Ashley Fenner
SPED 715
Book Review
Don’t Shoot the Dog!
Pryor, K., (1999). Don’t Shoot the Dog!: the New Art of Teaching and Training (pp. 1-183). $11.64 (softcover.) New York, New York.: Bantam Books. The target audience of Don’t Shoot the Dog! is for anyone who wants to learn more about the area of behavior management. The audience base is large and includes: teachers, administrators, parents, psychologists, and counselors. Karen Pryor attempts to address how to change a behavior, or ‘train’ individuals. The information provided throughout the text pertains to humans and animals alike, and how to shape the behaviors of both. In the first half of Don’t Shoot the Dog! Pryor brings up the idea of reinforcement, shaping behaviors, and stimulus control. Many teachers have experience with these ideas throughout their teaching career. Using reinforcements to encourage positive behavior along with reinforcement schedules are ideas that are used daily in classrooms and school settings. Creating new goals that are in line with what the subject is already capable supports the idea of shaping and how we …show more content…
She addresses things from extreme punishment such as shooting the animal to more compassionate methods that deal with changing the subject’s behavior. This section does a great job of allowing the audience to come up with different ideas about how to deal with unwanted behaviors. To end the book, Pryor discusses how to use reinforcements in the real world and how to effectively use clicker training. We can use clicker training to begin teaching an animal or human how to perform a task and then gradually decrease once the task becomes habitual we can move to a verbal command. From the end of the book we are able to see real examples of how these ideas are used for
SPED 715
Book Review
Don’t Shoot the Dog!
Pryor, K., (1999). Don’t Shoot the Dog!: the New Art of Teaching and Training (pp. 1-183). $11.64 (softcover.) New York, New York.: Bantam Books. The target audience of Don’t Shoot the Dog! is for anyone who wants to learn more about the area of behavior management. The audience base is large and includes: teachers, administrators, parents, psychologists, and counselors. Karen Pryor attempts to address how to change a behavior, or ‘train’ individuals. The information provided throughout the text pertains to humans and animals alike, and how to shape the behaviors of both. In the first half of Don’t Shoot the Dog! Pryor brings up the idea of reinforcement, shaping behaviors, and stimulus control. Many teachers have experience with these ideas throughout their teaching career. Using reinforcements to encourage positive behavior along with reinforcement schedules are ideas that are used daily in classrooms and school settings. Creating new goals that are in line with what the subject is already capable supports the idea of shaping and how we …show more content…
She addresses things from extreme punishment such as shooting the animal to more compassionate methods that deal with changing the subject’s behavior. This section does a great job of allowing the audience to come up with different ideas about how to deal with unwanted behaviors. To end the book, Pryor discusses how to use reinforcements in the real world and how to effectively use clicker training. We can use clicker training to begin teaching an animal or human how to perform a task and then gradually decrease once the task becomes habitual we can move to a verbal command. From the end of the book we are able to see real examples of how these ideas are used for