The Marker
The single most consistent piece of advice I give in dog training is this: reward what you want. We have a tendency to pay attention to behaviors we don't like (No, Fido! Stop barking! No, Fido! Stop jumping!), and when the dog is behaving the way we want, we have a tendency to ignore it. It's a common oversight. The dog gets feedback that undesired behavior gets attention and calm behavior is pointless and boring. That's exactly the wrong message!
Once you’ve gotten that mindset down, there’s a tool you can add to increase your clarity: when you're rewarding what you want, make sure you mark it first.
Marking the desired behavior helps your dog connect his action to the reward more easily. It's a way of helping your dog figure things out.
A marker is a unique sound that you make at exactly the moment the dog has done something right, and you follow it up with a reward (e.g., a treat, a toy, a game, etc.). That sound could be a clicker, which is the heart of clicker training, or it can be a unique sound you make verbally, like a happy "yes!"
Why do I need a marker? If I'm teaching my dog to retrieve the ball directly to my hand, and he does it, and then I give him a treat and another throw, it's not easy for him to connect the reward to the key action (dropping the ball in my hand). There are a million other things going on in his world, so what made the reward happen? Was it running back to me? Holding the ball? Doing a little dance with his paws when he got back?
By marking the moment of success with a unique sound, you make it a lot easier for the dog to figure out that letting the ball go into your hand is what made the reward happen. It helps bridge the gap between the moment he’s right and the moment you manage to deliver a reward. So a dog who has been marked at the moment of success and the rewarded five times in a row is more likely to "get it" than a dog who is just rewarded those five times with no marker first.
So, clicker or verbal marker? When you're learning to mark your dog's behavior before rewarding, the clicker has the advantage of being a unique, precise sound. We babble at dogs all the time, so the "yes!" isn't quite as clear as the clicker. However, the "yes!" has the advantage of freeing up your hands. I'll use one or the other, depending on the situation. I like the clicker for shaping truly precise or complex behaviors, like putting the back two paws on an agility obstacle and the front two paws on the floor. And I like the verbal marker for general training when we're out and about and I don't have a free hand.
Also, remember that the marker is different than praise. We use a happy “yes!” because it’s easy to remember and to do the same way every time, but remember that it’s a signal that the reward is coming. After you use your marker word, make sure you also praise the behaviors you want.
So as you're looking to develop truly effective communication with your dog, consider adding a marker to the mix. Decide the criteria of what you're trying to teach your dog, mark the exact moment he meets those criteria, and follow up with great rewards. This isn't an intuitive thing for us to do, so it really takes focus and attention on the handler's part to make it a consistent part of giving clear feedback to the dog. But it's absolutely the second biggest improvement most handlers can make to their communication.