RAISE THE BAR: RELIABLE DOG BEHAVIOR ANYWHERE LIVE!
Raise the bar: reliable dog behavior anywhere LIVE!
with amber Quann
A KPA LIVE!™ Class with a twist! featuring real-time training and coaching WITH amber
GENERALIZATION FOR ANY ENVIRONMENT - WITH A TWIST
Join Amber Quann and learn to train rock-solid behaviors inside and outside the home.Most dogs struggle with the behaviors they “know” when they are in new or challenging environments. For example, dogs may settle reliably and quietly in familiar places when cued. But that behavior can seem entirely “forgotten” at a café patio with servers buzzing around and food aromas wafting from all angles. What seems reliable at home often breaks down in the face of competing reinforcement. Sound familiar? You are not alone.
Amber Quann has answers for you! Join Amber for this four-week LIVE virtual class as she teaches you and your dog a generalization process that works. Amber’s process is steeped in fun, uses positive reinforcement, and will get you out and about town with your dog. Amber’s program starts in the low-distraction environment of home and then thoughtfully introduces greater complexity and challenge to achieve reliable behavior in the most challenging environments, i.e., bars, cafés, and other social spaces.
Distractions in these spaces—tasty temptations, brewery brouhaha, friendly strangers, tight quarters, new smells, other dogs, and more—make these locales challenging litmus tests for your dog’s training. In training terms, it’s a generalization and fluency challenge. Put more simply, how do you train so that your dog will, for example, settle reliably whenever and wherever you cue it?
Amber has worked for years to create a robust, easy-to-learn generalization process full of fun and positive reinforcement. Amber’s process can be applied to any number of behaviors but, in this KPA LIVE class, she will focus on behaviors that are super useful while you are out and about with your dog in public places, including cafés and breweries, crowded public places, airports, or even your front door when a visitor arrives. Skills that will be taught include settling quietly, staying close, and ignoring all manner of distractions.
This KPA LIVE class is based on Amber’s Drink With Your Dog® program; it prepares your dog to accompany you safely into a local brewery, bar, café, or restaurant. While you are training your dog to be successful in those environments, you will also learn to build and generalize behavior to any high-distraction environment. You begin at home; the café/brewery environment is the final test context Amber uses to share a process that applies to any behavior in any environment. In a nutshell, the training is designed to help your dog expect the unexpected.
If your dog can go to a mat and lie down when cued and has basic loose-leash walking skills, this class will show you how to raise the bar on those behaviors. The class also introduces several other behaviors to help you and your dog be successful in high-distraction environments. Whether you are planning to compete in dog sports or attain your Dog Trainer Professional certification, or just want a dog that you can bring to your grandparents’ house to relax for the day, this class will give you the knowledge, skills, and practice to make getting out and about with your dog safely in any environment a reality.
This class includes a week-by-week online curriculum that coordinates with weekly real-time classes over Zoom and an online social space to post videos of progress, share successes, receive or watch feedback, and have questions answered. In case you can’t make a Zoom class, each class is recorded. Each of the lessons within the four units has clear goals, video demonstrations, and detailed instructions for practice sessions with your dog.
Whether you enroll as an Engage or Excel student, you get access to the full curriculum as soon as you enroll. Class begins in the discussion forum on March 5th and live Zoom sessions occur weekly on Tuesdays at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET on March 12, March 19, March 26, and April 2.
Amber's mission is to help people get out and about with their dogs more often, safely, and enjoyably. In addition to her classes, Amber works with local businesses regularly to make their spaces even more dog-friendly and dog-owner-friendly.
Let’s both raise a glass and raise the behavior bar together. Join Amber and Raise the Bar for Reliable Dog Behavior Anywhere LIVE! Cheers!
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LEARN, PRACTICE, SHARE
LIVE learning brings concepts to life
LEARN
Six weeks of training, a week-by-week curriculum integrated with four LIVE virtual classes with real-time coaching, interactive learning, and Q&A. Super educational, super fun.
PRACTICE
The LIVE week-by-week curriculum integrates with, and prepares you for, the weekly LIVE class. New levels of advancement each week!
SHARE
Ask questions and share insights, pics, and your training videos. Celebrate progress together!A week-by-week curriculum guides your learning every step of the way. Each week, join your classmates for one of four LIVE classes for real-time training and personalized interactive coaching, plus Q&A with Amber. You will see other students practice the behaviors, hear Amber's feedback, make adjustments, and improve their training. Each of these Zoom-based classes is two hours long. All students get access to the full week-by-week curriculum and class forum. In each Zoom class:
- Engage students watch training and Amber's coaching and can ask questions through Zoom chat.
- Excel students get personalized real-time coaching and feedback on their training during the Zoom class PLUS on-screen Q&A.
Miss a class? No problem. LIVE classes are also recorded.
Let's Begin This Fabulous Journey, Together
- Unit 1 Lessons
- Live Class 1: March 12th at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET
- Unit 2 Lessons
- Live Class 2: March 19th at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET
- Unit 3 Lessons
- Live Class 3: March 26th at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET
- Unit 4 Lessons
- Live Class 4: April 2nd at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET
See What's Covered in Each unit
SHOW YOUR SKILLS
EARN YOUR DESIGNATION
SkillCheckTM assessment with Amber
Meet the criteria to earn the designation during the course or up to 30 days after the course ends
Available only to the Excel experience and included in tuition
You earned your KPA SkillCheck: Raise The Bar digital badge!
SkillCheckTM is a formalized KPA method for teachers to provide feedback to students on the skills taught in a specific course. SkillCheck criteria are developed for each KPA course or class.
In this course, SkillCheck is available only to students in the Excel experience. You will receive an easy-to-digest assessment of your skill progress on the generalization process and, if you demonstrate proficiency, you will earn the KPA SkillCheck designation in Raise The Bar: Reliable Dog Behavior Anywhere!
LEARN WITH Amber quann
Amber Quann is the founder and CEO of Summit Dog Training and the creator of the Drink With Your Dog® Project. She is passionate about helping dog guardians live their most adventurous lives with confident and skilled dogs by their sides. Amber’s interests and expertise include dog training for outdoor activities, such as hiking, camping, and paddle-boarding, and the popular start or end of many adventures—the brewery or restaurant patio. Amber and her team at Summit Dog Training have helped thousands of families live the active lives they desire with their dogs as their adventure companions!
Amber created the Drink With Your Dog® Project after working with brewery teams that wanted to host dogs in their brewery spaces. Through continued work with brewery and restaurant staff members, as well as with countless dog owners who want to be out in breweries with their dogs, Amber has honed a formula for what an excellent “dog-in-a-brewery” experience should be. The Drink With Your Dog® Project focuses on creating more dog-friendly spaces and brewery-friendly dogs that have the skills to navigate the spaces like pros!
A trainer for dogs and their humans for almost 20 years, Amber is a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner (KPA CTP), a Certified Professional Dog Trainer - Knowledge & Skills Assessed (CPDT-KSA), and a TAGTeach Level 1 instructor.
Here's What You'll Be Learning UNIT by UNIT
1
SET THE FOUNDATION AND DISCUSS RELAXATION
In Unit #1 we will be brewing up foundational behaviors that are essential to brewery and café manners. Remember that you can adapt what you learn in this Unit to the setting of your choosing! Whatever you and your dog are into, these concepts can be applied to help you and your dog refine your skills and succeed together. Amber will build on these skills each week to help you craft your dog’s “brewery-behavior sequence” and add the specific environmental cues and distractions you would expect to encounter in brewery and café settings.
You will also learn about the Drink With Your Dog® Project, and how a partnership among dog trainers, dog owners, and brewery staff is creating more dog-friendly breweries and brewery-friendly dogs nationwide. Amber will share her personal tips for setting up your dog for the most success when you bring your dog to public spaces like restaurants or bars.
The lecture, discussion, training plans, and exercises in this Unit help you build several foundational behaviors that will be put together into the brewery-behavior sequence later in the course. The main focus of this week will be a discussion of relaxation—what it is (and isn’t) and how to teach dogs to truly relax in a public setting. You will also begin to work on the skills that get you and your dog from the parking lot to the venue door, including calm in the car while parking, engaging with you in a new environment, and leash-walking skills to reach the venue door with composure.
The training plans and associated exercises in this Unit will organize and focus your training time and be your indispensable guide as we “meet” in the discussion forum and until we join in the virtual classroom.
Follow the recommended training plan because Unit 2 builds on the skills in Unit 1! We can’t wait to see everyone’s training video links and comments posted to the class forum; Amber will provide feedback on student videos and answer questions from Excel students. Everyone should follow along and learn!
In our virtual classroom, Excel students will demonstrate progress with their foundational skills, receive coaching from Amber, share their experiences, and ask questions about these early steps. We will also look ahead to the skills taught in the next unit (progressing from the door).
2
FROM THE DOOR...
In Unit #2, you will build on the skills you established with your dog in Unit #1. The lecture, discussion, training plans, and exercises in this Unit help you advance your brewery behavior sequence from the door to the bar, focusing on leash walking past distractions and a duration stay at the bar that is cued by the brewery environment! Amber will challenge you to consider how this sequence might fit into your next outing and what environmental cues may already be in place that can help make the generalization process easier from the start. You will also continue building your dog’s relaxation skills by adding a cue and increasing duration.
As a Bonus Skill, Amber will teach a behavior chain for helping our dogs recover from startling experiences that might happen in the brewery or café, like someone dropping something, a child running by, or another dog barking. You will begin to work on this “recovery-from-a-startle” behavior sequence during your hands-on practice with your dog in preparation for your second live class meeting.
In our virtual classroom, Excel students will demonstrate skills progress, receive coaching from Amber, share their experiences, and ask questions about these next steps. We’ll take a look ahead to the skills taught in the next unit as well and Amber will answer questions from Engage experience students.
3
THE FULL SEQUENCE
Unit #3 will add the last few steps of the generalization puzzle and the remaining steps of the brewery behavior sequence so that you and your dog can progress from the car to the door, to the bar, to the table, and finally, to your dog relaxing under the table while you enjoy your time together. You will learn how to add in additional behavior cues that are specific to the environment so that picking up your beer (or your coffee) from the bar is a clear cue for your dog to leash-walk by your side (yay for no spilled drinks!). You will continue building on your skills by getting your trained behavior sequence under stimulus control for the brewery environment. Lastly, we will begin to add distractions and additional duration and really raise the bar!
As a Bonus Skill, Amber will discuss Leave It for the brewery context. You and your dog may already have a Leave It skill; we will build on that to make sure that our dogs are ready for different brewery-specific scenarios, like a dropped and shattered pint glass or tidbits of delicious food dropping to the floor!
In our virtual classroom, Excel students will show off their progress on the skills built up to this point, demonstrate the process of putting their behaviors on brewery/café-specific environmental cues, receive coaching from Amber, share their experiences, and discuss how this part of the training process applies in other contexts. We will talk about the links to the skills taught in our next unit, too (including some creative ways to practice in new environments). Amber will answer questions from Engage experience students in the chat.
4
TIME TO HOP!
In Unit #4, Amber will encourage you to take your brewery and café skills on the road to practice in new environments with your dog! We will discuss the best ways to generalize your dog’s skills to any bustling public environment, and how to handle common environmental and training challenges found in these scenarios. This final unit will help you understand how to fine-tune your training plan so that you can help your dog maintain social outing skills for many years to come!
The last Bonus Skill will be a discussion of calm greetings with other people and dogs in public spaces. Amber will share her thoughts on how often, when, and how we should encourage our dogs to greet others in these settings, as well as how to get the type of polite greeting that you desire between your dog and approaching friendly strangers of both the two- or four-legged variety.
In our final virtual classroom, Excel students will demonstrate their brewery-behavior sequence skills progress in new environments and receive expert tips to prepare for their final SkillsCheck evaluations. This is the last chance to receive live coaching from Amber, share your experiences, and, for both Excel and Engage experience students, ask questions about continuing a generalization process that fits your needs.
