Occasionally our agility class will take a field trip to let the students see agility in real life. This gives them a chance to see what happens at trials, how the set ups work, how the rings are run, what the ring stewards do, and what agility actually looks like (beginner levels and more!).
Some of the responses are that their dogs will never be able to do this and for others it gives them a better idea of why we do what we do in class.
We’re lucky to live in an area where there quite a few agility trials so we don’t have to travel too far to watch and they get to see some of the places where they may be participating in the future.
For today’s group, we had four students come to watch, we went for about 2.5 hours, it was enough time to see some standard runs and some gamblers at a USDAA trial. The range of experience for our students was about 2 months of classes to a few years of on and off classes. It was a fun variety of experiences, all are training enthusiasts, and most of them I have known for quite a while. And they had great questions!
I didn’t run a dog today, Griffin ran last week (and completed his first standard run – horray!) and I missed the entry deadline for this trial. That helped me to better be in my instructor role.
The field trip inspired me to do a few things:
- Review old seminar notes and resources for additional ideas
- Find/create/share “are you ready to trial”/”how to prepare to trial” resources
- Look into hosting a fun show to motivate students/help them see if they’re ready
- Re-structure some of the Level 4 (out of 5) classes to use time better. I’ve started using a stopwatch to be more precise about lengths of turns, but we may still have too much down time.
- Give homework most/each week for at-home variations for everyone and be sure to mention 1-2 individual at-home activities for each team
- Schedule field trips more often
- Trial and train my dogs more!