How dogs actually learn. Rachel, one of our trainers at Royvon Esher, explores how dogs learn and how we put that understanding to work in training. Learning is a survival trait every species has developed, animals that learn fastest tend to thrive, and it's important not to expect dogs to learn the way humans do, since our episodic style of learning is quite different from theirs. Human learning is often broken into styles, visual, auditory, verbal, physical, logical, social and solitary, with each of us leaning toward one or two. Dogs, like humans, have their own preferred ways of learning too. Classical conditioning links an event, place, person or object with a consequence that occurs alongside it. Operant conditioning is the framework behind most dog training today. Clicker training begins as classical conditioning, the click is paired with a reward, then becomes operant conditioning as the dog starts offering behaviours to earn that reward. Shaping builds a behaviour the dog can't yet perform by rewarding successive approximations toward the goal.