Lesson Plan Workshop: Put It All Together

Before putting your lesson plan together there are a couple of concepts you need to consider. First is the concept of teaching only one element at a time. You can teach more than one element in a session, but you need to only focus on one element at a time during your session. Parelli talks about "isolate, separate, recombine". I like to say, "isolate, alternate, and recombine. So in practice, you teach each element separately and then when you want to start putting them back together, you alternate between requesting two elements. Usually the horse will start to combine these two elements together on their own, but sometimes you will have to actually ask for the two elements at the same time for the horse to understand that you want them to occur at the same time.

The other concept is to teach each element in several different and unique ways, so the horse learns the concept. So if the element that you want to teach is patience and your goal is to be able to have your horse stand patiently while you saddle up, you would teach patience and build it in some other areas first. Parelli refers to this as lateral thinking. Direct line thinking would be trying to build patience only in the spot that you are trying to fix. Direct line thinking isn't very effective with horses.

To complete your lesson plan, if you are working on teaching your horse something new, now you need to take all of the information you have gathered and put it together into a cohesive plan. To do this you will take each element and define a time-line and how many sessions you can do per week. Then you will break your plan down to fit into that time-frame. For example you might decide that you want to accomplish your goal in one month and you plan on working with your horse three times per week. That means that you have 12 sessions to implement your plan. This will allow you to see if it is feasible to achieve your goal in that time frame. If so, go ahead and define your plan. If not, revise your plan to fit the time available or increase the number of sessions per week.

If you are working on something that is a problem you are trying to solve, then there will be a little more detective work before completing your plan. This detective work will involve figuring out what exactly is causing the reaction you are trying to eliminate. This involves looking at the situation that you are trying to change from the horse's point of view. Try to think of all of the variables involved and figure out a way to test those variables separately in order to determine the one(s) causing the problem. Once you figure that out, then come up with some strategies to change the horse's perception of that variable. Maybe you need to cause the horse to associate that variable with something pleasant, maybe that variable needs to be associated with calmness, maybe the horse needs to be desensitized to that little piece. When working with these little variables, applying the one-element-at-a-time rule will give you better and clearer results.

As you go about implementing your lesson plan, you will need to revise and adjust as you go according to your horse's responses, the environment, and any other things that affect your progress. But having a lesson plan will help keep you on track towards achieving your goals and also help you to be aware when you are straying from your goals.

Next week I will write a summary and tie up any loose ends. So if you have any questions, be sure to ask me so I can include them in comments or in the summary. If you are having a hard time leaving a question, just email it to me and I will add it in.