Click!

The Trib had a story last week about the small but growing classroom presence TAG ("teaching with acoustical guidance") teaching--or "clicker training," as many pet owners know it.

The theory behind TAG and clicker training methods is similar: Break a behavior down into simple steps, and reward the student for right moves with a click (and a treat, if your student is a dog).

"It’s great for isolating problems," Rodriguez says.

Using a clicking noise in teaching is more effective than verbal reinforcement, according to Keri Gorman, a nationally certified TAGteach instructor. Gorman teaches TAG seminars in the Northwest and will start a five-week-long TAG class through Portland Community College next month.

"The clicking sound works faster in the brain and creates a muscle memory," she says.

It also sounds the same every time, whereas people use a different inflection whenever they say "Thank you" or "Good job." The message won’t get mixed: A click means the student did something right. Silence means "Try again."

Baldwin has discovered the difference firsthand at the climbing gym.

"Hearing the click doesn’t take your mind out of the game," he says, which is important when he’s thinking about the next handhold to grab.

As with clicker training for animals, TAGteach is based on positive reinforcement. When a teacher breaks down a movement or behavior into simple steps, it sets the student up for success.

I wish them better success with rock-climbing teenagers than I've had with a cranky parrot.

Before getting into the heart of the story, I suppose I should admit that the idea of clicker-training in the classroom, for humans, just sounds . . . not-right to me. But then most of my classroom experience was in professing, a communication activity whose assumptions couldn't be much farther removed from behavior training. Had I been a fourth-grade teacher, I might well look at the whole problem differently today.

Back to Pardoe, though. It's a general rule of thumb that parrots, in general, are on an intelligence level roughly with human two- or three-year-olds, both in pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities, and in neediness and ME!-centeredness. That pretty much fits. He's a big believer in rituals and routines. Certain things--e.g., having breakfast while I read the morning paper--have to be done exactly the same way every morning, or he gets annoyed. Since I'm much the same way, I can't say I fault him for this.

To the extent that I've taught him "tricks," it's usually that I've managed to encourage habits he's already got.

He's pretty vocal, but he's not from a breed that learns to "talk" as often as some other breeds. As one new-agey neighbor remarked, "he's really got quite an aura about him." (Yes, I suppose he does, although the charm of his aura wore off on her by the second time she parrot-sat for him while I was away. I could have told her--warned her about "aura fatigue"--but then she probably wouldn't even have parrot-sat that second time. Like other people's children, part of the delight of parrots is if you know someone else has to take them home and deal with them.)

Pardoe has several annoying habits--unsocial rituals--that I'd love to put a stop to. Squawking when I'm trying to talk on the phone--or even when he hears the phone beep as I press "talk" or try to enter numbers--is a big one on this list. I know enough to know that he didn't just decide to be a little horse's ass about this--somehow, I've unwittingly encouraged him. As anyone who remembers the BBC reality-TV precursor and 1980s cult classic "Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way" knows, fifty percent of the task of training Pardoe would involve training me (La Woodhouse would probably say it's closer to eighty or ninety percent).

A friend claims, "you never break a habit; you just substitute a new one for an old one." Probably some truth to that, including in the present case. In other words, teaching--convincing?--Pardoe to do nothing when I answer the phone has a nice zen-like sound to it, but isn't really workable. He's probably always going to react when the phone rings. The trick is to get him to react in a way that doesn't annoy me--to hop up on his perch, or do the White Man's Overbite Dance (long story; don't ask), or whatever.

Initial do-it-yourself attempts to improve his behavior haven't really worked. Here, for example, is the cover of one bird-training book I got.

Notice that much of the right edge of the cover has been chewed away.

So I bought the clicker training kit and set to work. Clicker training pairs the sound of the click with the giving of a treat for correct (or approximately correct) behavior. This works much less efficiently with Pardoe than it would with a dog, because Pardoe doesn't "wolf" his food. Give him the tiniest bit of a treat and he'll still take forever to chew it and nibble it a little at a time until, by the time he's swallowed it, we've both forgotten what we were trying to accomplish a few minutes earlier.

And if the point is to improve his behavior when I'm on the phone, that brings up added problems. I can't simply hold a dead phone up to my ear and expect him to fall for it, even if I start speaking. If he doesn't hear the phone ring or the touchtone buttons beep, he's not fooled for a minute. Which means that, to get him to a teachable moment, I would have to call myself from my cell phone or convince a friend to call me. My friends, if you can imagine this, aren't as interested in outwitting the bird as I am, so it's hard to motivate them to play Stump the Parrot.

The whole thing makes teaching rock-climbers sound easier.

Of course, with rock-climbers and dogs, there's always that bottom-line mammalian fellow-feeling that you just don't get with a raptor-descended parrot. Remember the moment in "Jurassic Park," when the two raptors have cornered the children in the kitchen? "We're safe in here," think the kids, "because they won't know how to work a door latch." And outside the door, we see the raptors studying the handle . . . studying . . . studying . . . . Occasionally I'll catch Pardoe, in an unguarded moment, watching me like that. Studying. Measuring. For lord knows what.