatt overstimulated now after living with him for 3 years.

She really breaks down contacts. Oh, how I wish I could go back in time on this one.

She uses timeouts quite a bit. I still tend to ignore what I don't want and reward what I do want. She does devote an appendix to timeouts and when to use them.

2 comments:

Pangaea said...

Thanks for the the recommendation of the book!!

I'm enjoying your blog--got here from an old comment in my blog, which I have woefully ignored for quite some time. But I've started it back up again and saw your note.

So did you move up immediately from Novice to Open in Jumpers? I'm not quite that brave......

John Heffernan said...

Hi, Pangaea.

Thanks for being a faithful reader and I hope you enjoy Shaping Success.

To answer your question, we did move right up from novice to open and do the same thing in CPE. I guess we figure we might as well start trying to get those Q's.

John