Here’s a website that shows an exercise for teaching a front cross (agility move). This may or may not be the best way to practice this, but it has good clear steps and it’s also amenable to repeated practice. You could practice this going up and down your yard or even in the house seeing how many times you could do it in 30 sec or a minute. You could practice this to fluency before trying to put it on an actual agility course. We’re going to use this as a homework example, operating on the assumption that this is a good exercise.

There are 4 clear steps:

1. step forward
2. pivot
3. step back
4. step forward

He suggests starting without the dog and also getting the footwork right before adding in the arms. This is all very consistent with the TAGteach way.

PART 1  – Watch the Video Showing How to Teach This

Please take a look at this site and watch the videos and read the description of the exercise. Then watch the video below of a TAGteach session attempting to teach this exercise.

https://www.agilitynerd.com/blog/agility/starting/LearningFrontCross/

Part 2 – Watch this Video of a TAGteach Session

Watch this TAGteach session. Things go wrong! Apply your trouble shooting skills and describe ways in which this could have been set up and/or executed so that fewer mistakes were made (ideally no mistakes).

The first 2:59 is teaching the footwork

The next part is after teaching the arm movements (giving the treats) – but the tag points for this aren’t shown. You can see by this point there are 2 footwork errors.

The learner has no idea what it’s supposed to look like, so he’s not frustrated by the errors.

The very last part is a mostly correct execution – certainly good enough for a first session. So we got there eventually!

What could you implement to teach this without causing the errors?

Or having caused the errors, how could you fix them?