Teaching to Train

Project

My project was to teaching my brother and dad how to train horses. I chose to do this project not only because I love training horses, but also because I like to teach and help others train horses as well. Riding horses has always been a passion of mine, though it wasn’t until I started to learn the art of training horses that I truly became ‘horse crazy’. Every person who has ever rode a horse knows something I do not know. I do not know every horse or every reaction a horse can have. As such, a trainer never truly knows everything there is to know about training. I learn from others just as they learn from me. Through this project I became a better horse trainer. I taught my brother and dad how to ‘finish’ a horse, which encouraged all of us to become better horsemen and women.

 

Goals and Objectives

For my Project I taught my brother and dad what I know about finishing a horse. Finishing is the fine tooth comb of training horses. My goal was for my brother and dad to know the basics of finishing a horses by the end of our time spent training this horse.

The learning outcomes I had hoped to achieve through this project was: to successfully teach my dad and brother what I know about training and finishing horses and to learn from them in order to become a better horse trainer myself. Because we only worked with one horse, I was not able to teach them everything I know. This is due to the fact each horse is different and created different learning opportunities. What I did hope to achieve was teaching my dad and brother the basics of training, such as spins, stops, rollbacks, circles, moving off leg pressure, and arcs. By the end of this process I wanted the horse to be ready to start training for barrels and/or roping. I also wanted my dad and brother to know the basics of how to get a horse trained to that point.

 

Deliverable

I kept a journal of significant events in our training. I also included video examples of how I teach a horse to collect in my training. One video I included is from a web site I like to look at on occasion. This video is of the tire drill. I also, more often times than not, ended up riding by myself rather than with my dad and brother there watching and learning. As a result there was no one around to video my lessons. My dad and brother would come only about once a week to see what I had taught the colt and how I did it. They didn’t see as much of the process as I had desired.