Course Details
Discover the power of ACE Free Work and all that it can do for you and your dog!
Created by Sarah Fisher at Animal Centred Education (ACE), Free Work uses individualized enrichment stations that support movement, regulation, and confidence and helps you learn what your dog’s posture, movement patterns, and choices are telling you.
This class is for teams who want a new way of addressing behavior—especially if your dog:
- struggles to settle or downshift from high arousal
- feels unsure in new environments or “gets stuck”
- needs more confidence and comfort in their movement
- loses focus and shows stress in the ring
- Lacks food drive and motivation to work
Kim Palermo, Certified ACE Practitioner, will take her unique approach of teaching Free Work by building calm snuffling and licking, addressing appropriate height and setups, and combining stations to help you create full Free Work sessions with your dog’s individual preferences and needs in mind. You will learn how to observe your dog’s behavior, movement, and posture in order to determine the very best framework for their structure, emphasizing strength, tone, and confidence in movement. Sessions will put your dog into a state of mindfulness, relaxation, and calm.
From there, you’ll learn how Free Work can make improvements on reactivity, loose leash walking, strength building, multi-dog household issues, general enrichment, advancing other training skills, and so much more.
Students often see dogs become more grounded, more flexible, and quicker to recover from stress, and handlers feel relief and confidence because they finally have a repeatable framework they can use every day.
Teaching Approach:
Kim releases lectures every few days based on the classroom progress. Most lectures will include tutorial videos and video demonstrations, as well as written instructions. Frequently Gold feedback will be a voiceover of your submitted videos. Text feedback will be included as well.
This class will have a few zoom calls that are open to all students (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). Calls usually include lecture and/or demonstration, plus open Q&A to all students. There will also be a facebook group with a TA for this class.
Instructor: Kim PalermoKim Palermo CPDT-KA (she/her) is a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor and ACE (Animal Centred Education) Practitioner. She specializes in teaching Control Unleashed and ACE Free Work with private clients, teaches a high volume of in-person CU classes, and incorporates CU into all of her membership-style group pet dog classes for her dog training business, BlueDog, located north of Boston...(Click here for full instructor bio)
