Scoutmaster Podcast 84

And now the old Scoutmaster. Hey, I hope you had a chance to see a lot of wild animals while you were at summer camp this summer. I know I did Come to think of it. Most of them were wearing a scout uniform with my troop cover on it. It is podcast number 84.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast.

This is Clarke Green. So chess merit badge, new merit badge.

That doesn't happen very often, by the way, that we have a new merit badge And now we have one that involves the game of chess, which you know, at first blush doesn't seem to have a whole lot of connection there. Right, There's not a lot of connection between chess and scouting and there's not a lot of connection between a lot of merit badge subjects and the core elements of scouting. But this is what I really like about the chess merit badge is that it has some connection to some of the core subjects.

People can scoff at it for being boring or dull, but you know there wouldn't be any video games or games of much level of a strategic sophistication if we didn't have chess to begin with. And the history of chess is actually kind of interesting because it's the history of games: Baseball, football, basketball- just about any team sport bears some similarities to chess. You have players with specific roles and proscribed ways they can move and act on the field. Some have really pivotal roles, Some are in more supporting roles. Chess is a martial game. I mean it's about conquering the other side and everything.

So some of the connotations may not transfer comfortably, but the strategy, the ability to think ahead of chess, to changing situations and to execute a plan, all lend themselves well to the study of leadership And that's one of the things that we work within scouting. Now, admittedly, chess isn't a physically demanding activity, It's not out-oriented, but it is great fun And I know a chess board goes along on most of our camping trips and you know it's taking care of some rainy afternoons. Before. Chad Fisher wrote in about chess merit badge and he said: my son is on the chess team at school and he's very excited about this merit badge.

Hey, you know, I'm sure that there are many scouts out there who are really anxious to take a look at it and to earn the merit badge. Chad is a varsity team coach.

Now if you haven't been around for very long you might not know about varsity teams. It is a part of the scouting program. In some places it's very popular. In some places it's almost unknown. But Chad is a varsity team coach and his blog is varsityteamvenueblogspotcom. I just discovered it this week and I recommend you get over there.

I'll have a link to Chad's blog in the post that contains this podcast. More about chess: Jason Pettis said my troop always brings two or three boards along the summer camp and the scouts use some of their downtime challenging each other and the adults, as well as starting teaching the game to the scouts that don't know it. Sometimes staff members come and play a game or two. Walter Underwood wrote in and said a chess set is a great way to keep boys scouts busy and out of trouble during those spare chunks of time at summer camp. It really worked: Two players and a swarm of kibitzers. One chess game could keep ten scouts busy.

No doubt I'm excited. I'm looking forward to getting the chess merit badge book and I'm going to become a counselor for chess merit badge.

I learned to play when I was in second grade- and there's a little story about that on the blog, if you're interested- and went on to be on the chess team in high school and everything. Play as much as I used to, But I think I can probably brush up on my technique and become a merit badge counselor for that particular merit badge. Let's see. Moving on, We're looking at who wrote in this week. Frank Maynardt had this comment about podcast 81.

In podcast 81, we were dealing with scouting and discipline And Frank said: I have a list of attributes of a boss versus a leader And one of them is a boss fixes blame and a leader fixes the problem. Well, thanks for that, Frank, And that points at the idea of discipline, and scouting is not about fixing blame as much as it is fixing the problem most of the time. Frank went on to say: I don't know if I agree with your process of having a scout who has run into disciplinary trouble appear before the troop committee When it comes to deciding his future course with the troop. It has the feeling of putting the scout on trial. Unless his behavior poses a clear and present danger, the situation should be disclosed to the committee. But I would really rather the Scoutmaster handle it, consulting with the committee chair as necessary to make him aware of the situation and discuss possible solutions.

I agree with you, Frank, more than you think. I think what we were discussing in podcast 81, when I particularly referred to this process, in other words of the scout going and talking to the troop committee. That was in a case where there was pretty much going to be a clear and present danger to safety and a propriety as far as the troop is involved.

Had this scout not, you know, adjusted his attitude and actions. Should a Scoutmaster handle it individually? Boy, that's a tough judgment call. In this particular case, the actions of this scout came to the tension of the civil authorities. In other words, he got in trouble with the police And it was over something that was kind of kind of worrisome And the way that and it ended up being not a troop related scouting event, but it was scouting related. I did discuss this with the committee chairman and what we came up with is that this was not going to be a decision on whether the scout was going to be able to go forward or not with our troop.

It shouldn't be my decision, shouldn't be his decision. It needs to be a group decision.

Because if we decided that he was going to move forward with the troop, you know we were going to have to defend that decision to parents who might be concerned about his actions, And so we would do that much better if there was a more general understanding and if it was a decision on the part of the whole troop rather than just me or the committee chair. So that's why we took that particular action.

I do agree with you, Frank, in most cases that's not going to be necessary, But in this particular one we felt that this was the best way forward And you know, progress report on that. The scout was told that for him to go on and scouting with our troop, that's what he was going to need to do.

So far, No reply, unfortunately. But I'm going to need to leave that right where it is for now and we're going to move on because it's a pretty big podcast. We've got a lot of things to talk about In Scoutmastership.

In seven minutes or less, we're going to talk about a recent troop leadership summit that we held, And I just want to give you a few ideas, tell you what we did, and maybe you'll be able to take some things away from that. The Great Brotherhood of Service is worldwide, scouting is worldwide, and I came across an interesting article from Scouts Australia And I thought that would be fun to share with you. And finally, we're going to wind it up with a Scoutmasters Minute.

I think that's enough for any podcast, don't you? Well, let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Scout troops have to plan. We plan with the Patrol Leaders Council.

You know, I think we all go through our several different planning processes in a little bit different ways for each individual troop, But there are some common threads that run through each one of them. Larry Geiger- oh gee, I guess it's a couple of months ago now- had an article on scoutmastercgcom where he talked about the planning process that he uses, just some little logistics and the philosophy behind it, And that was a good post And it got me thinking about the planning process we use.

And so, in consultation with our troop committee chair, we set up our first annual troop leadership summit. Sounds important, doesn't it?

What it was is a general meeting of all the people with a leadership stake in our troop, So that's the troop committee, myself and the Assistant Scoutmasters and the Patrol Leaders Council. We set this up to run over the better part of one Saturday And I'll tell you what our schedule was and what we did in that schedule, And maybe this will help you refine or come up with a planning process of your own. We started out by meeting at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning And at that meeting was myself and the troop committee chair and the Patrol Leaders Council.

Now the Patrol Leaders Council consists of senior patrol leader, assistant senior patrol leader, the patrol leaders, all the elected patrol leaders in the troop, And we also include the quartermaster and the scribe in on those meetings And the junior assistant Scoutmasters are typically there, So they were invited to attend as well. I read something over at Ask Andy this past week. I don't remember exactly where it was, But the takeaway from it was he pointed out that there's a difference between a leadership position and a position of responsibility, And he kind of used that differentiation to draw a line at who sits in on Patrol Leaders Council meetings and who doesn't. If you look at the Scout Handbook, you'll see positions of responsibility listed and you'll be able to differentiate them from leadership positions- And I'm talking about quartermaster, scribe, librarian, webmaster, et cetera- as being positions of responsibility. I don't have a strong opinion on whether they should be included as a part of a Patrol Leaders Council or not. I don't think that there's too much in the way of officialdom that would point us in one direction or another.

But just to let you know that's the way that we have operated- Made a decision this year that the junior assistant Scoutmasters- we have three of them- would not be official, you know, like participants quite so actively in the Patrol Leaders Council, And here's why We have a very good senior patrol leader and assistant senior patrol leader. We've got some pretty sharp patrol leaders.

But what we were fighting is that in those parts of the Patrol Leaders Council meetings that I looked in on, it seemed like the junior assistant Scoutmasters had a tendency to kind of monopolize the conversation And because they were older and more experienced they had a lot of the answers And so the patrol leaders were kind of sitting and listening rather than participating in the way that probably would have been most productive. So this year we've begun by taking the junior assistant Scoutmasters out of that continuous active role And we've put them into the role that the adult leaders take, slightly modified in that they're going to be coaches, counselors and mentors as far as the Patrol Leaders Council is involved, But they're no longer going to sit around the table.

Quite literally, we have a table, The Patrol Leaders Council sits at it. They're going to sit outside of that circle. They're going to be available to help, But the rule of thumb is they're not going to speak unless they're spoken to.

That worked very well because the first session that we had on that Saturday morning, the Patrol Leaders Council sat down and worked on their calendar for the year 2011-2012 scouting activities, And I took the junior assistant Scoutmasters aside with the troop committee chair and we discussed some other things. That turned out to be very useful, And the Patrol Leaders Council did an excellent job of coming up with a plan.

So back to the schedule here. Once the Patrol Leaders Council was done and they had their working calendar set up, I took a short period of time to meet with them and to outline what we are going to do as far as troop leadership training.

Now, I'm not going to get into a whole lot of detail here, but I'm sure that we'll unroll this as time goes by on the blog and here on the podcast. I'm going to adapt and adopt an old Green Bar Bill practice of using the Green Bar Patrol as a leadership training tool. Very basically, what this is is that the Patrol Leaders Council becomes a patrol for the three or four meetings that are necessary for this training and the Scoutmaster becomes the patrol leader. What we're going to do is we're going to kind of take them through the model evolution of putting a patrol camp out or event together, have some patrol meetings, kind of show them what those pieces are and they will be able to experience what a patrol meeting is. Hopefully that will help inform their leadership.

So it's a very hands-on method of training. As I adapt that, I will let you know how things go.

After we did that, what we did is we started reviewing the working calendar that the Patrol Leaders Council had put together and we just went week by week, meeting by meeting, and the senior patrol leader described exactly what their plans were. We wrote it out on a big whiteboard and as we went along we identified different tasks and different things that would need to be facilitated by some of the adult help in the troop, either the troop committee or the assistant Scoutmasters.

At this point, for lunch the troop committee and the assistant Scoutmasters all showed up, so we had all of our adult leadership there and they joined the scouts for lunch and then after lunch we continued on and we reviewed the calendar. As I said, this review was kind of week by week and everything that we were doing is we were teasing out tasks that would need to be supported by adults, such as securing campsites and taking care of reservations, doing tour permits and all that business.

So we did that and as we went along we got adults to commit to the different aspects of things. We've operated this way for quite some years.

We have people on the troop committee who are in the membership and advancement committees, subcommittees and things like that, and what we have found to be very effective is that sometimes these role-based responsibilities don't work quite so well as getting folks who are interested and engaged to just take on a piece of the program in support of what the boys have planned, and that seems to work better. So instead of having, like, a camping committee with somebody who routinely makes reservations for campsites and tour permits and things like that, we let that rotate amongst people who are willing to take it on for that particular month. That's another idea. It's certainly not a direction on how things should or shouldn't be done, but hopefully it'll give you some pause for thought. There We got through the calendar and we ended up all the way through the spring with commitments on making things happen. The Patrol Leaders Council put together a really interesting program for the year.

I don't have it sitting in front of me. One of the things they did which I thought was interesting: we usually meet on Monday nights. Martin Luther King Day is celebrated on a Monday. What they came up with this year is they wanted to have somebody come to the troop meeting and speak about Dr King.

I thought that was just a wonderful idea, something I'd never made the connection with for and since they have off of school that day, want to also join in and one of the community calls to service that we have on Martin Luther King Day. That's one of several really great ideas that they had at the time.

Just to sell a button on this, we did our calendar review. That started about one o'clock and that took about 45 minutes or an hour. Then we had a little bit of a breakout session where the troop committee went in and discussed things that they needed to think about: Assistant Scoutmasters.

We sat and talked for a while, The Patrol Leaders Council was done for the day, They did a work on troop equipment and then they had it home By three o'clock, we were all done. We started at 9 am, we were out at 3 pm. Things moved along at a pretty fair clip. We kept everybody focused and we didn't digress very much during those meetings and that really helped. That's basically just an overall outline and some of the things that I was particularly interested in about our troop leader summit, and hopefully that'll maybe spur a few ideas, and I would love to hear how you handle planning in your troop and how you put things like this together.

Do you have an annual meeting like this? This is the first time we had everybody with a stake in leadership in the same room at the same time.

It sounds odd, doesn't it? You would think that that would be a very smart thing to do, but we usually have meetings on different days, different times, different nights. Having everybody at the same place at the same time- refreshing.

It was effective and I believe we're going to try it again at least once or twice a year. Hope that helps folks.

Green Hand, Red Ribbon. The scout movement is forming a personal tie between the different foreign countries. A living force, a great brotherhood of service, a joyous work. Green Hand, Red Ribbon. Hey, from the land down under. That's right from Scouts Australia.

I find an interesting article. I thought it had a pretty good slant to it.

Some of the information is stuff that we all share, So this should indicate a couple of things, right. First of all, scouting is basically the same in most of the world.

The scout movement has basically the same thing going on in most of the world, And you know what The concerns and difficulties and challenges are of scout leaders in Australia, about the same as us. You know, boys are about the same, because we will be talking about boy scouting here in Australia. People are about the same and families are about the same and their concerns are going to be basically our concerns. And what I came across was this interesting article on how to kill a scout troop. That's right, you heard me right. This is how to kill a scout troop, And I'm just going to go ahead and read some sections of it, And we'll get it on the blog pretty soon here too.

So why do we have a story on how to do away with a scout troop? Well, it's pretty simple, actually, to help you avoid some of the more common program pitfalls that cause scouts to leave for other activities. See, same problem.

We have that problem here, They have that problem there. You can get away with having one or two of these pitfalls, but more than that, and you're probably leaking far more scouts away from the movement than you should be. Number one: we play the same game every week.

Now, games are fun, And so they should be. However, not everybody likes the same games And there will always be at least one or two scouts who don't really fancy the one you're playing that night. They'll be the first to be wishing they were elsewhere if the same game is played. Meaning after meaning- Variety is a spice of life in your choice of games as in everything else.

So that's the first way to kill a scout troop- is to do the same thing: play the same game every week at your troop meetings. The second way to kill a scout troop is to always work on badges. It's just like school. Too great an emphasis on earning those little bits of embroidered cloth in a school-type environment doesn't go a long way towards holding a scout's interest. Instead, you should be trying to include activities that will cover a badge's requirements almost automatically. When scouts do the things scouts do, scouts advance.

We don't do things to advance, We do things because that's what scouts do, Right? So that's the second.

The third way to kill a scout troop: we go to the same campsite every single month. Go someplace different, Right? If you repeat the same campsite, try not to do the same one, maybe more than twice a year. This way scouts will have a little bit of variety. They may have their favorites and you'll return to them at one point during their scouting career. You don't want your scout staying away because they've been there and done that, Right.

Number four: we always have to do the same thing as the new scouts do. Now, older scouts need some separation from the younger scouts, in part because their social needs are changing. The challenge is in providing a program to fit the needs of two developmental groups at the same time. One way to do that is the older scouts become more involved in the development and operation of troop activities. They should also receive more advanced leadership and skills training. Number five: all of our camps do the same.

No matter where we go, we do the same thing. So you need to- you know, have a varied menu of activities, Not just a varied menu of places, but a varied menu of activities. Do you do the exact same thing every time you go camping. You might want to turn its head every once in a while. Our scouts like an occasional weekend where they go on a camping trip that has no plan. That's right.

You find a campsite on a good weekend, They do their own thing and they really enjoy doing this every once in a while. Number six: we always meet in the same place, and it's really boring.

Now you don't have to meet in the same place week after week after week, Perhaps one meeting a month. You go somewhere else from amongst the many different places available to meet in your community And you know what. That's a really great idea. I gotta tell you that's a really great idea. Not something I really thought of before. But I'm gonna follow up on number six And number seven.

The last one: we're supposed to run the troop, but the adults never let us. Okay, folks, Baden Powell said that the scouts were supposed to manage the troop and we really need to let them do it as advertised.

The thing is, we all know kids the age of our scouts can't really provide all the leadership that's needed, right? That's not true. Of course you need to train your scouts to provide that kind of leadership. Huh, Letting go of much of what you may perceive as your leadership responsibility is hard to do, especially if your troop has been adult-led for a long time.

But your troops best growth and strength will come when you have a youth-led program And these young people can really surprise you with how well they can plan and run things once they are properly trained. Leadership training begins with a scout's investiture into your troop. It's a never-ending process that neither you nor any scout will ever complete while you're together.

Very well said: Leadership, running their program and leading their troop is a big subject with us here at the Scoutmaster blog and on scoutmastercgcom. I just thought that was particularly well worded. That's from Australia, from Scouts Australia.

Seven ways to kill a troop, And of course it's intended so that you'll learn about those pitfalls and hopefully avoid them. That's right. It's time

For a Scoutmasters Minute. We see heroes in movies and we hear about them.

But what is a hero? I think the best definition that I've been able to come up with is that a hero is someone who faces danger and adversity, usually from a position of weakness, and they do it with courage and with the idea that they're going to sacrifice themselves for some greater good. I started thinking about this because, of course, this past weekend we had the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11th 2001..

Now four planes were hijacked by terrorists on that day. Two crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. One was flown into the Pentagon. Flight 93 crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania 20 minutes from its intended target, the Capitol building. I don't think we've thought real hard about what would have happened if the people who were on Flight 93 didn't do what they did. The passengers on Flight 93 made phone calls from the plane after it was hijacked and they were told that the three other planes that morning had been flown into their targets.

They held together in the rear of the plane and they voted. They took a vote to attack the cockpit and take control of the plane, knowing full time that they were probably sacrificing their lives. Soon after they made that vote, soon after they attacked the cockpit, the plane crashed and the attack was thwarted. December 10, 2011,. This past Saturday was the dedication of the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Former President Bill Clinton delivered a short but meaningful speech, and this is what he said.

He said there's always been a special place in the common memory for people who deliberately, knowingly, certainly, laid down their lives so that other people could live. The President then went on to describe how the defenders of the Alamo and the Spartans in the past sacrifice their lives deliberately, knowingly, and certainly. In both instances, the casualties that they took and the time they bought saved the people that they loved. The President then continued on and said: your loved ones just happened to be on a plane, With almost no time to decide. They gave the entire country an incalculable gift. They saved the capital from attack, They saved God knows how many lives and they saved the terrorists from claiming the symbolic victory of smashing the center of American government.

And they did it as citizens. They allowed us to survive as a country that could fight terror and still maintain liberty and still welcome people from all over the world, from every religion, race and culture, so long as they shared our values, because ordinary people, given no time at all, decided to do the right thing.

Now, the citizens on the plane that day: they were men and women and mothers and fathers and children. They were executives, technicians, students, retirees, old, young, black, white Americans and foreign-born visitors. In a moment of time, they overcame any apparent differences with courage, bravery and selflessness and actually achieved the first victory in the war on terrorism. Heroes are made when people do the right thing. They do the right thing because they're prepared mentally, physically and spiritually to respond when the time comes. The opportunity to respond as the passengers on that flight.

That day may come to us, but the opportunity to do the right thing presents itself to us every day, Every day, Sometimes many times a day. What we do as scouts challenges us to be prepared to do the right thing. In mind and body and heart.

We are prepared to respond to the everyday opportunities of life by knowing the right thing to do and then possessing the courage to do it, To be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.