When I think about all the obedience exercises, I do not categorize them into novice, open, and utility. Instead, I think of all of obedience as five subjects. Your dog must learn stationary skills, recall skills, healing skills, jumping skills, and retrieving skills. Just as you might consider the core subjects for your child at school to be language arts, math, social studies, science.
You and your dog will be working on five core subjects. I want you to be doing something in each of those subjects all the time. This chart is designed to show you the order that I believe you should teach your dog the exercises. So for example, look at the jumping skills that I want you to teach. The first jumping skill I want you to teach is directed jumping.
The reason is that I want your dog to know how to jump, to be a comfortable jumper, and to enjoy jumping. In the meantime... look below that. The first retrieving skill I want you to teach is the retrieve on the flat. I want him to become a reliable retriever.
Now look how far over on the right the retrieve over the high jump is. If you have a dog that understands how to do directed jumping and has a reliable retrieve on the flat, doing a retrieve over the high jump is easy. Most dogs simply consider the jump to be a mild distraction on the way to the dumbbell.
However, if your dog is not experienced at jumping, and is only moderately committed to retrieving, then retrieving over the high jump can become quite difficult. When the dog goes around the jump, it's hard to determine if he's not jumping because he's uncomfortable jumping or because he doesn't understand that he should take the jump on the way to the retrieve. Likewise, if he runs up to the jump and stops, you will struggle to determine if he's refusing to jump or refusing to retrieve. Drawing a vertical line through all the boxes gives you a loose interpretation of what skills... you can be working on concurrently.
For example, when you're working on the recall, you can also be teaching directed jumping and the retrieve on the flat. Finally, the length of boxes indicates the length of time it may take to teach a particular exercise. For example, look at the healing row.
Healing is a skill you're going to work on throughout your dog's career. Compare that to the moving stand. This is an exercise that taught late with all the other prerequisite skills mastered.
takes very little time to accomplish. So start thinking about what your dog knows in each skill set. And as you finish this module, be ready to decide where on the road you and your dog belong.