Scoutmaster Podcast 322

I'm Uchiyakuba skipper with Sea Scout Ship 272 in New York City, New York. This edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Our senior patrol leader asked one of our scouts if he would like to be the troop historian. But the scout wouldn't do the job because he said there was no future in it.

So next he said, well, how about being the bugler? But apparently that wasn't noteworthy enough for the boy.

So finally the scout accepted the job of being the troop librarian and now he is in charge whenever there's a hardcover warning at camp. That's a threefer for you right there.

Hey, this is podcast number 322.. Music Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. As always, let's take a look at the mailbag. Last month I put some t-shirt designs up for sale on Amazon. Some of you have seen them, some of you haven't.

Look in the podcast notes. I'll have a link where you can find those. I just wanted to share some reviews that we got about the shirts, And the most popular one is one called Stuff. Scouters Say, which is like more than 200 things that you probably end up saying over and over again. It's all printed on the shirt. It's just a lot of fun.

In the reviews, people have said it's a great shirt. All the scouts and leaders in our troop got quite a charge out of it. It was a terrific gift for a long-time scouter. I bought this for our past Scoutmaster of seven years, who probably has heard 90% of the sayings And he wore it at Wood Badge Training. It was definitely a conversation piece.

So when you get a chance, check them out. Mark Lee is the Conocohe District Chair in the new birth of Freedom Council in South Central Pennsylvania And he wrote in to ask: is the Scoutmaster CG app coming back?

Well, no, Mark, I announced in January we're going to kind of let the app go by the wayside and focus resources and time on other things. So no, the app is not coming back. It's no longer available.

It's not coming back, But we're still alive and well doing podcasts and blog posts and things like that. So every week, try and have a couple of live chat sessions, usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Keep an eye on my Facebook feed and the Twitter feed for an announcement when we will be live at scoutmastercgcom and come and join all the folks that check in for a chat. A lot of folks that check in we call frequent fliers, but joining them this week was Jeffrey Heck, who's an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 56. Rob, who's an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 235 in North Plainfield, New Jersey. Darryl Oakley checked in and he's a Scoutmaster with Troop 132 and Upton, Massachusetts.

And Don C checked in and he's a Scoutmaster too. Sometimes we talk about really important things and sometimes we just talk. That's live chats, scoutmastercgcom Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Watch the Facebook feed, Watch the Twitter feed. Come and join us.

We have a lot of fun. Hey, if you're a regular reader and a listener, I have a favor to ask of you. What you need to do for me is go to scoutmastercgcom. Look in the upper left-hand corner of the website. You'll see a menu there. Click on the support link and take a look at the opportunities to become a Scoutmaster CGcom backer.

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Well, in this week's podcast, oh, I've got a couple of brief email questions to answer, But in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, something that will phrase as youth engagement in scouting and explain exactly what I mean by that. So, hey, let's get started, shall we

Scoutmastership in seven minutes Or less? So, when we're really hitting on all eight cylinders, scouting is something that Scouts do for themselves rather than just like this program of activities that is presented to them.

There's a big difference there, right? If we are just putting together a series of programs and activities that Scouts participate in, they're not really fully engaged in what's going on and we're not really tapping the potential and the opportunities that scouting presents to us, Because the context of scouting means our youth members are engaged in leading one another and in making decisions affecting what they do and how it's done.

I want to call this youth engagement rather than youth leadership- And I'm being pretty careful about the terminology here. I'm saying youth engagement, I'm not saying youth leadership, or boiling it down to that famous two-word phrase- boy led- And the reason that I think we need to differentiate, because a lot of times we look at youth leadership as kind of like a light switch: It's on or it's off. We're boy led or we're not boy led.

Now what we need to do is to engage all of our Scouts in a partnership where they're leading one another and they're making decisions affecting what they do and how it's done. Our ideal role as Scouts is being a barely perceptible influence that empowers young people to do things for themselves, And we accomplish this through a kind of a progressive partnership of adult and youth roles that are collaborative and not necessarily hierarchical.

Now, there's a couple of great $9 college words right there. So what I'm saying is is that we are facilitators, enablers, helpers, mentors, guides, coaches. We're not issuing orders. We're working with our Scouts in a way that they are fully engaged in what's going on. And this partnership, this kind of collaborative partnership, is one of the unique facets of Scouting that adults generally misunderstand.

We can be very reluctant to put trust and authority in young people or doubt the ability of young people to exercise that trust or that authority responsibly. But engaging young people in these things does not mean just purposeless anarchy. I mean Scouting has boundaries. In the same way the lines chalked on a playing field describe the boundaries of a game.

Both Scouts and Scouters observe the boundaries and we have a shared commitment that's based on mutual trust and patience. And that's why, as I said before, I want to be really careful about the terminology and call it youth engagement rather than youth leadership, because it's not this kind of binary, on-off thing, It's progressive. We could do a much better job of building that progression in early on, when our young people are in Cub Scouts And the opportunities are there but they're not necessarily connected with what happens in the future.

We want the youngest youth we're working with, helping with simpler tasks and some decision-making and peer-to-peer work and sharing and helping each other right, And we build on that by giving them more directive leadership roles and intermediate tasks as they get a little bit older, more influence on choosing activities and decision-making and instructing and leading each other, And then we build that towards more independent decision-making and leadership roles. This progression, if it hasn't started early on or if it's just simply not present with the youth that we're working with. It's going to take some time for this to all catch, for everybody to understand their roles and things to get going.

And there's a real simple kind of three-step formula for this by Greenbar Bill William Hillcourt in an earlier Scoutmasters' Handbook. Very simple idea: Train them, trust them and let them lead.

So let's pick that apart for a moment. Training, So we wouldn't begin instructing Scouts learning how to tie a square knot, for instance, with long theoretical discourse on knots and rope. We put a rope in their hand and we let them try.

So if you're going to engage youth in leadership, the most effective way to develop those skills for them is by getting them to lead, And that's engaging them in actual rather than theoretical leadership, because leadership skills develop as you lead, not in a training session or in a theoretical environment. And we have a way as adults a lot of times of over-explaining and over-instructing in a way that our Scouts find very frustrating.

So let's not overload them with theoretical information. Give them the basics and let them at it. Follow up with reflection and mentoring to steer developing leaders towards more confidence, more success and more understanding. Training our youth members to be engaged with what they're doing is not an event.

It's not something that we can sit down and do with PowerPoint slides or in a theoretical environment. They have to actually start doing things and then, once they've done them and they've had a little experience, reflecting on them for a very short period of time before they move on to the next challenge is a really great idea, because then they start to understand the complexities of what they are doing.

So the next thing Green Bar Bill says is trust them, says train them, then trust them and think about this. Okay, Maybe you haven't had the pleasure yet, but if you have a child, at one point you're probably going to get involved with helping them learn how to drive and get a driver's license.

And if you're going to ride along in the car with them as they're learning, you know what I'm talking about. It's very challenging to put a whole lot of trust in what they're doing, and letting scouts engage in leadership feels a lot like sitting in the passenger seat while a student driver steers the car.

Now we may understand how important it is to let go, but letting go is never easy. Trusting youth leaders is always a challenge, but it gets easier as you see what they are capable of achieving. And next is: let them Let them lead.

So we can't give scouts the responsibility and then undermine it with continual interference. And that interference can come in many guises. It can come as wanting to help, or wanting to instruct or train, or just being a little anxious about letting them carry out a given activity.

So it's real responsibility and letting them lead and letting them learn as they move along. So let's talk about real responsibility, and real responsibility means that we haven't eliminated all the possibilities of failing in the situation.

I mean, we want our scouts to succeed, naturally, but this doesn't mean we absolutely protect them from failing. We ought to expect and learn to welcome all the little bumps and setbacks and failures that come along the way, because they're a vital tool for developing skill.

If you think about it, any skill that you claim right now you develop by making mistakes, And the wonderful thing about scouting is that we put our young people in a safe environment so that they can make plenty of mistakes and thereby learn and develop some skill. Any championship sports team has usually suffered at least one or two losses somewhere along the way, right, And the difference between a championship season and a losing season kind of hinges on learning the lessons from those losses or those failures. Handled the right way, All of the things that go wrong can be a source of intense motivation for athletes and for scouts.

We need to respond to mistakes and failures with good humor and encouragement and commiseration, because we've all been there. We need to understand that failures and missteps are inevitable and they're valuable and they're opportunities to grow.

They're not crimes to prosecute and punish And we can encourage leadership, development and accountability without being real dramatic or having to deal with punishments or bad feelings. And the right attitude on our part will inspire the initiative in our young people. And that attitude can be a real challenge as an adult, because a lot of us have tried at least once or twice or three times to engage scouts in meaningful leadership and if they don't respond as we'd hoped, we get impatient and discouraged and we tend to reserve important decisions and authority to ourselves because we know that we tried that a couple of times and it doesn't work. Look, scouts are no fools. They will wait until you do everything for them, because in a lot of ways that's normally what happens in just about every area of their lives.

But we want to inspire them to take the initiative of making things happen, and we have to understand that what might seem routine to us may be totally new to one of the young people that we're working with, and I think it's unfair to expect an inexperienced scout to respond the same way an experienced adult would when they're faced with a leadership challenge. And scouts always show initiative if we learn to look for it. Sometimes it's very small, but when anybody is undertaking a new enterprise, like engaging themselves in leadership, they are vulnerable. They need reassurance to get past their problems.

So instead of looking for what's wrong, we do a lot of work looking for what's right. We look for the least sign of initiative and we support it and we build on it, no matter how small it might be.

So we want to watch how we react to what scouts do and we want to find that kind of advisory role and that advisory voice. And I'm not talking about tone or volume, but the motivation behind what you say. If you're really invested in engaging youth in leadership, you will help articulate the concerns of all the scouts, to motivate your youth leaders to service.

So let me explain what I mean by that. Why are we engaging youth in leadership?

Is it to satisfy the demands that we're making on them? No, They aren't serving us, they're serving their fellow scouts.

And what do their fellow scouts need from them? They want to go camping in advance and do scouting with their friends. Right, An advisor is keeping that in front of the youth leadership all the time. Hey, you're serving these scouts.

What do these scouts want? Are you making it happen for them? You're not serving me. I'm not your boss, I'm not your drill sergeant. You're serving your fellow scouts and I'm just here to help you make that happen.

So this whole concept of engaging youth and the way that the opportunities we present for them to develop leadership skills needs to be a progressive thing. And then the work that we do with them to advise, to instruct, to mentor, to coach, to guide- are things that are simple to articulate in a podcast, but they're very complex things to learn and it takes time.

So you have to be patient with yourself too, because in scouting, the relationship of adults to youth leaders is something that you will not find very often in the other endeavors that they are undertaking during this time of their lives. So, as you go out and you work with your scouts. Think about youth engagement as a way of helping them develop leadership skills.

E-mail, that is folks. And here's an answer to one of your e-mails. Sean Earp is the Scoutmaster, Troop 330 in Auburn, Washington, and he wrote with this question. He says: sometimes, as a new-ish Scoutmaster, I'm finding it challenging to figure out why our troop does things the way that it does.

Is it because the previous Scoutmaster preferred to run things that way? Is it a question of policy?

Is it a Or is it a question of policy? Or is it some kind of inviolable precept handed down by Baden Powell?

For example, when we go camping, our patrol is set up and camp and cook as a patrol, separate from the adults. But I'm trying to figure out where do the senior patrol leader and assistant senior patrol leader set up their camp and eat? As long as I've been with our troop, the senior patrol leader and assistant senior patrol leader have been required to set up their tents and eat with the adults.

So I wanted to see if that's the norm. I see no guidance in any of the literature, not in the troop leader guidebook or the Boy Scout handbook or the senior patrol leader handbook. Sean, that's an interesting question. I'll tell you: my practice has been to have those youth leaders who are not in a patrol camp and cook with the adults too.

Now, we don't require them to by any means, It's just an expectation that has been created by long practice. I know that it should be, as really never come up recently, but that would probably be a really good thing for you to do with your youth leaders is to sit down and ask them how they see the issue and if they want to change the way things are done. They may come up with an idea that neither of us have thought of. Daryl Oakley is the Scoutmaster, Boy Scout troop 132 and up in Massachusetts, and he wrote with this question. He says: I've been through youth protection a couple of times. I'm one contact role.

I understand that when I email, text or otherwise contact a scout, there's always a parent or a scouter included in the message or conversation. I know when I have a Scoutmaster conference, I do it in plain sight of others.

But what happens when I pick up the phone and call a scout? Do I have to have like another party on the line with the scout in myself If a scout asked me for a merit badge counselor and he calls the merit badge counselor should his parents be listening to the phone upstairs. This is all really kind of confusing.

Well, Daryl, yes and no, I mean, you have it right. There's no one-on-one contact. Just keep that in mind and keep it simple, and it's really not all that confusing when you think about it. You're on the phone with a scout. Think about it in the same way that you would think about talking to a scout at a meeting or during a Scoutmaster's conference. We don't go into the other room and close the door.

No, we do it out in the open or we keep the door to the room open or whatever. So you pick up the phone and call a scout and his parents pick up the line. Hey, I wanted to talk to your son for a moment about scouts.

Would that be okay? Are you making a one-on-one contact there?

Well, you're talking one-on-one with the scout, but somebody else is aware that this is going on. So you call on the phone and the scout picks it up. You say, hey, I wanted to talk to you about a couple of scout things.

Is your mom or dad home? Could you put them on the line for a moment, Or you are someone else's presence when you're making the phone call and you say, hey look, I'm going to call John. He's our senior patrol leader. You don't have to listen in, but just follow my side of the conversation for a couple of minutes, if you would. I hope that helps clear the confusion up. But that's usually the way that I observe the youth protection thing.

When it comes to telephone calls, I make sure that there's a third party involved somewhere and that they know that that conversation is happening. Hey, if you have a comment or question, I'd love for you to get in touch with me. I'm going to tell you how to do it in just a moment.