Scoutmaster Podcast 317

I'm Russell Altman and I'm an assistant scoutmaster with troop number 555 in Ridge Springs, South Carolina. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like us, And now it's your scoutmaster.

So what's a good collective noun for Webelos, Walter, Swarm, Swarm of Webelos. Chaos, A chaos of Webelos. Yeah, I like them both. I like them. An explosion of Webelos, An explosion of Webelos. Perpetual emotion, I'm sorry, Yeah, perpetual emotion of Webelos.

Yes, Yeah, You don't want to be on the scene after an explosion of Webelos, though, Yeah, light that fuse and stand back.

Hey, this is podcast number 317.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So right there at the top of the podcast, you heard Walter Underwood.

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So right there at the top of the podcast, you heard Walter Underwood and Mark Ray join me in a little bit of foolishness, But we'll talk more about that in a moment. Let's look in the mailbag first.

This past week heard from Bus Price, who is a Scoutmaster with Scout Troop 349 in Verona, Wisconsin, And Bus wrote in to say: at our meeting last night, I began my Scoutmasters minute with this question: What is our theme for the year? And the Scouts responded in unison: Do what Scouts do. Thanks for helping me change my perspective from advancement to creating fun situations where Scouting happens.

Well, thank you so much for the kind words, Bus. It's always great to hear we're being helpful And it is all about doing what Scouts do, isn't it? Do what Scouts do, Everything else will take care of itself. Also heard from Brent Dixon. Also heard from Brent Dixon about last week's podcast, podcast 316. And he said this may be one of the best episodes I've heard.

I love the analogy and it only clarified and energized me more than I already was. I played it several times to make sure I fully absorbed the message. I will soon be stepping up from being an assistant Scoutmaster to being the Scoutmaster of a new unit And I'll certainly keep this episode in mind with the youth I'll be mentoring. Keep up the great work, sir, Thanks. Thanks for all you do to help us adults present the Pyramid to the youth we serve.

Well, thank you, Brent. I'm really glad that at least somebody understood what I was talking about. Last week, Actually, I had a couple of people share similar messages that it did actually work.

So if you've got no idea what I'm talking about or what Pyramid we're referring to. You got to go back and listen to podcast 316. Hey, every week we get together and have a couple of live chat sessions- or at least I try to every single week- usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

The thing to do is to keep an eye on our Facebook feed and our Twitter feed, And there I will post a notice that I am at scoutmastercgcom welcoming folks to have a live chat session. A lot of people show up and the majority of them are those who I would call our frequent flyers, Who stop in to discuss all kinds of important and unimportant things.

So just jump in and join us. We had Steve Douglas, who's a committee chair from troop 127 and Kathleen Georgia, signed in for the first time this week. Eric Mondrush, who's a scoutmaster in troop 103 in New Hudson, Michigan, stopped in, as did Brett Bolton, who's an assistant scoutmaster for troop 508 in Irving, Texas, And Brett's also a committee chair for a pack there in Irving. Like I said, live chat sessions Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed. Jump in and join us.

We have a lot of fun, And now has come the time for me to ask of you a favor In that tortured a sentence structure. Somewhere an old English teacher is pulling her hair out.

Okay, if you regularly listen to the podcast and use the resources to scoutmastercgcom and it's something that's helping you, you can support what I'm doing by becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer, and that's a one time deal. Now you can also make a subscription payment by joining the many patrons who pledge $5 or more a month via something called Patreon. Both of these things are easy to do. The premium is available to anyone who becomes a patron or a backer.

Here's how it works. Go to scoutmastercgcom, Look in the upper right-hand corner of the page. You'll see a menu there. One menu choice is support. One menu choice is Patreon. You can click on either.

Check them out, See what's going to work for you. It's all pretty easy to do.

It only takes a couple of minutes, And I want to take a moment to personally thank Bus Price, Phillip Ingram and Robert Searson, who became backers since our last podcast, And to thank Chris, who's become a patron since last week's podcast. Just do me that favor: Check out both of those things at scoutmastercgcom, See if they're going to work for you, And if you become a patron or a backer, I'll make sure to thank you personally during next week's podcast. In this week's podcast I'm really pleased to be able to share a conversation I recently had with Mark Ray, the author of the two-volume Troop Leader Guidebook published by the Boy Scouts of America.

And our old pal Walter Underwood joined us to have this discussion Back last month in podcast 313, I'm pretty sure it was Walter- and I reviewed the first volume of the guidebook And then the author got in touch and Mark and Walter and I got together. We had a great time looking at the second volume of the guidebook And we had planned on an hour.

It turned into two hours because you know scouters right, And once I had edited that conversation down into something that is listenable, I ended up with about an hour's worth of material And I'm going to split it between this week's podcast and next week's podcast. So this week is part one. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did And, most importantly, I hope it helps everybody understand what a valuable resource this two-volume troop leader guidebook is going to be. The first volume is already out, and Mark answers the question about when the second volume will be out.

So hey, let's get started, shall we? Really pleased to be able to have a discussion today with the author of the new troop leader guidebook that has been published by the BSA, both volume one and volume two, And I have on the line with me today Mark Ray, who is in Louisville, Kentucky.

How are you doing, Mark? Doing great, Clark, Thanks. And also joining me is our pal Walter Underwood, out in Palo Alto, California, And I should preface the discussion by saying that Mark had to swear on a stack of handbooks that nobody else but Walter and I would see an advance copy of volume two of the troop leader guidebook.

If you've been listening along on the podcast for a bit, what was it? It was last month. Walter and I got together and we talked about volume one And Mark got in touch and he was kind enough to say that he would be happy to come on the podcast and talk about volume two. And, Mark, the current word is volume two gets released sometime in June.

Is that right, Correct? I think by the time it gets to Scoutshaft, it might be near the end of the month.

Everybody will be clamoring to get a copy, I'm sure, because I was really favorably impressed with the first volume and I like the second volume even more, I think, Walter, what's your kind of back-of-the-envelope speech about volume two? I feel like volume one is the stuff you have to know to do it at all, And volume two is all that stuff it takes three years or ten years to learn by going to Roundtable or talking to other Scouters. This is three years of Roundtables right here.

I think the Roundtable commissioners of America are going to be very happy with this. Yes, it gives them a lot to work with, doesn't it So, Mark?

What was the genesis of this new two-volume approach and why Troop Leader Guidebook rather than what this publication has normally been called, the Scoutmasters Handbook? Back in around 2010,, National did some surveys to see how people were using the Scoutmaster Handbook, what they liked, what they didn't like, And we followed that up with focus groups in each of the regions to talk to people not just about the Scoutmaster Handbook but about the Troop Committee Guidebook and about a lot of the ancillary publications that experienced Scouters have seen but a lot of people don't even realize exist- Everything from advancement guidelines to passport to high adventure- And a couple of things came out of those efforts.

One which was a little bit surprising is more than one person said they had never read the Scoutmaster Handbook because they were an assistant Scoutmaster or they were not even a registered leader in a troop, so they didn't think the book applied to them, And that's why we ended up going with the title Troop Leader Guidebook, to emphasize that this is really for any adult who works in a troop. And then the other piece of that that came out was a realization that there's a lot of really good stuff in some of those ancillary publications but it's just not accessible.

And so part of what we did with Troop Leader Guidebook was try to incorporate some of that content so that you don't have to go look for all those other things on scouts stufforg or on the free shelf at your council office. Then the other piece of it is looking at two volumes. We talked a lot about what those two volumes would look like.

You guys have probably seen the big two volume Handbook for Scoutmasters from the 1930s, for which was divided between program and administration, And we settled here on doing the two volumes that you've seen, where volume one is for that new scout leader, much like the current Scoutmaster Handbook has done for the last several editions, And then volume two would address the needs of a more experienced leader, which is something that really had not ever been done before. That is really kind of unprecedented, isn't it? I've never seen anything like it.

Walter, you were wondering if they were thinking about that old two volume set when they were writing it, weren't you? I was thinking about that because some of these same topics were in volume two, as I remember.

But I think this is a different approach. This is level one and level two of what you learn as a scoutmaster. There's a new term in here: the scoutmaster core. When we talked last time, Clark, we realized there was no word in scouting for all of the adult leaders.

So now we have a core of scoutmasters- huh, Better than a corpus, because that's the story Mark. One of the really key pieces of information is: this is really for all adult volunteers involved with the scout troop, isn't it? It really is, including the troop committee members, even though they still have their own guidebook.

I think they can get a lot out of this book as well. Yeah, I mean, the troop committee guidebook touches on some of the why we do things, but it's more administrative in nature. What you've done in both of these volumes is: this is such a good, clear explanation of why we do what we do. I hope I don't appear to be too fawning.

Oh, that's okay, I don't mind. But now I really really appreciate the way that you put this together. The price of admission for me was fulfilled in the second volume, on page four, You talk about the ninth method of Boy Scouting. Tell us what that is. The ninth method is time, And when you think about it, nothing that we do as scout leaders really has an instant gratification to it.

It takes months, if not years, for us to see the program working in kids' lives And I think so often we get people in a troop and they don't last very long and they never really get to see the magic happen. And you really see the magic happen when that tenderfoot becomes an eagle scout. But you really really see it happen when you dance at your senior patrol leader's wedding, Giving everybody a little bit of an idea that everything is not going to happen at once. It's very reassuring. The youth leaders and volunteers are pretty driven people and they're very results-oriented and they like to see immediate results for their work.

But I think we sometimes missed the long game of it all. One thing to see that right away is where you get adult lad or adult-driven troops. It's more like yeast bread, where you mix it up and just walk away for a while. Artisanal scouting: Yes, The first chapter is called Troop Vision. I like the idea of starting off with the vision and especially working on that with the youth leaders. There are a couple of big troops in our area, but they have very different personalities.

They just really have a little bit different vision about what we're doing. Mark, what were you looking for in that chapter? Just what Walter is talking about is clarifying what your troop is about and what it's not about. I thought about this a lot when I was a scoutmaster: that if you don't really have a vision and a focus, you start getting pulled in all sorts of different directions, some of which are not really beneficial to where the troop is headed.

So it seems to me that having a troop vision helps you clearly delineate what's important and what's not important, what you need to focus on and what you can ignore. Basically, It's a good way to step back Every time a troop meeting rolls around. There's plenty of things to pay attention to. Also, I saw the looking for strengths and we've done something with the PLC and adults in rating strengths and weaknesses across the eight methods for our troop, and that's a nice way to go through the strengths. There's excellent advice on craft division and sharing it, getting it into a form that people can gather around and really work with. Looking at the idea of evaluating your troop Mark, you feature in this using the Journey to Excellence program as an evaluative tool.

That's something for too many troops. That's a form that you fill out at reach harder time, which is not really the point of the tool. Obviously, it's to help you plan for excellence and also to evaluate as you go along, But it's just one tool in your evaluation toolbox, if you will.

The other thing that I mentioned that some people are familiar with is the Unit Commissioner Worksheet, And Unit Commissioners are taught not to go in and fill this out in front of the troop because it looks like there's files from the council, But at the same time, if they're aware of what's on that worksheet, that's a really valuable tool to measure what you're doing well and what maybe you need a little bit of help with. You built another bridge between some time disparate elements in scouting by saying, yeah, take a look at this, See what commissioners think about and see what they're up to, because they're not there to spy on you, Right?

And then the third piece we've got is this new 75 question assessing your troop instrument, which I think could be really valuable for people to look at different categories like membership, troop meetings, advancement, youth leaders and so forth, to evaluate themselves. And I think it would be especially valuable if a number of leaders in the troop did this separately and then compared their answers.

Have you looked at that, Walter? Yes, I have, And I've been recommending and using the evaluation in the SPL handbook. This has a little bit more about committees and things the SPL wouldn't worry about, but it's a similar kind of thing and a great thing to do.

And then evaluating your leadership team: in chapter three we're looking at all of the adult volunteers in the troop, kind of helping them sort out what their work really is and how they fit into that overall vision. There's also, I remember from the first volume we talked about how we wish there was more about the personal growth of the Scoutmaster, which is, of course, this whole section, Right?

So I think the things that we were saying wow, I wish there was more about this are greatly expanded in volume two. It does answer a lot of the questions that we had In the third chapter. You're getting the big picture.

Fourth chapter, you're kind of drilling down a little bit, And then chapter five is evaluating yourself. Yeah, chapter four is evaluating yourself. I'm sorry, chapter four is evaluating yourself.

So why is that important? It's sort of like a Scoutmaster conference with yourself. Yeah, I'm looking at the five questions you have listed in that chapter, Mark.

Why did you become a troop leader? Why do you want to be a leader now?

What does the BSA expect of you, What do you expect of scouting and what do you expect of yourself? Do people ask those questions to themselves on a regular basis? I'm not too sure I don't think they do, And especially I don't think they think about how their motivation has changed from the time they joined until now. Maybe somebody experienced with his own son who had just crossed over from cup scouting.

Well, now his son has gone off to college, So he's in it for a different reason, And if he doesn't think about that then I don't know he's likely to get frustrated or not change his approach or just not do as good a job as he could. Well, I'm definitely doing a different sort of thing now because, as Mark mentioned, my son's not just in college but graduated, so I'm not doing this to spend more time with my son. I enjoyed scouting when I was a youth. I enjoy it now. I enjoy working with the people here and I should be asking myself those questions. Those are really.

It's a really interesting list, especially, I think, as you move to a new position, say from Scoutmaster to Assistant Scoutmaster Or indeed the other way around. Right, But you know, I was Scoutmaster for three years, then ASM, working with High Adventure, with the older Scouts. Those are changes where you're doing it for a different reason or different expectations.

One of the things I frequently hear from people who are in their second, third, fourth year of working with a scout troop is when they come in as your son crosses over from Weebel O's, You look around and there are these older Scouts. You look at them and you go, wow, they're really competent, knowledgeable and everything.

And then, two or three years later, your son is one of the older Scouts and you wonder what happened to all those competent, knowledgeable Scouts that were there. You know that's what happens And we see this when we really encourage new parents to be on Board of Review.

Oh right, Yeah, Because then they'll see this 14-year-old and they'll think: can Johnny? Johnny will never be like that. We tell him, yes, he will.

So much of the work that you do as a volunteer in Scouting is really about perspective. Your perspective is going to change And if you don't keep up with your changing perspective, you may be missing something. That's a dialogue. What you do, what you learn, changes.

What you know about Scouting And I think a lot of this second volume is the rest of the career, Right, Right, If you're going to stick around for decades, if not years. When you start you're sort of like the big brother or big sister, but then you become more of the parent figure and then you become more of the grandparent figure. Oh yeah, I've definitely experienced that When you're 60 years old and you're the Scoutmaster, you can't really act like the big brother of the kids and you have to find other people to play that role for you.

The idea of evaluating yourself in Chapter 4 is a real key, important thing, And it's not a one-time thing, is it? I mean, it's something that you continuously want to be doing When you have a relationship with Scouts. If you are anchored in who you are. It's going to be easier for them. Yes, If you're thrashing around and you kind of keep switching roles, that's going to be a lot harder for them. Yeah, you become kind of a moving target.

Chapter 5 is about charting the course. What is this?

Charting our course? What are we looking at there?

Mark? I see this as creating sort of a Wood Badge ticket for The Truth.

The chapter talks about creating a priority list and then goes through the stages of team-based project planning that are covered in Wood Badge as a way to work that plan so that you move toward your vision for The Truth. This chapter reminded me of the Eagle Project workbook. It walks you through the steps of let's do a project.

How about that? I hadn't thought of that, Walter. Neither of us I like that.

Those first five chapters or so are evaluating and planning, setting the stage, and then a really useful chapter in Chapter 6 about how teams develop, and anybody who's been through Wood Badge will be familiar with the way that this chapter unfolds. Tell us a little bit about it, Mark.

This chapter and then the next chapter on edge supplement what's talked about in Wood Badge, but hopefully it will add some depth- One of the things that was fun, as I was researching the stages of team development, was to learn that there's actually a fifth stage, which is adjourning. It was added to the model about 12 years after the original model and adjourning is a stage where the team does situations like when a high-adventure crew comes home from Fillmont and disbands that you adjourn.

So we talked just a little bit about that. Adjourning is an interesting thing which is often left out. For the Fillmont crew, You get back together and have desserts and watch all the pictures.

We can do a little better with those kinds of finishing ceremonies. We really could. One of the things that sports has going for it is that there are defined seasons. There's a defined beginning, There's a defined season, There's a defined end. There are ceremonies at the beginning and the end.

Scouting goes on forever And, like you said, people leave all the time and there's nothing that marks that occasion. Most people will be familiar with storming, norming, forming and performing stages.

Introducing the idea of adjourning- and what that means, I think is another perspective that you gain over time- is that in one way you're kind of always adjourning That particular patrol on that particular camp out, that crew that went on the high-adventure trip, that patrol leaders council, that particular group of adult volunteers. Understanding adjourning happens, maybe not in major ways but in smaller ways, in those transitional things, kind of takes the edge off of the change part of it. That can be a little difficult sometimes. There are these small adjournings you can do like thorns and roses at the end of even an overnight. But there is this: you can't build the same camp for it twice, or whatever it was. Heraclitus said: Oh, that's a good thought.

This steps way ahead in the book. But in chapter 17,, which is about older scouts, a scouter named Steve Myers gave me some great stuff about the concept of rites of passage, Intentionally building those in Scatmaster Conferences in other ways, so that you mark a young man's growth, And I think that relates back to talking about how there's no off-ramp, so to speak. Those rites of passage give you that off-ramp.

So maybe you do have some sort of formal ceremony when that 18-year-old stops being a scout and starts being an assistant scoutmaster and you formally present him with an assistant scoutmaster patch or something he can take off to college with him or something like that. That kind of ceremonial recognition I think is incredibly important as is just kind of like the really simple, you did a really great job, pat on the back kind of thing: You've been through this mile of the trail, You did fantastic, You're going to do great in the next mile too, That sense of recognition not only for individuals but for the group settings that we have.

So the edge method: Talk a little bit about that chapter Mark. A lot of this will be familiar to folks that have done wood badge or other trainings.

There are a couple of things that I think are important, that are additions. We've got a couple of charts that give examples of using edge in leadership settings. Tailoring your response to a developmental step in an individual or a group is really important.

And then one of my favorite chapters comes up next and that is working with youth leaders. One of the more difficult things is learning how to work with youth leaders, how to work with their abilities and how to focus on developing those abilities. I like the page with how adults can support youth leadership, but also some don'ts, as in how adults can undermine youth leadership. I can't really recall a whole lot of verbiage in any scout resources about working with youth leaders in this wise. I'd agree with that.

I think these things are getting kind of implicit or just are passed over. I guess It's kind of like, okay, you should understand how to do this Or you sort of figure it out.

Yeah, But the business about the Scoutmaster pose, you know, get your hand in your pocket. I didn't pick that up from any BSA material, but now it is in the BSA material in terms of keep your hands in your pockets, Page 46..

Okay, I'm going to take the number I have in all of my notes. That actually came out at one of my Fillmont conferences, Building Stronger troops a couple of years ago. And if you think about that situation where a scout is struggling to get a fire going, for example, if you go up and you have your hands in your pockets, you're not going to take over for him. You're going to let him struggle a little bit with that and learn. Mark, this is exactly my example that I've told Clark before.

If you want to be a scout leader, ask yourself how long can you stand there with your hands in your pockets watching a scout try to build a fire? And the number should be something over 35 minutes, unless there's a hypothermia situation.

Right, What I really like about this is there are very practical, actionable things, And one of those things is- let's see, how did you put it? Mark CFD, a code word.

Tell me about the code word That came from a Fillmont conference and the troop had this code word, CFD, which stands for confusion, frustration and danger. Their rationale was that those are the only three times that adult leaders should interfere with youth leaders And they used it as a code.

So if one leader saw another leader sort of overstepping his bounds, he just had to walk past him and say CFD, And that was enough to remind the guy. Oh, I didn't need to do that, They could have figured it out for themselves. Nobody was going to get hurt. What would constitute an intervention would be if they were just totally confused about something, if they had grown really, really frustrated with it and it was getting to the point where it wasn't constructive for them, or if it was dangerous. Right, That's actually a pretty succinct way to triage a situation. I like that And if you do this for long enough, the ninth method time the scouts will pick this up.

I've had scouts tell adults to back off And we were still keeping with the other troop. My son came over and really annoyed because the adults were running the briefing in the parking lot.

Before we had it up, He was like what are you doing? Shut up, You spoiled him. Yeah, No, he was just like this is wrong. Yeah, Like, yes, it's working. The following chapter is making the patrol method work.

Now, Walter, I think we both celebrated the idea that the patrol method was very well explained in that first volume. Here's some really good practical advice on how to make it work. And probably my favorite heading in the entire book in red: making the patrol method fail.

Why would we want to make the patrol method fail, Mark Well? Why would we recognize some things that we do in this section?

Why make the patrol method fail, Mark Well, we shouldn't. But we do inadvertently, mostly because the Scoutmaster gets impatient, And the classic example is: patrols are not working, so we'll just throw all the names in the hat and draw names again, And then three months from now, we'll do that again because it still didn't work.

And so that's the first thing we talk about is frequently. Reorganizing patrols is not a good approach.

It has been fascinating watching the PLC when we have had to reorganize patrols because we got like 20 new scouts. Wow, They know all kinds of stuff I could never figure out.

They organized patrols so that friends were together, so people who had to stay at each other were apart, so that each patrol had a bench of scouts that were going to be ready to be patrol leader in another year. They had this whole thing scoped. Wow.

And I'll tell you: in the top 10 things that people ask me about is: how do you reorganize patrol? There's a set of bullet points about why you really don't want to mess with patrols. I definitely agree with you, Mark. It's one of the things that caused the failure of the patrol method.

So the other one is circumventing the patrol structure. What are we talking about there?

That's when you say, well, we really don't have time to cook by patrol on this camp out, So we'll just have the adults cook and we'll call your voice when it's time to eat. So we make it a little bit simpler, We make it more efficient. Making it simpler and more efficient is actually why you make the patrol method fail. It's because the patrol method is messy and inconvenient. Yes, it is.

It is not built to be efficient, is it Right? If we wanted to have efficient troops, then they would be 100% adult run. If you see a patrol that looks like it's professionally run, that means the scouts are not doing it. If it looks like it's run by amateurs, that's great, because as soon as they figure it out they'll be given a new challenge. Or if it looks like it's not being run, That can happen too. Sometimes In this chapter, Mark, you go on to work with patrol advisors and outline some steps that can be taken there.

Honor Patrol programs, Honor Patrol- I feel like this is the patrol level version of Journey to Excellence. The important things that happen at a troop level scale to a patrol level.

A new patrol leader- right, They don't know what a patrol is supposed to be, And so the Honor Patrol is just a straightforward list of: oh, my guys are supposed to advance, They're supposed to meet, And if the guy before you was not a good patrol leader or your troop has never had very strong patrols, they don't have good models to follow and so they're going to keep doing it wrong. So this gives them a way to maybe understand how it could be done better, Right, And they could just take whatever strengths they have against this list and say: let's do it.

Well, like I said earlier in the podcast, there's lots more to share. Come back, join me for podcast 318.

Next week We'll have part two of this discussion with Mark Ray and Walter and myself, And I want to hear from you. It's really easy to get in touch and I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.