Horse Boy Method 3: Creating your environment and team, setting goals, creating activities to address behaviors and academics, working with IEPS, and make inclusion possible.

Duration: 5 day (aprox. 6h per day)

Cost:

  • $1650 (costs for workshop may vary; price DOES NOT Evaluation Phase for participants that decide to become Horse Boy Method Practitioners)

Qualification for: 2* Star Horse Boy Method Practitioner

Designed for:

  • Anybody that has taken HBM2 and wants to offer multi family Playdates at their facility

Requirements: 

  • Completed Horse Boy Method 2
  • Age 16 and older; neuro-typical only (for young adults on the spectrum check with your trainer regarding participation)

What will be covered in Horse Boy Method 3?

In this 5 day course you learn the really difficult stuff. How to address and change dysfunctional behaviors. How to teach really effective social skills. How to create neuroplasticity that last. How to really teach academics. How to do what schools find the most difficult task of all – creating real inclusion.

When you reach this level you begin to operate on a level that goes way beyond the therapeutic while at the same time upping your skills for creating well-being. Centers that have gone through Horse Boy Level 3 often find themselves in demand as adjunct campuses for schools, and regional mental health services, and therefore find access to greater funding and staffing. If you want to go further than being just a therapeutic riding center, and becoming part of your local educational and mental health authority, then this is the gateway course.

Workshop Schedule

You can take Horse Boy Method 3 as a 5 day consecutive course or you can break it up into modules which can be done either with a physical instructor or via Zoom and other online tools with direct feedback from instructors and evalutators.

Day 1: The Physical Environment

Learn how to make-over any environment – both indoor and outdoor – for the maximum sensory and therefore and emotional/intellectual optimization. Often the environment that practitioners are trying to work in are so sensory-negative that real learning is impossible. We show you in really practical steps, how to create superb environments with very little budget. No matter the location.

Day 2: The Human Environment

Creating the right Human Environment is perhaps the biggest challenge. It is no secret, that riding centers, schools, and therapy centers often attract very controlling personality types, that work against the goals of well-being and learning. Sometimes without even realizing it. Getting past this both in yourself and learning to manage and optimize the other personalities involved in the environment is a crucial skill if you want to be successful. We teach you very practical skills in both identifying and adapting the various personality types in your environment so that from the client’s point of view the people around them are at their best. Obviously this requires continual management. We introduce you to the skills required for this.

Day 3: Behaviors

Although we are not trying to fix people and indeed we recognize and celebrate the gifts of neuro-difference, it is also true that some behaviors can be so challenging that they threaten the client’s and the families’ well-being. How to address these challenging behaviors and gradually shape them into more functional responses is a real art form. Among other challenging behaviors you will learn to address are: aggression, meltdowns, toilet training, turn taking, waiting, personal hygiene and more.

Day 4: Academics

There is no debate anymore among educational scientists, that movement is essential for learning. However, most educational programs still separate times of movement from times of learning and still try to deliver learning while sitting. i.e. They go run outside, then they go sit and do math. It is now proven that it’s far more effective to teach during the moving sessions, not after them. But how to deliver this?

This is one of our specialties. We work all over the work, not just with therapeutic riding centers, but with schools, universities, and corporate institutions (neuro-typical as well as neuro-different) to provide cutting edge strategies for moving while learning.

We will show you how to teach basic math and science, and then much more complex, pre-college modules as well such as statistics, and advanced geometry and more.

Day 5: Inclusion

This is the holy grail for most learning facilities. There is much talk about the need for inclusion, but in reality most places simply put the neuro-different people in a corner, while teaching the neuro-typicals in another corner and call this inclusion, when it is anything but. We have designed modules that are now considered a gold standard for schools and other learning centers in many countries. Each educational module we show you has specific guidelines for how to include people of different cognitive abilities as well as different learning styles in the same group exercises, so that everybody participates and everybody learns and no-one has to sit in a corner or participate in something they don’t really understand. On Day 5 you will learn through practical exercises as well as analysis how to make inclusion work.

What to bring

  • Please bring plenty of water to drink and something to snack on.
  • Notebook and pen
  • It is also good to come with plenty of examples of where you tried and succeeded or failed to address behaviors, academics or inclusion.