Thread: Where to start

Your wading into dangerous territory here of having to, as a new to the task person, sort through the advice offered and work out wht is sound and what is not. A lot of popular "common sense" training advice is ill informed and can set you back a long way. Rather than looking at the specifics of training I prefer to have a few principls in mind when trying to achieve something with my dogs, the first are questions for myself
What do I think I'm teaching and what is the dog actually learning (sometimes the two are worlds apart)
Am I viewing this lesson from my perspective or the dogs
If there was correction, was it interpretted as intended or was it just a confusing growling which added confusion.

after that I adopt the principles of
every command has a release command
Commands are given once and compliance is expected instantly (provided the command is understood) - sometimes people think praise for an almost correct completion of a task is good but that just tells the dog how it did it was good and leads to confusion of what is expected.

Thats about all I'll say on the matter, I think you would be best finding someone with good success in dog training (there are a few off here) not just somebody who caries a stick to beat their dog or a pocket full of schmackos, somebody that knows dog training. Spend time with them and do it right from the start, once a dog knows a certain behaviour it is hard to teach it otherwise and its easy to create a lot of extra work for yourself.