Canine officer visits Psychology Club

On Wednesday, Feb. 25, the Psychology Club had a meeting that had the hounds howling. During this meeting, the Psych Club had a special guest, canine officer Scott Scarborough and his drug dog Officer Zar of St. Louis County Police Department – SWAT division.
Zar is fully trained to locate illegal narcotics such as marijuana. Psych Club saw a demonstration of this ability when Officer Scarborough hid an amount of marijuana in the classroom. Zar sniffed and barked to indicate that he had found it.
“It was interesting to see how in control of the dog the guy was. He didn’t even have to really say anything. [He just used] his body language and they really worked together. He understood the signals the dog would give him, and the dog understood him. It was going both ways,” said senior Lindsey Potts.
Police use operant conditioning to train police dogs like Officer Zar to perform specific tasks. Operant conditioning teaches the dog to associate certain behaviors with rewards or punishments and trains them to behave a specific way.
“Operant conditioning is a piece of information we study and that’s how they train drug dogs…using the theoretical base of operant conditioning. It gives a really good concrete example of how that’s used in real life,” said Barger.
Barger has been using Psych club to further her teachings from the classroom and connect them to the real world.
“The reason we developed Psych Club is that the first year I taught AP Psych, we put together a field day for careers you can use psychology in and we had speakers come in. It was this big thing. It was awesome, but it was just too much to do every school year, and it took up lab time. So the next year, I thought how could we continue this without doing as much,” said Barger.
Barger also uses the club to benefit her students who perhaps don’t have time to make connections of her lessons outside of school.
“A lot of my seniors are busy, so it gives an opportunity to further their learning here at school, and take the lessons we are learning in class and apply it to real life or movies like that,” said Barger.