Training a Dog – What is Behavior Shaping?
now we’re ready to talk about shaping
this is a powerful tool that allows you
to build a behavior step by step
reinforcing small approximations of that
behavior until you achieve your final
goal
imagine a staircase where the goal
behavior is placed at the top in this
example the goal is to have a dog sit on
top of a box each step represents a
piece of the behavior the lowest step is
the simplest version or the very first
piece of it when your dog can easily
achieve that first step you bump up the
difficulty just a tiny bit and work on
the next step little by little the
behavior grows until you reach your goal
at the top the fancy way to describe
this process is reinforcing successive
approximations
