Catch Parker in action on Instagram @puppyparkerposey .

Q. Who is/are this/these learners of yours?

Parker is a 4 year old beagle mix!

 

Q. How long did it take for them to press their first button?

Parker is somewhat atypical as it took her about 30 seconds to press her first button. I unpacked the 6-pack we started with, laid them out and pressed all the buttons so she could see them, and as I went into the other room to put the box they came in away in my closet, I heard from the other room “ALL DONE” - she had pressed her first button.

She began experimenting with them immediately and had pressed all six of her first buttons by the end of the first evening we had them.

 Q. What have the buttons revealed about your learners that you wouldn’t have known without the buttons?

Parker is very particular. I would have thought she was a picky eater, but through the buttons I’ve learned that she’s actually just very picky about how her food is given to her. She’ll use her buttons to ask for a snuffle mat if I give her food in a puzzle and that isn’t what she wants. If I dump the same food in the puzzle into the snuffle mat, then she’ll eat it.

She is also very curious about the world around her and wants to be included in the conversations among the humans. She asks people’s names and the names of objects often!

Q. What do you do to ensure the buttons remain an engaging and positive experience for your learner over time?

I try to continue to pay attention to Parker’s needs and what words she is asking for or might most help her to have more agency in her life. I’m also really trying this year to get better about modeling the buttons myself much more!

Q. What’s your funniest button moment?

Oh wow… Parker is pretty hilarious, so it’s hard to pick just one… but I think it is probably when she called out Joelle (@bastianandbrews human) for pooping when she and some other talking dog folks were staying with me. Joelle had just been in the bathroom and Parker walked over to her buttons and said “HUMAN POOP POTTY”. We still talk about it all the time, and she’s done it to Joelle again since then a couple more times. Sorry Joelle!

Q. What’s your most surprising button moment?

This is also a really hard one to choose! There are probably two. One is from early on, and it was the first time Parker demonstrated inventing her own phrase for something. There was an ambulance parked outside our house and she was staring at it out the window. Then she went over and pressed SQUEAKER CAR. It totally blew my mind that she had used the buttons she had to describe the ambulance in her own way!

The second one is when I was hand washing some sweaters and after the timer went off to tell me it was time to rinse them, I got distracted by something on my computer and didn’t get up to get it. She went over and pressed SWEATER WATER. At first I had no clue what she was talking about because I didn’t anticipate her actually paying attention to what I was doing and what I had set the timer for. But once I realized what she was talking about my mind was completely blown.

Q. What challenges have you faced with button teaching?

I’m not sure whether we’ve had a ton of challenges so much as re-framing my approach about some things. There are certain words that I thought would be useful that she hasn’t had much interest in (like hungry, when she can just talk about food, or using UGH instead of POOP to express her frustration).

Sometimes it can be challenging to get her to use words that aren’t her own invented shorthand for things. But there are two things about this: 1) this is a reminder that if i want her to learn these other words I need to model them more and 2) what is the reason I want her to use these words instead of the ones that she is already using that get her point across? If i understand her, does it really matter? Is it about her having better ways to communicate or is it about my own ideas of “correctness”? If its about me, then i realize there’s no real problem with the way she communicates and so I try to let go of some of these things.