Tackle Your Teaching Presented by Veronica Boutelle

Presented by Veronica Boutelle of dog*tec

CEUs: PPAB 1, CCPDT 1, IAABC 1

Either you’ve been thinking about teaching classes but you’re a little nervous, or you’ve been teaching classes quite a while and you enjoy it. Your students love you and your evaluations are great. But there’s still a challenge or two you’d like to face down. Maybe it’s a classroom management quandary—How to handle the students who insist on talking all through class, including while you’re instructing. Or the ones who seem to do their own thing no matter what instructions you give, or how many times you give them. Or the parents who aren’t able to manage their children while training their dog, or even the students who aren’t able to manage their dogs. Maybe you want a way to more actively engage students in your classes—to get more discussion flowing, or see them start to work proactively with their dogs and make needed training adjustments without waiting for your feedback. Maybe it’s finding easier, smoother ways to handle the widely varied skill and experience levels of your human and canine students. With over 20 years of experience teaching dog training classes, training trainers and teachers, and developing curriculum and instructional strategies, Veronica will help you develop new approaches to tackle your teaching challenges and set your students up for success.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand and be able to use curriculum and instructional strategies that work for learners at all levels simultaneously
  
• Understand and be able to use various classroom management strategies to keep students focused and on task
  
• Understand and be able to use scaffolding, an instructional strategy designed to teach independent decision making for real-life training success
  
• Understand the relationship between curriculum choices and classroom management issues
  

About The Presenter

Veronica Boutelle, MA Ed, CTC

Veronica is the founder of dog*tec, the dog pro industry’s leading business consultancy, through which she has been helping dog trainers help dogs since 2003. She is the author of How to Run a Dog Business: Putting Your Career Where Your Heart Is and the co-author of Minding Your Dog Business: A Practical Guide to Business Success for Dog Professionals, and writes on business topics for many dog training industry journals, including a regular column for PPG’s Barks from the Guild. Veronica is a sought-after speaker at conferences and dog training schools across the country and internationally. She has recently spoken to positive reinforcement trainers at conferences and seminars in countries as diverse as Chile, Australia, Spain, New Zealand, and the UK, as well as at our own PPG Summit in Florida.

As former Director of Behavior & Training at the San Francisco SPCA, and as a dog training business owner before that, Veronica understands what it means to be a dog trainer first hand—the daily worries about everything from client compliance to financial security, the unique challenges of a “flexible” schedule that requires evenings and weekends, and the struggle to balance clients and training with the minutiae of running a business—and to balance all of that with a rich non-work life. Her background as a trainer, her business expertise, and her work as an educator put Veronica in a unique position to help professional dog trainers learn to become as skilled in business as they are as trainers—and that means more dogs’ lives touched by positive training.