What are Badge Classes?

A Better Way to Track Progress

What shows that a dog has been trained? Take a moment to think about it. You’re probably thinking about real world applications; the dog is able to pass distractions on leash, or stay in the elevator. You might consider fancy party tricks or a dog who is participating in dog sports. You probably aren’t thinking about the graduation certificate your dog received at 15 weeks old and immediately chewed up. Or the certificate they got at 6 months old for passing a basic manners class. That’s because we’ve been doing dog training all wrong for years. Sorry about that. We’ve been catering to the human concept of “graduation”, linked to a time-bound course commitment rather than the demonstration of actual, real world, skills. Dogs may move on from material before they are ready and the concept of “graduation” gives the human end of the leash a false sense of completion, often before the essential skills have been mastered.

Subsequent classes aimed at more advanced training become remedial for those who weren’t ready, which makes them boring for those who are. Niche classes like tricks or scentwork don’t revisit those essential skills like Recall or Loose Leash Walking which may not have been perfected before the dog moves up, leaving glaring holes in their education.

In short, the way we’ve been structuring dog training classes needs to change. Instead of one-size-fits all courses, we need classes that support each team’s learning progress. Instead of handing out certificates of attendance, we should be recognising when specific training goals have been met.

One afternoon, late in the summer of 2025, Katrina and I sat down and rebuilt how dog training classes should be run. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

Flexibility

Classes are the most helpful for training when students can book into them with some flexibility over a long period of time. Fixed-schedule intensive courses (say, 6 weeks in a row at the same time each week) tend to have a significant attrition rate because if you miss a class early on, it’s difficult to catch up... but it’s also very difficult for busy pet parents to commit to weekly classes without missing any. Furthermore, some students require more time to process and practice the material than others, leading to discrepancies in skill levels by the final few classes in the course. Start Anytime style classes, where students can begin at the next available class, rather than waiting for the next intake for a course, are not new. Unfortunately while this model is widely adopted for group activities such as running clubs, fitness classes or yoga, you are unlikely to find it in the dog training world.

Start Anytime style classes can support students in a number of ways. Firstly, we can cater to those who can’t commit to a weekly appointment time. We can also allow for cancellations and rescheduling more easily, because classes are running on an on-going basis rather than in blocks. This means students can come when they most need support, and work at a pace that fits their personal schedule. Providing this level of flexibility isn’t easy, though. Our classes must allow for students of different skills levels to attend the same class; for one student, it might be their first ever dog training experience, whereas for another student may have worked with us for months already. These classes can’t be run on auto-pilot, we have to plan each one based on the dogs in attendance! Katrina and I have a top secret system that allows us to do this more easily, but it's still more effort for us than if we were to teach fixed-schedule classes with unchanging content. It might be harder to run, but we don't do things in half-measures and we like results, so here we are.

Support

Support in-between classes matters, too. We’ve created several avenues to access at-home support; our training manuals provide a written summary of in-class exercises (at various difficulty levels), our discord community keeps us connected, and our “office hours” allows clients to ask their trainers quick questions via group video call. All together, this better enables students to practice in-between classes and get those real, lasting results we all want.

Flexibility and on-going support like this means one major change right away: there’s no graduation class! But don’t be sad about missing out on your piece of paper, because with our Badge system, we’ve created something better.

Badges and Rewards

Achieving your training goals in class should be a big moment, and we wanted to reinforce our students for every skill they can demonstrate with their dog. We’ve designed our advanced training classes, or “Badge Classes”, around this idea. Katrina and I wrote a long list of cool skills we like to train dogs to do and organised them into eight different categories. Demonstration of each skill, as written in our rubric, earns a “Badge”. Each Badge comes with a built-in reinforcer for the student, $5 off your next class. This way, we can apply the concept of mark-and-reinforce training to our human learners, too… Because we all deserve recognition and reward for accomplishing cool things!At this point we have eight Badge class categories as follows:

Trail

These badges help your dog navigate off leash hiking and trails. You’ll find skills like recall, passing (joggers or off leash dogs), and resistance to distractions (like bicycles and squirrels) in these classes.

Loose Leash Walking

These badges are about walking nicely on a loose leash. Here you’ll learn about leash handling, teaching your dog to walk on the left or right side of the handler, pulling prevention, stopping at cross walks and passing dogs who are also on leash.

Manners

These badges focus on polite interactions with people, navigating urban spaces and being polite around the home. We generally use the “Canine Good Neighbour” testing criteria to inform the content of these classes.

Obedience

These badges look at obedience behaviours from dog sports, including Rally-Obedience exercises and the “group stay” from CKC Obedience. Here you’ll work on snazzy response times to your verbal cues and flashier sits, downs, stands, fronts and stays.

Heelwork

These badges hone the art of heelwork, which is much more complicated than many people realise. We will cover pivoting so that dogs can find heel position from any angle and maintain position in motion around tight corners. We’ll also look at your dogs ability to carry themselves in the correct gait and with the correct posture by practicing strengthening exercises.

Obstacles

For those looking to try Agility, our Obstacles badges offer the pre-requisite training steps including learning to wrap a cone, go through a tunnel or send over a jump. These classes help our dogs with their confidence and are a fun and safe way for active dogs to hone their parkour skills.

Scentwork

Scentwork badges are earned by teaching your dog to search for, find, and alert on specific odors. Best for those looking to get into competition scentwork, find truffles in the forest, or utilise scentwork as an enrichment activity for busy pups. We generally use truffle odor or non-competition odor in these classes, so you can focus on the key concepts of scentwork before training for a real task or competition.

Tricks

Tricks classes teach intermediate, advanced and expert level tricks, with badges earned per each trick mastered at intermediate level or above. We use the Do More with Your Dog “Tricktionary” which contains hundreds of tricks, and Sarah is a CTDI so trick titles can be judged directly in these classes.

See you in Class

Running highly tailored classes allows us to best support our students and their dogs. Content can always be revisited and practiced, and learning can happen at each team’s preferred pace. Katrina and I firmly believe that through our system of Start Anytime classes, especially with Badge classes, we can create an environment where learning is a treat, not a checklist. What’s more, by recognising and rewarding specific training goals, we believe we are bringing Positive Reinforcement teaching to the human end of the leash!

Want to give it a try? We’d love to meet you and your dog in our classroom and in our community! 

For more information on badge classes please visit Advanced Badge Classes