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I get this email fairly often;
‘I have been reading what you have to say about the patrol method and youth leadership buy MY Scouts don’t seem to get it. We’ve done youth leader training and even sent them to NYLT but they just don’t lead.
What are we doing wrong?’
It’s not that you’re doing something wrong – its just that you may have misunderstood the difference between training and experience.
Growing leaders starts with training but it only starts there.
Experience is what makes a leader.
Experience comes from
| Experimentation | Accomplishment | Ordeals |
| Familiarization | Triumph | Testing |
| Repetition | Acheivement | Baptism of fire |
| Participation | Fulfilment | Endurance |
The finest training in the world can only mimic the actual process of experience.
Man, there’s a lot of good stuff going on out there in Scouting land!! I love hearing this stuff from you guys.
We’re going to our spring camporee the weekend after this one. We have two patrols, one of 6 and one of 4. The SPL and ASPL are each in their original patrols. Three boys have conflicts and won’t be there, our oldest Scout is going to go with our Crew.
They will cook by patrols, but they decided to make a master troop menu. Nothing too fancy but all my boys are 10, 11, 12 and with just crossed over to a little under a year and a half in the troop as an experience range. It’s a little more ambitious than the Green Bar patrol menu from the last trip but not much. I’m going to enjoy watching each patrol solve their problems on their own when I’m not out doing WB staff training (who schedules these things?!).
Training is good, but experience puts the shine on it.
John
“Confidence, not fear, through training.” – A sign on the wall of a classroom in the Ft. Knox Gunnery Dept.
Conduct youth leader training for ALL the boys, not just the “leaders”, have them work through the experience as patrols, don’t create “training patrols”. Remind them that patrols are about interdependence; shared leadership and shared responsiility.
Let them chose their own patrols, and don’t meddle in it. In our troop of 20 the patrols are 4, 4, 5, and 7, yes I’d like to see one less patrol but that’s not my place. Once they have their patrols help them create and maintain their identities.
It may be cheaper and easier to combine the troop for meals, don’t do it, meals are the most basic building block of the patrol method, and don’t let adults “help” the scouts by making sure they make a decent meal. Are they going to burn food? Yes, we have a patrol that still talks about their “e-coli burgers” from 4 years ago. Beyond meals have them do things as patrols, but when things go wrong don’t step in, find your SPL and together watch to see what happens and how they handle it. Afterwards, along with the SPL, review the activity and what happened, but don’t give answers, ask questions, let them find the answers.
Finally, give your leaders real responsibility; for troop issues talk to the SPL, don’t go around him and deal with things yourself. Work with him when coaching the troop level leaders and Patrol Leaders, discuss ideas and outcomes first, then let him take the point in the conversation.
Youth leadership is not easy to watch, my inner Marine Staff NCO keeps telling me to step in and get it done right, thankfully he seldom wins. Learn to reinforce the positive results, build upon the leadership you do see, and keep telling yourself it a process and not a product. Step back and coach through the troop level leaders, don’t lead yourself. Who cares if they didn’t finish the pioneering project, they still learned and used the lashings AND if they lead the project learned some lessons on how to lead.
Since November I have had some new scouts join, and it is practically a new troop. Some boys have returned to the troop, so we are up to 10 boys on paper, with maybe 6 at any given meeting or outing. The leader is one of the new guys, selected by the patrol.
I have since November been using the EDGE method as a guide in the leadership training. The first month of the boys service, I said, “Stand beside me and watch what I do up here at the front.” The second and third months, I said “I will stand beside you, and you do the talking.” Now, I am sitting at the back of the room. As shown on the troop meeting plan form, he has three things to accomplish. A game, a patrol “business” meeting (for menu planning and the like), and a scout skill (he is supposed to line up a teacher, and has the authority to ask an adult, an older scout, a dad, etc.)
Things do get chaotic up there. He had “paint the patrol flag” for one of his meeting goals one time. But he did not ask the adult who had the key to our supply closet to bring the key, and the adult forgot to bring it. The scout had to drop back and punt. He did all right. But I did not jump in and take over.
Clark is right about the adult being the one they look to if that adult is in the room. I have taken to sending the patrol into an adjoining class room to do their patrol business. It does take longer, but I have seen them get it done. We seem to have breakfast burritos every campout,, since they now know how to make them, and they just like them.
I like the EDGE approach you applied – very smart!
Larry,
That’s an excellent commentary and very similar to a discussion that I have with my parents every year. It’s difficult for them to sometimes deal with staying in the background and being quiet. What I tell them is that they boys won’t do it the way they would, it probably won’t look as good and the process will look like a combo of chaos and pandemonium and that’s EXACTLY how it’s supposed to look.
Guide them, ensure that they’re safe then get out of the way.
Only when you fully understand “boy led” do you realize that all that ugliness and confusion is actually the beauty of Scouting.
Well done Mike! Learning to see past the hurly-burly to see what’s actually going on is a big step forward for all of us.
The person that writes that email has one of two problems:
1. They are leading but you adults won’t get out of the way.
2. They are leading but you adults don’t recognize it.
This is a difficult concept to get used to, particularly number 2. You may be seeing leadership, even excellent leadership, but you just don’t recognize it. How does that happen? You have probably seen myriad examples of leadership in real life, on TV and in books. You know what leadership looks like. You saw the movie “Patton”. You’ve watched John Wayne and Chuck Norris. You work for a company that has “real” leaders! You know.
No, you probably don’t know. The Scouts just took four hours to make breakfast. They took an hour to organize 21 guys into patrols and they didn’t do it very well. At least it doesn’t look good to you. They just don’t teach axe yard as well as Mr. Smith. (Mr. Smith happens to own a logging company.) We need to get a doctor in here. You should see how they taught the first aid skills. Good grief. They planed 15 activities for the last campout but only got 4 of them done. Bunch of slackers!
Here is the key: the result that they like will NOT look like the result you like and want. They just aren’t going to do it like an adult leader would. That melee over there that you are watching is a bunch of guys learning how to lead. Think of it as pre-school. What you are seeing is a pre-schooler writing her name for the first time. Letters all over the paper. Letters upside down and backwards. She likes it AND she gets postitive reinforcement for it! Oh, good grief. What is our educational system coming to?
Picture baby steps. How often did your son fall down when first learning to walk? Once? It’s like walking. You can’t “train” a child to walk. You can hold their hand a bit but eventually they must cross the floor on their own. Otherwise, they aren’t really walking.
Hold their hands. Stand next to them a bit. Eventually, however, step back and let them go. They will promptly fall on their faces. It’s ok. Let the other guys pick them up and carry on. Stand back. Way back.
Do you have a picture of the perfect troop, or perfect troop meeting in your mind? Get rid of it. Stop imagining what might be. You’re not smart enough to figure out all of the interactions between 21 Scouts and their leaders and what the perfect result should be. At no time in the history of mankind have these 21 individual ever assembled together. You are only smart enough to tell them what Scouting is all about and what the rules are. They draw the picture.