Article: Communication Skills

For a young dog, body language is everything! Your positioning in relationship to the stock and dog will either help or hinder the dog understanding what you want. Make sure you are clear and consistent with where you place yourself when you are asking for different behaviors. If your dog isn’t reacting the way you would like, reevaluate where you are, chances are your body language is the issue.
Start out in an area and using stock that your dog can’t beat you around. If he learns he can avoid you or get to the stock to do things the way he wants you aren’t going to accomplish much.
Get the basics ironed out using body language, corrections, and praise, before you start trying to put words to the behaviors you want. No sense telling a dog “come by” if he’s slashing his way around, you are just going to wind up with a dog who thinks “come by” means slash or bite or some other undesirable behavior. Get the shape of the flanks right first, add the words in later.
Corrections and commands! There is no point telling a dog anything or fussing at a dog if you are not in a position to correct the behavior. If you can’t show the dog what you want then it’s not going to mean anything useful to him or is going to desensitize him to words you’d rather he acquire a meaning for.
Releasing pressure can be equally, if not more important, than putting pressure on. If you are constantly putting pressure on it can come off as nagging and the dog is not getting a clear picture of when he is right and wrong. Conversely, releasing before the dog responds or when the dog responds incorrectly, you can wind up rewarding a behavior you didn’t intend!
If you start out with a loud voice, you have nowhere to go. Dogs can hear quite well: if they aren’t responding most often it’s either because they don’t actually understand what you mean, or they don’t think you’ll enforce it, or they’re just excited and not paying attention. Start low and easy going, you can always go louder or harsher from there.
Speed and inflection in voice, whistle and body language can speed up or slow down a dog. If your commands are fast and choppy, your dog is likely to be as well.
Don’t make your commands too similar: teaching a dog “come by” for a flank and “come” for a recall can be confusing. Also be careful of using commands that are similar to the dog’s name. When teaching whistles, make sure the first half of each whistle is distinctly different from your other whistles, otherwise you invite confusion for the same reason.
If you ever want to check where you are in your training, just stand still with your hands in your pockets, and give the dog a command. What the dog does is what he thinks those words mean. Or maybe he just guesses a behavior and the words don’t mean anything to him!