Scoutmaster Podcast 98

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. We were camping last weekend and I was sharing a tent with one of my assistant Scoutmasters. Before he batted down He took two coins out of his pocket and he put them under his pillow. I saw that and I said it's kind of interesting.

But the next night he did it again, Took two coins out of his pocket, put them under his pillow And I said: you know, I saw you do this last night and doing it tonight. I got to know why And I said: well, those are my sleeping quarters, Those are my sleeping quarters. They don't seem to be getting any better. It's podcast number 98.. Clark, this is Chad Fisher. In Little Own, Texas,

I'm a varsity coach for Team 63.. Just listening to podcasts 97 from the advancement team. First of all, Gray podcast. I don't know how anybody couldn't love the new guide for advancements, because it essentially takes all the power away from those rogue scout leaders and puts all the power back to the boy to have a boy-led Eagle Scout project and a boy-led advancement process in scouting. I get straight. I love it.

I'm grateful for it. Thanks, Clark, Hi, Hey, This is Clarke Green. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. Thanks for getting in touch, Chad.

I'm glad you enjoyed the interview we did about the guide to advancement. Let's take a look in the mailbag here and see who else got in touch. Frank Maynard wrote: I enjoyed the chat with the advancement team members. Their insight into the types of cases that make it up to the national level was interesting, as was hearing about the process that went into rewriting the guide to advancement. Tim Begley wrote and he said: I'm a scouting volunteer since 1999, currently finishing my second year as Scoutmaster for our troop in Omaha, Nebraska. I found your podcast website last week and have found a great deal of information that I find very useful.

Thank you and keep up the great work. Well, thank you, Tim. Thanks for the kind words. A particular interest was your recent podcast about the Patrol Leaders Council. I'm discussing your views with other leaders and getting their feedback.

Can you point me to a podcast or other resources where you discuss the senior patrol leader Our troop currently appoints one? Many of our adult scouters are adamant that it remain that way. Personally, I'd like to see it become an elected position. Your direction is appreciated.

I've been picking and choosing from the most recent podcast, but I think it would take a long time to get through them all To write about that. Tim, there's 98 now, Hey, with this one there's 98.. That means in two podcasts we're going to be at big podcast number 100.. Tim, what I'd suggest you do is listen to the podcast where I interviewed the authors of Working the Patrol Method.

I think it's somewhere in the 40s there. I'll make sure to have a link to it in the post that contains this podcast, And I also got to recommend the book that they wrote.

I think it's. You know, it's a great piece of work and it will give you a really great overview of the patrol system, the senior patrol leaders job and how to operate from a boy run perspective.

So I think that would probably be some of the most useful information that I have online to help you out there. Thanks for being in touch and thanks for your encouragement and kind words, Always appreciated. In this edition of the Scoutmaster podcast, we're going to have in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, a discussion about the patrol leaders council and planning.

This is one of those perennial subjects that we need to keep on discussing because it's one of the more difficult things to get right. I know I'm still working at it, as most people who are running a successful scout troop out there.

We keep working at planning and training our youth leadership and mentoring them through the process, And there was a Google plus discussion that I think we're going to find useful and we're going to listen to that and Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Then we're going to move on to a quick email question about the requirements for arrow of light applying to the scout rank, to the scout badge rank.

So I think that's going to be enough for this podcast. Let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. So if you haven't joined the exclusive Scoutmaster CG circle over on Google plus, go to Google plus, look for Scoutmaster CG and add me to your circle and I will reciprocate and add you to the Scoutmaster CG circle. There's been some good discussions and back and forth and questions being asked over on Google plus and I wanted to make you prove it. In one of those questions and some of the answers that came in about them, Todd Grady on Google plus wrote this. He said: while our Scouts are very active and enthusiastic, their ability to plan and follow through is sorely lacking.

So I'm going to stop there for a second and I'm going to let everybody nod their heads in appreciation- Yes, that is true of 99.99% of the people who are listening here. Their Scouts are very active and enthusiastic, but their ability to plan and follow through is sorely lacking. You're not alone. All right, let me get back to Todd's question here. We hold a yearly planning conference and the Scouts come up with a great schedule for the year, But if it weren't for the adult leaders, the events would never come close to happening.

Every month we have to walk the youth leaders through every detail of making a camp out happen. We're always down to the wire, organizing transportation and food and things like that. When we still manage to make the events happen, it's a stressful experience and it's mostly carried out by the adults.

So my question is, as adult leaders and mentors, how can we guide these Scouts to do a better job of organizing events? I've tried making a point by letting them fail, which only results in hikes and camp outs being canceled, But that only results in a poor program and it didn't seem to have much impact on them.

My desire is that we have a rich outdoor program that's planned and executed by the Scouts. I do understand they can't do everything, but they're not Cub Scouts anymore either. We do train our new leaders. I have an active outdoor coordinator and celebral, very involved assistant Scoutmasters.

My answer back to Todd was basically I think it's three words: time, patience and persistence. This does not happen overnight And just because we train youth in these things, training has nothing to do with the development of skill. Let me say that again. Training really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the development of skill. Training basically gets people OK.

So this is how it works. Now you know, go out and give it a try a few times. That's where the development of the skill comes in.

So I think sometimes we could lessen our frustrations by having a realistic expectation of exactly what training will do for us. Training will do for us very little if the concepts and the practices that we work on in training don't get put into practice and build over a incremental period of time. Time, patience and persistence is what's going to make it happen.

Now, if things are really off the rails and not going quite so well- which my sense is that they're going OK- It's just a little aggravating because boys don't plan very well. They're horrible planners. They really are, And this is. You have to make up your mind that this is one of the things that you're going to deal with, And the way that you get them to start thinking about planning is you get them to start thinking. And the way you get them to start thinking is by asking them questions.

So if you sit down with your senior patrol leader and you say here's the list of things that have to happen for this camp out, how are you going to make it happen? And then get very specific, Keep asking questions until you've drilled down to his thinking through a specific plan, If you hand him a sheet of paper with a plan on it or some kind of planning matrix where he fills in the blanks, it's not going to work very well. Get him to start thinking in small, incremental steps about each piece of the plan by asking questions, And that will really start to work. Trust me, it will really start to work. It will take repetition, patience, persistence and repetition, but it will work. After you've done this, after you've sat down and you've questioned the senior patrol leader about what his plans are, how he's making them, how has he recorded them, suspend judgment and observe what happens next.

Don't judge. And it's hard to do because you're emotionally involved with your program. If you're the Scoutmaster, it's your troop and your program and you're going to be emotionally involved in its success. But what you have to do is you have to kind of suspend that judgment and just observe, as if you are an anthropologist in a blind watching a herd of antelopes somewhere. That's what you want to do And see what happens. OK, And you'll see more if you take up that observer position.

All right, Study the communications, what the scouts say to each other, look for the least little bit of success or initiative and then step out of the blind and encourage them. Hey, I was really happy to see that you guys were talking about transportation and it's three weeks ahead of the event. That's really great. If you need any help with that, make sure to let us know. I really appreciate that you are thinking ahead, Little pats on the back like that. Study that and analyze it and discuss your findings with the other people involved, with the troop, your assistant Scoutmasters, and see what you can do to keep advancing the cause.

Tiny steps, tiny steps. This all happens incrementally over weeks, months, years, as you build your confidence in the scouts and you build their skills, And each successive group that has this set of responsibilities it's going to be adding just little bits at a time And then, once they become competent, it's time for them to move on in the next group to take over. As I said, as laudable as training is, as good as it is, it's only the beginning of a very long process And we're tempted to think that train means skills, but, as I said before, it doesn't. Train means they have the information, but they certainly haven't learned how to use it. I like what Sean Cleary had to say. He added in: he says it's kind of like the old Johnny Cash song, one piece at a time.

Yeah, if you remember that song, it's about a guy who works, I think, at an auto assembly plant and he builds his own car by taking a piece of the car from the plant home every night and, you know, ends up with his own car after a while. The Scouts really want to do these things. This is what Sean said. He Scouts want to do these tasks, but they don't really know where to begin.

We've been doing this for so long, We don't really know any different And we just have to reach out and help them and do it one piece at a time. Okay, Jack Thornton added this.

He said, let's face it, if all we were concerned with were successful activities, we wouldn't need the Scouts to be involved in making them happen. All right, Jack had that's a really great insight there. Let me read that again: If all we are concerned with is successful activities, we wouldn't need the Scouts to be involved in making them happen.

The reason that we're going camping, the reason we're having meetings, the reason there's something to plan, is not so that the end product- that camping trip, the meeting, whatever, that's not the end product that we're looking for. We want that to happen, but the end product is the process of planning.

Jack goes on to say: since our goals are not activity focused, we can afford to step back and let mistakes happen, as long as they're not health and safety issues and we coach and counsel those involved so they learn what went wrong and how to avoid them in the future. I added: I'd also want you to take an honest, long look at how the adults are involved in the process. It sounds like there's probably a little bit of hovering going on Now. Todd, that's not a criticism. It's just an observation. I deal with this in my troop all the time.

You may have set a precedent that the adults will, in the end, step in and fix everything. You also note that it's stressful. This means there's some kind of resentment and possibly anger involved and at a minimum, there's some frustration involved. Scouts are always going to defer to adults. Scouts are always going to defer to adults. If an adult is in the room, Scouts are looking at him to see what he's going to say next.

If an adult is supposed to help the scout plan, guess who's going to end up doing the planning? Most of the time, The adult Scouts are going to defer to them. They're trained to do that.

Okay, That's the way that they have been brought up. You may have too many voices advising them and they're getting cross signals, or they may be so confused and kind of dispirited about the whole thing that they simply are going to wait until you guys step in and fix things. I had this kind of an issue on our last backpacking trip.

Four very helpful adults separately advised the senior patrol leader on how to filter water at our Saturday campsite and each time he got some advice about it he changed his plans to suit them and by the time he- you know he listened to the fourth adult, advised him about that, he was pretty confused and he wasn't really sure what to do. And at that point he kind of said: look, you know, why don't you guys just do it? If you're going to come and tell me how to do this all the time, you guys can go, just do it.

Now he didn't actually say that, but his actions reflected that attitude. And standing orders for adults are nobody but the Scoutmaster or his go-to designee advises or instructs youth leaders in the field, unless there's an intimate danger to health and safety.

That's really, really important because otherwise, you know, there's a lot of people who want to be helpful, there's a lot of helpful advice and sometimes it can go across purposes with each other and you want to watch out that you're not confusing the scouts and that you're not putting adults in places where they're going to be automatically deferred to by the scouts. And even though you know I talk about this all the time here, even though I write about it, even though I think about it all the time, hey, we still all have our share of these difficulties and problems and these difficulties and problems are scouting. They are scouting. They're not something to be eliminated.

This is the way that it works: Imperfect plans halting difficult plans, you know things that don't come out as they're supposed to. That's the process that we want our scouts to go through and that's what we want them to learn from.

So persistence, patience, perseverance. Do it over and over and over again. Ask a lot of questions, do a lot of talking, hand out praise and add a boys like they were candy. Make sure that you always tell the guys when they do a good job and over time things will develop and you'll get what you're looking for, Todd. You'll get that kind of thing where they're doing more planning than not and they're making successful steps in going through the process. That is really at the heart of scouting.

This email came in from a listener asked to remain anonymous. He said: here's something that I thought when I was paging through the Cub Scout section of the New Guide to Advancement. In section 4, there's a statement that says this: We Below Scouts who have earned the Arrow of Light Award have also completed most of the requirements for Scout Patch. This can easily be completed and presented when the boy has joined the troop and the Scoutmaster has signed for the accomplishment in the Boy Scout Handbook.

Now my listener goes on to say: I interpret that to mean that since these requirements were already completed and approved by his We Below's den leader, the boy does not need to repeat them in front of the troop for credit towards the Scout Badge. About the only thing he needs to do with the troop is have a Scoutmaster's Conference and complete the child protection exercises in the front of his handbook with his parents. Yet in some cases there seems to be a notion that the troop needs to spend endless time getting them to scout. After they cross over, the new boys are assigned to work with current Scouts, going over things like the Scout Sign and the Handshake, relearning the Oath and Law and trying a Square Knot.

They sometimes wait until all the We Below Scouts have crossed over before beginning the process and then they have cases where six months later the boy still hasn't been recorded as a Scout because those requirements weren't signed off. Here's the way I think it should happen. A We Below Scout with his Arrow of Light Badge- his Scout Book had a completed application which was given to him at his Arrow of Light ceremony- shows up at the troop meeting. During that first troop meeting he has a conference with the Scoutmaster, who reviews the joining requirements with him and checks to see if the parent exercises have been completed. The Scoutmaster signs his book, notifies the advancement chair and informs the senior patrol leader that there is a new Scout who should be recognized at the end of the troop meeting. As long as everything is in order, he should walk out of that very first troop meeting with a Scout badge in hand.

Anything less than that, and it seems like we're throwing road blocks in his way. So, Clark, what's your take on the applicability of Arrow of Light requirements toward the Scout badge and how do you handle it in your troop?

Well, I really appreciate you, having been in touch, for pointing this out again, and this has always been true. Let me re-read the exact wording of that sentence from the Guide to Advancement. We Below Scouts who have earned the Arrow of Light Award have also completed most of the requirements for Scout badge.

This can easily be completed and then presented when the boy has joined a troop and the Scoutmaster assigned the accomplishment in the Boy Scout Handbook. So here's my take: If a boy comes with the Arrow of Light badge.

I think I would probably want to start handling it exactly as you describe it. Make it quick, simple and easy. There's no reason for a boy who's already earned this learned the Scout Oath, because most of them will come having memorized the Scout Oath and the Scout law at one point.

Okay, but if you remember, for the Scout badge it doesn't say have it memorized, It doesn't say repeat it from memory. It says understand and intend to live by the Scout Oath and law.

Yeah, so we're not- hopefully not- making them recite the Scout Oath and law for the Scout badge. All right, and you're right That Scout badge should appear lickety-split. It should happen within the first couple of meetings that a boy comes to join your troop, And that can happen whether he is a We Below Scout with an Arrow of Light or a boy who's just kind of come right off the street and joined your troop.

And you're exactly right- I think a lot of times we put too much emphasis on dragging that out for an unknown reason- That Scout badge should get in his hands and get on his uniform as soon as possible. How do I handle it in my troop?

Well, now that I've read this and you've reminded me of this pretty darn poorly, to tell you the truth. So I am now armed- and I really appreciate your reflection on that- And now I am armed with some renewed information so that when we approach having the We Blows crossover and join our troop, we're going to get those guys with the Arrow of Light and we're going to make sure that we get them their Scout badge right away. And we're going to get the guys without the Arrow of Light and we're going to make sure that they get their Scout badge right away. And whenever any boy joins the troop, he's going to get that Scout badge just as soon as possible.

So that was a great year in mind here and I really appreciate it. I hope that helps everyone else too.