Training Journals are considered a vital piece of equipment for serious clicker trainers and any organisation that trains animals for a living will generally have complex templates to ensure that trainers know where any particular animal is at in its training. 

For the casual owner\trainer it still can be very useful to keep some sort of training journal with notes about  the behaviours you are working on, the prompts and cues you are using, any issues and successes.  This can just be quick notes that might include items like your ride notes or impressions of how interested\worried the horse seemed during that session.  These can be very helpful to look back on and see progress, to diagnose problems and even to help train new horses later on if you see where you had problems or successes in the past.

It doesn't even have to be a diary that you keep religiously with each session.  I myself am a bit sporadic with my training journal entries.  I use it when I start a new behaviour, for a new horse, when I start to find problems or if I have really exciting sessions.  I also tend to use it to keep 'stock' of where I am - every so often writing up a total summary of all the current behaviours - cues and where we are at as far as performance or reliability of the behaviour.  However it is still highly useful as I found at a recent seminar.  I was asked to describe how I trained a particular behaviour and my mind was a complete blank - I could think of several ways in which it could be done but not how I had trained it the first time around.  A quick look through my journal quickly revealed that I had not used any of the methods I had thought of and reminded me how valuable keeping notes can be.

Keeping a journal, no matter how brief, can also help you to sort out what sort of training style you have and whether that style is getting you the best results or not. Do you plan your training sessions and then go out and complete that behaviour before moving on to the next? Or are you more creative\reactive? Starting out with a plan and then getting sidetracked when the horse offers something new?  Neither is necessarily right or wrong but each has advantages and disadvantages. 

If you need to train a particular behaviour by a particular date (or even as fast as possible) then having a plan with all the steps along the way and sticking to it will get you there as quickly as possible.  On the other hand you may miss some wonderful creative behaviours from your horse that you won't see again if you don't take the opportunity to reward them then and there.  Keeping and reviewing a training journal will help you to recognise your natural training style and change it if you need to for a particular purpose.



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