Hi Kay!
I meant to reply to your posting sooner but I was on a trip and came back yesterday.
I am glad that Todd responded to you and I agree with him about training your dogs separately. In addition to what he wrote, I would suggest you to take each dog to a basic training class, if it is available in your area. Going out with one dog at a time is a great time for you to focus the dog and it will help establish YOU and THE DOG's relationship and bonding. When you have 2 dogs from the same litter, the dogs are closer to each other than with you. This is a problem. If you want your dogs to respond to you, you will have to make yourself as the leader.
Also, as Todd said, if I were you I would take the dogs to walk separately. It will be a great opportunity to train each to walk nicely and have fun with just YOU! You can also go to an errand with one dog at a time.
I also have 2 border collie mixes that we adopted separately. Holly 3 years ago and Noah 1 year ago. By the time, Noah came to our house, Holly already had passed Canine Good Citizen test. I didn't have to train Noah any basic commands because he learned them by just looking at Holly. Noah just finished the advance training class and I am taking agility 2 classes with Holly. It is a lot of fun!
As Todd said Border collies are very smart but it will be too much to train them if they are not getting both physical and mental challenges every day.
The first thing I would like you to teach your dogs is to pay attention to YOU. You can teach this quite easily, as long as you train one dog at a time.
Have your dog sit and show a treat right in front of your nose saying "Watch me". If your dog looks at you, give the treat. Repeat this 10 times. Make sure the morsels are not big because you don't want to overfeed them. Border collies should be fit.
Border collies are working dogs. They like to work hard and to be acknowledged so with a right kind of training they will learn pretty fast. Please be sure to be consistent and give the training every single day, even for a 5 minutes training.
Hope you will enjoy training your dogs. I think it will be very rewarding
