Scoutmaster Podcast 166

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But I was sitting on a log in Neal California and a group of guys went by And there was like six or seven of them And the last guy went by and on his backpack. It was an external frame backpack. It was the most weirdest looking sleeping bag I've ever seen And I just glanced at it. He's going by but he's going down the trail.

I said that's strange, looking So fine. I couldn't resist. I got up and I ran down the trail and got right up behind him. I've seen a sleeping bag look like this. It wasn't a sleeping bag, It was a clear bag of Cheetos. It was two feet wide and a foot and a half around, strapped where a sleeping bag goes, And it was Cheetos.

Did he give you any? No, I just turned around, shook my head and walked back. I asked a couple of scouts. I said that we're sitting there with us on the log.

I said: did you see that kid? They go, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got a bunch of Cheetos. I said you could see that. They saw it immediately, the scouts, And they were jealous.

So what's the story there? I mean, he just likes Cheetos a lot, or Wasn't in my troop? Our troop was sitting on a log. They walked by and it went off into the woods and never saw him again. But he had, he had like three pounds of Cheetos. That's a mystery, That's a weird one.

Hey, this is podcast number 166.. Hey, Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast.

This is Clarke Green and we have one entry in the mail bag this week. Let's have a listen. Hi Clark, This is Cameron Smith.

I am the Scoutmaster of maybe four months now of troop 51 here in Minnesota, California. I just wanted to call to let you know two things, both a review and a little story.

So I'm in cubs, right, And I know my son's going to be going to scouts because he's legalized too And I'm like, okay, well, they're going to want a leader, They're going to need help. You know, I know how this goes. I'm going to get some training.

So I did all the training. I go to leader specific training and I did all the online training and I even went to Wood Badge. Wood Badge was awesome. Then I show up to the troop, fully fled, ready to go.

I want to be an assistant Scoutmaster with you guys And they look at me and go: well, actually we have a Scoutmaster who's kind of leading the position. Now What do you think about being the Scoutmaster?

So that's the end of the funny story. I became the Scoutmaster And next to Wood Badge, I have to say this podcast, this program that you put on, is probably the most valuable asset. I have all the resources that you introduce on your podcast, be it books, be it other podcasts, and all the subjects you talk about are fantastic. I wanted to also say that the path that you speak to and relay information you get from other Scoutmasters- like Larry, that guy, awesome guy, That's my story, That's my review. Don't stop. And I just want to say thank you one more time.

Thank you so much, Cameron, Thanks for being in touch, Congratulations on stepping up and jumping into the volcano of Scoutmaster ship. I hope I can continue to be a good resource for you.

And hey, we're going to hear Larry, and we're going to hear Tom a little bit later on because we have the Scoutmaster panel discussion. I want to remind you that our next scout circle is coming up on April 14th- That's a Sunday night. It will be between 9 and 10 pm Eastern Daylight Time and you'll be able to find us at scoutsircleorg, and our friend, Kevin Callen, author and canoe guide, will be with us to discuss canoeing and canoe trips On the blog. This past week we've been talking about high adventure canoeing, kind of in preparation for talking to Kevin.

Scout Circle is a live presentation followed by a question and answer session, so it's all about audience participation. Put that on your calendar, won't you? April 14th- that's a Sunday, between 9 and 10 pm Eastern Standard Time- go to scoutsircleorg to see the presentation and participate. As I mentioned earlier in this podcast, it's the Scoutmaster panel discussion for April 2013..

Those of you who are long-time listeners to the Scoutmaster podcast will note the absence of our friend, Walter Underwood, who was on a family vacation this week So he wasn't able to participate with us, but we look forward to him returning next month. Have a good time out there, Walter.

So let's get started, shall we? It's time for another Scoutmaster panel discussion.

It's time once again for another Scoutmaster panel discussion, And there's three of us tonight. We've got Larry Geiger down in Vera, Florida.

How are you doing, Larry? Good evening Clark, doing good. And I've got Tom Gillard down in Tolahoma, Tennessee.

Hey, Tom, Hi Clark, how are you? I'm doing good. It's springtime and the Weebelows are joining troops everywhere and we're getting ready to go camping and having a good time. You had a nice backpacking trip recently, Tom.

We did. We took a four-day trip while the scouts were on spring break, at 32 miles. In my four days It was really thunderstorms and lightning and thunder and cold and, Yeah, it was really good.

What could be better? I'm sure it's been cold down there in Florida too, Larry.

Yeah, last week it was chilly, Chilly, being, You know, in the 50s at night, All right. So listen, guys. We've been talking for a little while and the subject of evaluating scoutmasters and evaluating troops and evaluating our program came up. What I'd like us to think about for this discussion is what evaluation tools are available to us, who should be evaluating what or who, and why. This would be a useful thing for us to do. The job that the three of us know best is being a scoutmaster.

Let's talk about that for a minute. How does one evaluate a scoutmaster? Self-evaluation is pretty tough. Sometimes You have to do like we're doing and talk to other scoutmasters or other people and see if you're on the right track and listen to different things. But sometimes you can be pretty rough on yourself.

Yeah, you know, I think you're right. I think that can cut both ways. Figuring out what you're trying to do and whether you're doing it right can be a good way to start.

Larry, where does the kind of objectivity come in? Who do you talk to? You're a scoutmaster.

Who do you talk to? How do you figure out if you're really making the program click or if you're missing out? I look at it kind of programmatically.

Are we doing the program? I look at interaction with other leaders.

Some guys get together- you know scoutmasters in a district or a council and they're in other. You know wood badge and other things and they hang around together and I haven't had that as much for whatever reason.

So I look at the program programmatically: Are we doing what I think scouting is supposed to do? And of course I come back to our ideals and our values, but also to that lead, train and inspire younger scouts.

Are we teaching the older scouts those leadership abilities? Are we using the methods to do that and kind of evaluate each method and each part of the program? And I tend to do a lot of introspection about that, you know. Driving back and forth to campouts, I'm thinking about how do we do in the last camp out and I review the whole camp out.

You know, how did the scouts do, How did the adults do in letting them do their own program? So I guess I do, or have done, quite a bit of that kind of stuff. I would suggest that there are several tools out there that can help us out.

What used to be the quality unit award is now the journey to excellence. I think the quality unit is a good thing to help districts and council maintain overall quality.

But if you're a Scoutmaster that wants to really affect scouts, I think the journey to excellence is better. But I don't think those tools are going to take you quite as far as you want to go. They're an objective measurement that you can use. It's not the be all and end all- The number of times you go camping and the amount of advancement you have and the number of courts of honor and parents meetings and things like that are definitely indicators of a successful program. If you have weak scores and you start there, then that's a good thing. It gives you a base number for how you're doing and where you need to improve or where you're strongest.

And one of the familiar tools that we use, train both adult and youth leaders in, is the kind of stop, start, continue technique, where you evaluate what you're doing and you figure out what you need to stop doing and what you need to start doing and what you ought to continue doing. And that's kind of an ongoing process.

It's not necessarily something you sit down and do intentionally all the time, but it is one of those things, like you said, Larry, when you're driving back and forth, when you're thinking about the troop, when you're thinking about the way that you're doing the work, I think that's also a good tool to use. It's a good thing to have in the toolbox. I've been Scoutmaster for mostly I've been the one that everybody looks to.

Now I know that in some troops occasionally there's some older guys and people turn and look at them and say: what do you think about that? You know they have this continuum.

But the last two, I've been the guy everybody turns around and goes, well, what's that all about? How should we do that?

You know, and sometimes I cross my eyes and go, oh no, And then you just work through it. But I've been the one who was a scout that had read the material that went to training and some other stuff in my background.

So I got that, you know. And Clark, you're now one of those guys, and so's Tom.

You know everybody turns and looks at you because you're the scout guy. You know. You've got the age. You've just been around a while, Right. One of the other tools that figures into this is leveraging the experience of others. Yes, You can talk with other scout leaders.

Hopefully, what we're doing as a part of having this discussion and the broader idea of the podcast and the blog and everything, is trying to share those experiences. I don't want to mention that without saying that it's not that we're smarter than everybody else. We've just been around longer, Right.

We've tried things out that we thought might be a good idea, that didn't turn out to be such a good idea, and we've found different ways of doing things that do work and sometimes been surprised to go back and look in the literature and say, well, it was there all the time We should have. Just, we should have believed it the first time we read it. Larry mentioned that he doesn't have a lot of interaction with the other troops in the district or the council, but I know you've got a very large online presence, which you know. That's another resource, like you just said, Clark, with this blog or with any of the other the other stuff out there.

That's always good information and that's true, Tom, but are you really reviewing how you're doing in the eight methods in the aims in the program? How are your scouts doing? It can come around to that. I mean you can. You can pull different ideas from people and put them up against those standards and see how it, see where it falls right. Scouting is one of those places in the world that is just replete with advice and advisors and how to do things Right.

If you're a Scoutmaster or you're a committee chair or an assistant Scoutmaster or something like that, how do you know you got it right? How do you know that things are working? And we've said that.

Well, there are some objective metrics that are indicators. They're not the gold standard that you're absolutely doing things right, because you can drive indicators rather than doing program, and there's a difference.

Who do you go to? How do you find out?

How do you get any kind of objective evaluation of what you're up to? Well, I have found that in the past- generally- not always, but generally- my commissioner hasn't, hasn't been and wouldn't be a real good resource for that. Not picking on commissioners, but some of the commissioners I've had coming into a meeting have been about as clueless as a brand new Webelos parent coming in as to what's going on. If you don't have an experienced Scoutmaster, who's a commissioner, I'm not sure.

Well, you had mentioned it earlier but it's- it's one of those when the older scouts age out, get eagle or just age out, and then they come back for a visit later on in their life and you're still there and they come back to see what's going on and they tell you that this was a real meaning to me at some point, that they didn't get it when they were a kid, but then they later in life they saw what you were doing and it took them a while, but now you can be validated a little bit that, yeah, you were doing, doing a good job. I mean, this is one of the advantages of hanging around for a long, long time- is that I've talked with guys who are now well into adulthood and I've said: tell me a little bit about what you remember as your time in the troop and what- what you thought was good and what you thought was bad, and you know, and just have that kind of general conversation and they've pointed out some things that I've changed and sometimes it's myself personally and just my attitude or the way that I look at things. It's some good feedback one way or the other. It's not as good as a Monday night or weekly feedback would be. It took years to get there, Decades. Another good evaluation tool are your ears, Listening to the scouts.

We wouldn't give an 11 year old scout a piece of paper and say: tell me what you would change about scouting, because they have relatively not a lot of an idea. But I think if we listen to them as they're out and around and we listen to our older scouts talk, sometimes that can be a pretty good indication of things that we maybe need to think about a little bit. One evaluation that can be fairly immediate is moms.

I think a cool thing is to have parents in the troop talk to the new parents. Another way, another tool to evaluate is listening to parents. Sometimes that can be very difficult. Sometimes it can be very encouraging, but you'll get a more objective outsider view of how things are going and how things are being perceived. I do listen to that because it can be eye opening sometimes and you always learn something. You never turn down a chance to change something.

If the Scoutmasters doing his job correctly and the older boys are trained and are doing their job, then the younger scouts- there should be some evidence that they see and feel that they're not being picked on but they and their buddies are being helped and encouraged. The Scoutmaster and the adults are saying, oh, it's just your program and just like, go, do whatever you want to do.

And you know you get this thing where a click of older guys is picking on the kids and then they're not really doing their job, training and guiding those older scouts. And you can get a feeling for that from the younger guys. I don't think that it's the younger guys evaluating the program or the Scoutmaster. It's evaluating the results of your leadership and training of the troop leadership. It's tricky to figure out what you're saying, Larry, because what you're trying to do is listen and observe and to hear things without affecting the thing that you're observing.

If you're in the room and everybody's acting the way that they ought to act, you know well that that feels pretty good. But if you're not in the room and they're still acting that way, Something's working, you know, then you're. You should be very pleased, because that means they have gotten the message. That's where being able to sit back and watch them, like you say somehow, is always a lot of fun, because you can see them interacting without you being a real nuisance to them.

What we want is we want honest behavior from their own initiative rather than it being coerced by our presence. So let's go back to where we started. You're a Scoutmaster or a committee chair or another adult leader and you're trying to figure out if you're doing your work effectively.

Let me ask you this, fellas: what are the signs that maybe you're not getting it at all? You think everything is going so smoothly that you don't really need to change anything and you're not worried about anything? One of the watch signs in the past has been what we call a 14 year old troop. That basically means that somewhere around 14 years old guys check out. It's run by adults. The scouts don't feel ownership.

They do the scouting thing and go camping for a couple years- they never take ownership- and somewhere around 14 they check out. There's clues there. If you're watching that, you can tell if you're getting it. If you're not getting it, you don't see that problem coming arising. Right, if you don't get it, you don't get it. Yeah, If you're listening to this conversation and it's making sense to you and you're identifying with the idea of being a little edgy or maybe a little bit worried that you might not be getting it, you're getting it, You're getting it.

Yeah, If you think that nothing should ever be changed and that you're hitting on all eight cylinders all the time, I mean I don't think that, even after 30 years, and I'm concerned about getting too set in my ways, about things being unapproachable so that people can't tell me if they do see something that's wrong. Having that kind of open mind and being teachable is a pretty important aspect of it, And I have two very strong committee people right now and they are into the program, they're on target. But they totally disagree with me on a couple things and that's not bad, but I grip my teeth.

Yeah, I mean, you know there's lots of different ways to get a cup of coffee mate, and as long as you end up with coffee, most of them are just fine. I know how that feels and if they're doing something wrong I'll say something if it's not scouting.

So you have some objective tools that you can use, like the standards. There's some metrics to look at that indicate that you know you're probably getting it. There's leveraging the experience of other people.

Who can you know? You can bounce ideas off of and concepts off of and test them that way and say: you know, is this the way that you do this or does this sound like it's working?

We can listen to the scouts themselves. It's a little tricky to do, but if we can listen to them and we can hear the way that they're treating each other, that's an indication. And we also have the parents. Being able to talk to parents and listen to them and to hear how things are being perceived and maybe what they hear from their boys back home is also a pretty important piece of the puzzle.

So thanks very much for joining us for this edition of the Scoutmaster Panel Discussion. Let's thanks, Larry. You're welcome, Clark. It's been great. Thank you, Tom. You're welcome too, Clark.

Thank you.