THE ART OF TEACHING PEOPLE TO TRAIN HORSES

THE ART OF TEACHING PEOPLE TO TRAIN HORSES

I have a great passion for training horses but I also have a great fascination with people and how they learn. Therefore, there is nothing I enjoy more than teaching people how to train horses and for this blog I would like to talk about this interesting process. I think it is an important issue to discuss because like everything with horses we focus so much on the horse and little on the human but the more you understand the process the more you realise it is the person sitting in the saddle or holding onto the lead rope that has the greatest impact on a horse’s behaviour and performance.

Ray Hunt highlighted the importance of fact many times such as this quote from his book “Think Harmony with Horses”:

“My goal with the horse is not to beat someone; it’s to win within myself. To do the best job I can do and tomorrow try to do better. You will be working on yourself to accomplish this, not on your horse”

Therefore, I want to focus attention on how people learn to do the best job they can do with a horse because it far from an easy thing to learn. Working with horses is complex as it requires a combination of mental and coordinated physical skills that are guide by observations and appropriate decisions regarding those observations. But while it is a complex and layered with levels of understanding and skill development people CAN learn, CAN develop and CAN be supported to develop their horsemanship skills via education, experience and encouragement.

To begin this discussion I am going to delve into my past and reveal parts of my own journey of learning to teach people as it is a journey littered litter with a heap of ignorance about the human learning process as well as a lot of mistakes.

I am a university lecture in pharmacy, in fact I am a lecturer at the same university that I graduated from and if I be really honest I only got the position because when I was in my first year in the course I nearly failed a subject! I nearly failed it as it was hard and required me to think. I was really good at memorising stuff but this subject was concerned with the formulation of drugs into medicines which is a complex topic as it requires a high degree of problem solving because every drug has its parameters for formulations as a chemical entity, every route a medication can be administered from injection to capsule has another set of parameters and don’t even get me started on the patient factors from age to disease that adds further complexity, so making a medicine is just as much art as it is science! Nearly failing motivated me to work really hard at the subject to get my head around it and work out how to perform well in it and ultimately lead to me gaining a tenured academic position in my school and much to my amusement 10 years ago I was put in charge of that very subject I nearly failed all those years ago. This was very cool because it finally gave me reign to throw the entire program in the bin and unleash my ideas of how I believed it should be delivered, so I re-built the entire program. In my first semester I took the subject from the worst performing subject in terms of student satisfaction and failure rates in the university to the highest performing subject with 100% satisfaction and 100% pass rate. In that first year of tenure I won a stack of teaching awards, I was labelled a “dynamic” and “innovative” lecturer and invited to detail how I was able to achieve such a turnaround in a subject’s performance. I was pulled out of my research area at the time and encouraged to specialise in educational research. I therefore set out to show the world how excellent my teaching practices were but instead I discovered the complete opposite and my feelings of triumph quickly deflated as I discovered I was more arrogant than dynamic and more ignorance than innovative. By understanding human learning more and by researching my teaching methods and student results I was able to prove I actually hadn’t done a good “teaching” job at all, in fact all I had done was “train” students and this was not the expectations of a university experience. My big mistake was taking everything I had worked out myself from my own experience as a student about formulating medicines and constructed the step by step process necessary for students to do to pass the subjects assessments. I had broken everything down into little steps and had got the students to practice and repeat until they were able to follow the steps flawlessly. I basically created a flow chart for them to follow, a flow chart that I had constructed from MY understanding of the subject. They all performed outstandingly on the assessments as they all mastered the steps I taught them to follow. The students wrote wonderful things about me in their subject feedback reports about how amazing I was at making such a hard subject “easy! The problem was that I removed any need for them to “think” in the unit, instead of problem solving they just followed a flow chart that I had constructed for them. Needless to say I did indeed make it much easier, it is easy when you don’t have to think and just follow steps! The next mistake I made was spending a lot of time talking AT students. I love lecturing, it’s like the greatest fun challenge of making a dry boring topic interesting so you can entertain 200 people at 8am on a Monday morning! But the combination of talking at them in lectures and letting them follow my step by step process further destroyed the quality of learning. I remember not long after I started researching the concept of teaching humans to think and then having to sit down and mark student examination papers. I remember sitting their feeling horrified as I realised that paper after paper I picked up and marked had just one voice coming through their words and it wasn’t theirs….it was mine! It was just my voice just parroted back to me with various quality. These students were just memorising me, my words, my opinions, my thoughts! My horror continued as my research lead me to follow up on cohorts of students who had done my subject previously and moved into the higher years and even into professional practice as pharmacists. I gave these past students both an example of an assessment they had previously done in my subject and also a novel complex question that deliberately required them to use their thinking and reasoning skills using the concepts taught in the subject. Whilst they didn’t fail the tasks they did not perform well and definitely nowhere near their performances when they were enrolled in the subject. Faded memory of my step by step instructions and with no experience using their thinking skills besides low level memory skills of the material in the subject resulted in their responses being very average. So in a nutshell, I had created an education situation that eliminated their need to think and did not encourage them to development their own understanding of the materials. I had taken the art out of the subject and replaced it with a colour by numbers experience and all I set students up for was to be nothing more than a poor imitation of me. So to cut this long story short I changed the way I did things, I stopped lecturing them and talking AT them (which was hard because I like talking!) and instead talked with them in workshops and encouraged them to investigated concepts, discussed ideas and experimented together. I let them design their own step by step processes and have their own opinions and ideas about things and I let them make their own mistakes. I again repeated my research and followed up students who had experience this different approach to teaching the subject and this time there was no decline in performance in fact their performances even continued to improved and most importantly when I sat down and read their responses I no longer heard myself talking through their words but their own voices which was way more interesting to read. I realise now that by working out everything for them and merely training them in the process of my subject I was both eliminating their need to develop their thinking skills but also I had made the benchmark myself limiting their abilities to never be anything greater than myself and this is sad because as I teacher I now realise my job is to set people up to better then me and not limited to me! Their subject feedback reports also stopped talking about how I had made it “easy” and started reporting that they found the subject “interesting”, “challenging” and shock horror even “fun”!

10 years ago, I did not understand the difference between training and teaching, in fact I would have rolled my eyes at the topic and considered it completely pedantic and pure semantics but after enduring the painful and cringe worthy experience of actually testing my teaching results and then performing experiments and making changes and seeing the dramatic positive impact of those changes I am happy to be labelled pedantic because I now know it makes a hell of a lot of difference in overall performance and development of ability.

So what is the difference between teaching and training and what the hell does all this mean in relation to working with horses? Firstly, training is part of teaching but teaching if more than training! Training focuses on specific skills development and in a nutshell HOW to do something and WHAT to do in situations. Teaching is a much broader concept and also includes transferring of knowledge and theoretical concepts, the “WHY” behind what we do and how to do it.

We train horses’ behaviour by conditioning them to RESPOND to certain cues and perform behaviours. Many horsemanship programs TRAIN people to train horses by giving them a step by step guide of what to do and how to do it in order to train a horse to do something. Whilst they can be good at developing the practical skill of applying a training METHOD they tend to make the same mistake as I did when I created a step by step colour by number drug formulation subject. By making it “easy” for people we eliminate the need to think, they just have to follow the steps and remember the clichés that go with them but unfortunately by limiting the development of knowledge and mental skills and also because it is one person’s particular training plan that they have created we also limit the benchmark to the creator of the program, so everyone that sits below will be of varying qualities less than that person. So needless to say that is why I believe horsemanship programs can get a bad reputation because the sheer majority of people following a set of steps, just following the “what” and the “how” and doing that with varying levels of proficiency from good to terrible, can get in to trouble. The reason they get into trouble is because the holy trinity of horsemanship – timing, feel and balance, are all in fact actions based on decisions and decisions improve the greater a person’s knowledge, observations skills and experience and hence the quality of their decisions improve. Therefore, it is the “WHY” behind the “WHAT” and the “HOW” that improves your timing, feel and balance and ultimately your horsemanship skills. Our human superpower is our tremendous thinking and cognitive skills, our creativity and ability to solve problems, to train a human to respond to situations like a horse responds to our cues, is not digging into this incredible ability to learn that humans possess.

When you embrace the concept of teaching humans to train horses you also discover something else – not one person knows it all! Not every great horseman possesses all the knowledge about all aspect of horses in order for someone to gain the necessary knowledge to help underpin all training situations and decisions. To teach humans effectively you have to realise both the limitations of your own expertise and relevance of the knowledge of others. I refer people to various knowledge produced by various practical and academic experts that are relevant to training horses. There are experts in horses as creatures, in the way they learn, in techniques and methods to inspire learning, in horse health, in training of particular disciplines etc. – because we must identify that all these perspectives of the horse are important and when you bring that knowledge together in the brain of a human they observe more, they therefore experience more and they make better decisions and have better judgements about what is in the best interests for the horse…and really ultimately we are all in this for the horse and to enjoy working with them safely!

I had someone say to me the other day that the way I trained a horse was completely different from one of my mentors, a man that helped me observe things I never saw before and who has been a great supporter of my knowledge development and understanding of the “why” of what I was doing. I must say I was proud of that observation because I am me and just like me with my university students he will not necessarily hear or see himself when he watches me work a horse or reads my words. He will not because he never set himself as my benchmark, he never limited me to his “how” and “what” but instead did something far greater - he ignited my interested for finding out “why”. He was able to inspire this because he is not my trainer, not my guru horseman but he has been my teacher and that has made all the difference.