The difference between Training and Teaching
They are both familiar words and on the face of it they might both appear to mean the same thing but there is a subtle difference between them.
Training is a common term we apply to horses, we often think in terms of training our horse in order to have the horse do for us the things we think a horse should do, often according to our perception of what we define as the horse’s job or function. For example, if we define our horse as a dressage horse we might spend many hours developing the horse’s ability to perform certain physical actions necessary to fit with our idea of dressage.
One approach that many trainers instinctively take is to use correction of the wrong behavior to continually refine the right behavior. The trainer will have in their minds the idea of what the ideal behavior looks like and will, through a process of continual repetition correction and refinement, move the horse closer and closer to this ideal. In a way this will echo the ultimate goal of the dressage trainer, the performance of a dressage test, where the judges will once again evaluate the performance of horse and rider against a perceived notion of perfection. The winning horse rider combination is the one that comes closest to this ideal. Other horse/riders are evaluated in order of ‘least failure’ to achieve second/third place etc…
This idea of teaching through correction and comparison against a perceived notion of perfection is one that is pretty familiar to us humans as it is very similar to the way our own academic education system works. Years of study and evaluation and assessments culminate in the ultimate final exam. The ultimate evaluation of success or failure.
The problem with this whole approach to training (and education) is that it is deeply coercive and based on avoiding failure rather than achieving success. It certainly has very little to do with personal development of the individual’s strengths. More importantly learning through the avoidance of failure will result in a state of mind I call compliance. Compliance is always demonstrated through the principle of minimal effort. Subjects, whether horse or human, will use their intelligence to work out what is the most efficient way of avoiding the coercive thing, in other words, they will always put in the minimal effort because they have no incentive to do anything else.
It is this notion of minimal effort that makes these systems incredibly inefficient. It sometimes takes years to train a dressage horse to make even the most basic movements even though we are often told that all these movements are developed from observed natural movements that all horses can (apparently) naturally do. In other words, we spend years teaching the horse to do something it already knows how to do and yet it still fails when we test it. – Bonkers!
In the human world of education with its emphasis on assessment and qualification most of us spend many years being trained to pass exams. Our state educations systems consume more and more resources, not only in measurable terms such as money but incalculable amounts of human potential and yet, because of the principle of minimal effort increasing numbers of students leave the education system barely able to read or write. Of course, a few students ‘make the grade’ and succeed and even excel within the system, but that is exactly the point, it is only a few students, a relatively small percentage of the original intake that somehow seem naturally able to adapt to the requirements of the system.
So if this is training, what is teaching?
I define teaching as essentially a positive process of recognizing and developing the natural talents of individuals be they horses or humans. All of us have certain aspects of behavior that we have a natural aptitude for. For example, in the human world some have a talent for imagination or design others may be particularly good at analytical tasks such as mathematics others may be gifted linguists or very good at practical subjects like engineering. It is the same for horses. In my herd I have individuals that appear to like solving problems or others that love to play and imitate. Some horses are quite tactile and enjoy manipulating objects and touching things. The point here is that all individuals are different, so to my mind, teaching should be a process of firstly recognizing and then developing the strengths of the individual. The teaching process should respect this uniqueness and be able to adapt to the individual.
So this is the basic difference between teaching and training. Training attempts to force the individual to adapt to the rules of the system, teaching recognizes the strengths of the individual and adapts to them. How do we do this? The answer is that we use positive reinforcement methods to teach – and only positive reinforcement. Because positive reinforcement is automatically emotionally rewarding, it overcomes the problem of minimum effort. It should never be in any way coercive, with positive reinforcement the subject engages emotionally and intellectually with the process, therefore there is always an incentive to do more, in other words, maximum effort. This makes positive reinforcement teaching highly efficient. Not only this, all the students that are taught using these methods will achieve success because all students have strengths and abilities that can be developed through teaching.
Some people might argue that this is all very well but we want horses to be good at everything, I would say to this OK but just as we cannot expect every human to be an outstanding musician or an exceptional architect, so horses may not be naturally suited to a life of dressage or show jumping but there is another factor here: positive fallout. As the horse develops skill in areas in which it is naturally talented, other areas where it is less naturally talented become useful and relevant to it, for example, a horse that is not particularly athletic but enjoys solving puzzles may come to respond quickly and enthusiastically to a behavior because it wants to do it. The positive side effect is that because of the quick response the horse becomes fitter and healthier the more times it repeats the action. This is positive fallout
In the past I have used the phrase positive reinforcement training (PRT), but perhaps I should now re-define that phrase as positive reinforcement teaching.
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