Safe spaces for anxious or fearful learners
live with Ellen yoakum
A KPA LIVE!™ Class featuring real-time training and coaching WITH ellen
Help your dogs feel safe and secure around the stimuli that scare them
Join Ellen and build safe and secure learning environments for any dogLast Chance! Engage enrollment closes at 9 pm pt/12 pm et! Spots are Limited and Available on a First-Come, First-Served Basis. Excel has sold out.
Dogs often have “big feelings” about one or many stimuli in their regular lives. Traditional management techniques have limitations. For example, we can limit absences for separation anxiety, cover crates for upsetting visual stimuli, or sound-mask for traffic noises, but these choices alleviate symptoms without addressing causes or imparting skills.
The more sustainable solution is to provide dogs with calming environments as well as the agency and skill to move to those environments. Then, we can teach dogs behaviors that help them calm themselves. These are the underlying concepts for creating “Safe Spaces” for dogs.
In this four-unit LIVE! Class, Ellen will coach you through creating, conditioning, and maintaining safe spaces for your dogs or your clients’ dogs. These techniques apply to dogs and other animals; they will apply whether your dog is merely shy or has elevated levels of reactivity. However, this class is not designed for dogs with resource-guarding issues.
You will learn and practice:
- A robust working definition of “safe space”
- How to recognize and build an excellent safe space *spoiler! Your dog will tell you!
- How to maintain and boost the impact of your dog’s safe space, even when life gets busy
- How to use safe space training to help dogs gain the skills to navigate the world, even when their worlds are big and scary
Excel students will learn and practice:
- A well-conditioned and calming safe space where dogs can begin to tackle life’s challenges
- A plan for maintaining your pet's dream safe space (that also meets your needs!)
- An enrichment menu that helps dogs de-escalate when stress might be running high
- Skills to continue to capture and teach new de-escalation behaviors on your own
- The skills to teach dogs to seek out their safe space when challenges get to be too much
- Skills to support dogs as they use safe spaces as a “stop button”
- Skills and knowledge to adjust your plan and continue meeting dogs’ needs long after the class has ended
Where and When!
- Enrollment opens on June 27 at 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET.
- Class begins on July 10; start Unit 1.
- Discussion board opens, teaching support begins on July 24.
- Zoom classes will be held on Wednesdays: July 31, August 7, August 14, and August 21. Classes will start at 2:00 PM PT / 5:00 PM ET and are two hours long.
Can’t make the Live classes? No worries! The Zoom classes are recorded and made available shortly after each class concludes; you can access all of the recorded material for an entire year!
LEARN, PRACTICE, SHARE
LEARN
Five 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 your instructor. You will see other students practice the behaviors, hear your instructor’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 your instructor’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
- Discussion Board Opens: July 24th
- Live Class 1: July 31st
- Unit 2 Lessons
- Live Class 2: August 7th
- Unit 3 Lessons
- Live Class 3: August 14th
- Unit 4 Lessons
- Live Class 4: August 21st
LEARN WITH Ellen Yoakum
Ellen Yoakum KPA-CTP and Certified SA Pro Trainer, is a co-owner of Pet Harmony Animal Behavior & Training. Through Pet Harmony, Ellen and her team help pets and their guardians foster a happy, healthy, and harmonious lifestyle. They specialize in private sessions addressing behavior issues ranging from nuisance problems to serious maladaptive behaviors such as aggression, anxiety, and fear. Additionally, Ellen mentors professionals to enhance the quality of life for pets, clients, and themselves through Pet Harmony’s PETPro Mentorship Program, prioritizing a safe and supportive learning environment.
After acquiring her BSc in Psychology with an emphasis on Animal Behavior from the University of Washington, Ellen has worked in a variety of fields including wildlife rehabilitation, zoological settings, dog daycare and boarding, captive animal welfare research, private training and behavior consulting, and University teaching. She is a frequent speaker at conferences, has published literature, appeared on podcasts, and has dedicated her career to the well-being of animals. Ellen has been involved in animal care since 2009, obtaining her KPA-CTP certification in 2017 and SAPro certification in 2021.
Here's What You'll Be Learning UNIT by UNIT
1
a safe foundation
In Unit 1, Ellen coaches you through building a solid foundation so that you always have a stable and effective place to return to when life gets messy.
Unit 1 topics include:
- What is a safe space?
- What are the phases of creating an adequate, safe space?
- How to create a plan that you can follow realistically, not just lofty goals
- How to identify your goals for a safe space. In what situations do you think your pet needs a defined safe space, or where do you want to create one?
- How to measure progress. What observable measures can you use to assess your progress?
- Beginning an effective enrichment program that facilitates and classically conditions calm.
2
Safe and Sustainable
In Unit 2, you will learn what to do when life gets tough for your learner. This knowledge includes measuring and adjusting your long-term calming projects and capturing and building a reinforcement history for behavioral signs of de-escalation. In this unit, you will build on your behavior-observation prowess and hone your behavior-capturing skills.
Unit 2 topics include:
- How to assess and adjust your pet’s safe space
- How to keep the safe space safe, even when things get stressful
- How to observe, measure, and assess the efficacy of your long-term calming projects so that you can provide effective and varied options that match your daily bandwidth.
- Teaching your pet to go to the safe space (2 variants)
- Capturing signs of de-escalation (2 variants) so that you can help your pet practice the behaviors that elicit relaxation.
3
Not-So-Scary Opportunities
In everyday life, safe spaces are needed when a learner lacks control. In Unit 3, you will work on the elements of variability and excitement and teach your dog that these conditions are just cues that can be positively associated with the security of the dog’s safe space. You will learn how to link stimuli into a sequence of cues, providing your pup with a plan for when the environment gets too spooky.
Unit 3 topics include:
- How to add additional layers of safety and comfort to your pet’s safe space
- Teaching your dog to party and that safety is only a party away
- Layering in distraction to help generalize and build fluency
- Bringing skills together to create a whole safety picture
4
Choosing Safety and Security
In Unit 4, you will combine the skills learned in Units 1-3 and apply them to the situations and stimuli that affect your dog. You will learn how to utilize your learner’s safe space when needed, build a plan to keep the momentum going for you and your dog, and teach your dog that the space you built in this class isn’t the only safe space in the dog’s world.
Unit 4 topics include:
- Practicing the whole sequence - escalation -> safe space -> de-escalation
- What to do when your pet starts using the safe space INDEPENDENTLY
- Building your flexible plan and your enrichment menu so that you can match your bandwidth, no matter how difficult or calm your day
- How to create new safe spaces
- How to utilize your pet’s safe space for uncontrolled and controlled triggers