Scoutmaster Podcast 186

And now the old Scoutmasters. Why is a room full of Scoutmasters like a box of matches? They're both full of heads. They can't think, but that will strike anywhere.

This is podcast number 186.. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag. Paul Simonetti wrote in to say this: I'm about to become a Scoutmaster. I've only been a Cubmaster for four years and I'll be replacing a legendary Scoutmaster.

So to help me prepare, I found your podcast and I've listened to the first 25 or so. So if you mentioned this one on air in your next podcast- and I did, Paul, here it is right now. I hope to get to it by the end of next year. Thanks for your perspectives and thanks for keeping the podcast going.

Many of us are verbal learners and we can toss your podcast into an MP3 player and listen to it while we're walking or driving or exercising or something like that. I'm certain one of the reasons that I can relate to you is that you've stated somewhere that you were never a Scout and I wasn't either. Thanks again, Keep making those podcasts. One day I'll be caught up with you and you'll interview me, and it will be magnificent.

Well, Paul, I'm sure you're going to make a fine Scoutmaster. It'll be a little bit different than your Cubmaster experience, I'm sure, but that's pretty good preparation for the job. Also heard from Bill Duncan, who said: thanks, Clark, as a Scoutmaster I always look for your email alerts and I walk away with something new to think about, not only for our troop but for each Scout and our leaders. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for the kind words and thanks for getting in touch. You can email me, Clark, at ScoutmasterCGcom.

It's C-L-A-R-K-E at ScoutmasterCGcom. Visit us at the Scoutmaster blog and check that out, and you can subscribe to receive updates to the blog by email once you're there, and there's a contact form on there too, if you'd like to use that. Last night I got together with Arlam Ward for our September Scout Circle and our guest was Derek Hansen, and Derek is the author of The Ultimate Hang, which is the book on hammock camping. If you're not familiar with hammock camping, it's something you really ought to get to know. We recorded our discussion and lots of people sent in questions and we had a great time.

So make sure you go to ScoutmasterCGcom's YouTube channel and you can watch the presentation there. Our next Scout Circle presentation is going to be October 13th. That's a Sunday.

It happens between 9 and 10 pm Eastern Standard Time and what happens is we have a live presentation that's followed up by your questions. If you have questions about backpacking, and specifically about scouts and backpacking, you can start emailing now, and you can do that at the same email address: Clark at ScoutmasterCGcom, C-L-A-R-K-E at ScoutmasterCGcom. If you haven't gotten in on one of the Scout Circle deals.

It's a lot of fun, so make sure that you put Sunday, October 13th on your schedule and we'll see you then. One important thing to note is that the Boy Scouts of America recently released their initial implementation resources addressing the change to membership standards voted on at this year's meeting in May. Part of the resources that they've provided to date is a frequently asked questions for unit leaders document, and I'll make sure to link to it in the post that contains this podcast, and I mentioned it on the blog within the past week or so. You want to make sure to look at that because it provides initial guidance on implementation of this membership change and just to give you a condensed overview. Not much changes With anything at all in the day-to-day workings of a troop program. As always, we always apply our training and available resources to presenting the program in the way that best benefits and serves the interests of our Scouts.

When this change goes into effect at the first of next year, our task as leaders is to address any practical concerns that arise once it does, and the way that we do that is the way that we do everything else: By asking the question: what's in the best interest of the youth that we serve? And we apply the good judgment that we've developed over our experience and through our training.

Now, as the debate was brewing this past spring, questions of accommodations and logistics arose, and the FAQ document that I mentioned answered these questions with very clear, unambiguous language. A few bullet points. Sexual orientation is not a youth protection issue. We're going to focus on the best interest of our Scouts and assure that there's an atmosphere of goodwill. It's clear that equanimity, care for the concerns of our youth members and their families and addressing those concerns wisely is always dependent on us, as unit level volunteers, applying good judgment. I know that there are a lot of differing levels of comfort and acceptance with the new membership standards, and my best advice to all of us is to review the materials that the BSA has published very carefully with an open mind.

One of the things referred to in these materials is there's going to be additional training material to be released this fall. I'll keep my eyes open for it and share any further information with you, both on the blog and here in the podcast. In this podcast and Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk about sharing information with our youth leaders. We do this in training. We do it in mentoring.

We're going to talk a little bit about how we go about doing that effectively, and that's going to take up the rest of the podcast. So let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less. So we're working with our youth leaders. When we're mentoring them or training them or advising them, We're doing a couple of different things. First of all, we're sharing information with them, and information is great. It educates and directs and helps make things clearer, And we know that having that information is good, but it's only experience that develops skill. Sharing information is good, but I'll tell you something, especially when it relates to our youth leadership, too much information can be paralyzing.

We live in the information age. Our scouts get plenty of information and much more than any of us can effectively do anything with. What we really need is being able to take what information we receive and apply it and gain experience from that. Scouting is an educational movement, but it's not educational in the traditional sense. Scouting is a journey through experiences that develop skill. It's not just this body of information that we impart to our scouts.

Sometimes we get a little mixed up. We think our scouts need a lot of information to develop skills and they don't.

I think we get a little mixed up when we're talking about training adult leaders with this. We think they need lots of information. They don't. What they really need is experience, and this is true of almost everything we do in scouting.

So if you have ever taught someone how to ride a bike, think about that for a moment. What would you do? We get a bike out, we put them in the seat, we give them a couple of pointers and we tell them to try it out.

The first couple of tries aren't going to work very well, probably, but as they start to figure things out, we coach them and we encourage them and we work with them until, through experience, they've developed enough skill to go ahead and ride a bike. Right When we're instructing scouts or working with scouts on a skill like building a campfire or safely handling a pocket knife or flipping a flapjack.

We're giving them the information that they need at the time and they are applying it in a very hands-on kind of an atmosphere, and there's not necessarily a lot of talking going on, but there's a lot of action, there's a lot of experience being gained. So how do we apply this to training or mentoring or advising our youth leaders? Unfortunately, a lot of our training, both for youth and adults, is aimed at sharing information.

More often than not, what we do is we plop people down in front of a PowerPoint presentation or a video and we give them lots of handouts and then we say, okay, now you have the information, now you've been trained. But that is just the beginning, isn't it? Once somebody has the information, they have to act on it. When they act on it, they gain the experience.

When they gain the experience, then they become skilled, and that very simple concept is what we are all about, isn't it? Measuring out the information we share with our youth leaders is important.

It's not because we want to keep secrets or we don't want to reveal to them what's going to happen next, but because we want them to get the amount of information they need to act. And then what? Gain an experience and develop skill.

So I have right now a new senior patrol leader that was elected during our week at summer camp and he had his first patrol leaders council meeting last week. I could sit him down and I could sit the new patrol leaders council down and I could start sharing information with them, to the point that they would become totally overloaded and they're really not sure what to do next.

Now, because I am a talker and I love to talk, I could have started out with their job descriptions and then probably followed 17 different rabbit trails on each bullet point of those job descriptions. Pretty soon, you know, about 10 minutes into my sharing information, their eyes would kind of glaze over, their heads would begin to nod, their feet would begin to shuffle, because those are all indications that I have overloaded them. I have told them more than they need to know. What they're anxious for is the information that they need to know. Right then. What I did was I sat down with the senior patrol leader for about five minutes and I asked him some questions about the content of his patrol leaders council meeting.

What are you going to do? Do you have it written down?

If you write down what you're going to do at a meeting, do you know what that's called? That's called an agenda. An agenda is a pretty important thing to have. If you share that agenda with people before you get to the meeting, they're going to be more prepared for it.

Now is that something that you did, And we went along like that for about five minutes. We talked about the very practical things that he needed to do, and then I stopped talking. I left the room. I let the patrol leaders council go ahead and sit there and get to work. I didn't sit in on their meeting. I didn't guide their meeting.

I didn't do anything else other than give them the pertinent information they needed for the next half hour or so. Now my next move was to go out and to work with my junior assistant, Scott Masters. They're 16 or 17 years old. They're very experienced guys.

They understand what all the youth leadership positions are and how to do them well, And I gave them enough information so that they could get started basically doing my job right. I'm going to be there and I'm going to be working along with everybody, but I want these junior assistant, Scott Masters to work with the senior patrol leader and the patrol leaders council in the same way that I usually would.

But I have these great, experienced guys, so it's time for them to go to the next level and to learn about the job that Scott Masters do. Because what are they? They're junior assistant Scott Masters.

So we talked about different ways that they could support the patrol leaders council and the senior patrol leader. We talked about what I'm talking about right now, which is, hey, if you're going to talk to the senior patrol leader, remember he doesn't need to know everything that you know right now.

He needs to know what he needs to know for the next few things that he needs to accomplish And what we're doing right now in our troop. We've got a couple of different levels of this going.

Things go better if I give my youth leadership the most pertinent information that they read right now to get their job done and let them work on that piece of information, let them gain some experience from applying it. Then we'll reflect on that experience and the developing skills that they have and then they'll get the next bit of information: Somebody learning how to ride a bike, scouts learning how to handle a pocket knife or build a fire.

They need brief, concise, informational statements and then lots of practice and a little coaching as they practice along. Then the final step is to get them to reflect on the way that they applied the information that was shared.

How did it work? How did it go?

What are you going to do differently next time? What do you think you did well?

What do you think you can improve on? And we do this not an hour long sessions, but kind of in real time. We take a couple of minutes here, a couple of minutes there.

We have a patrol leaders council meeting once a month. The patrol leaders council gets together before the troop meeting to check on their preparations and after the troop meeting to reflect on the meeting and check on their preparations for next time. And in those times my most important tool is my ears.

I'm listening to what they say, I'm listening to their discussions with one another, I'm observing what they're doing during meetings, during campouts, looking at the interactions that are happening, And then I'm giving them the information I think they need to move on to the next step of skill development. So let's remember, you know, as denizens of the information age. There's a lot of stuff out there.

We can take all the information that we know. We can dump it on somebody and say, okay, now you got it, see you later. But the best approach is that riding a bike approach right, Giving them what they need right. Then letting them digest that, internalize it, take it, make it into experiences, that sharpen skills, reflect on the experience and help them see what they're getting right and what they maybe need to improve on.

And then we move on to the next challenge.