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JiKC, OGE, peri,Sr540 - You have provided some really great examples. I'm not entirely sold that packaging them in an acronym like EDGE get's our boys up to speed any faster. To all of them, I would have added, "have the boys read the relevant section of the handbook ..." Or because tents vary so much, "look for instructions in the tent bag, find a language you can understand, read it." Why? Because because our learners need to have resources for when the teacher isn't there! Shoot, our teachers need to have resources to peek at on a good day!

Try not to let this stuff eat at you, on the bright side ... It doesn't sound like any boys went home crying to mamma, "Mr. Exibar called me a thief!" This keeps it from becoming a bigger production than it really was. You have an opportunity to talk to the older boys about "what went well, what went wrong, what I would do differently?" Maybe after the SPL and JASMs run bed-check on the next campout, you can have them come back to the campfie and discuss a few things in that framework. One of these days there will be a very funny campfire skit about this. You'll be the brunt of some really good inside jokes! P.S. - You probably don't want them to know you've been talking to the likes of us about it.

I get what you're saying. As long as we give the boys 10 camping nights of opportunities, why can't we be called a QU? The point is that the gold category is doing nearly monthly outings. If your troop has the adult leadership available to make many of those Friday+Saturday night, that's awesome! I agree that many boys are not impressed with the QU patch. But I think it does register something with parents who are selecting a troop. When Weblos visit you could pull the parents aside and simply tell them your troop is a "Quality Unit" and even hand them a copy of your tally sheet. Or, you could do just as well handing them the troop calendar. The jury's still out with my Crew and the Venturing standards. I think the officers would like to meet them, which means the standards are better than the previous ones. I don't think they would know what to do with the designation if they earned it.

Massive ditto on what SP just said! The SM has bottom line in this. But, if the boys have a good plan, support it! THEY ACTUALLY ASKED PERMISSION. Like JB said they are according the troop a very high level of respect. This might be a good excuse to get those parents trained. Is there a reason why they haven't taken YPT? If I were so fortunate, I would have the PL file a tour plan with him as tour leader and the APL as assistant tour leader. Push that through council.

Yep, 2 consecutive nites = 1 trip. But, as long as we're trying to push boundaries ... Say a troop has three patrols. Is it 3 trips or 1 or none if they each go on ... a separate overnight in the same weekend separate overnights on different weekends in the same month separate overnights on different weekends throughout the year. What if one gung-ho patrol pulls off 3 independent overnights while the other two only do day hikes? And please, no tour plan/GSS rants! There's a thread for that. Let's just assume that the troop has enough adults nutty enough to set up camp 100 yards from each patrol on the weekends they camp out.

I would have responded as you, without the oath and law sharade. Rather than lining them up, sit them down in a circle. You expect boys to be trustworthy. On a hike communication is important. "If you didn't pack it in for yourself, don't assume you can have it." Tell them you'll be at your tent, and as soon as you know where your Mt. Dew went, you'll start on cobbler #2. If it was the CC who downed the two cans, public humiliation is in order!

Ya Ea. I've met a few SM's who retired from the Advisor business a couple years after they were leaned on by a DE to start a crew. We, on the other hand, were leaned on by a few young women who wanted to do the high adventure that the scouts at their lunch table were talking about. Scouterabouter, in which category does your crew fall? Another question: what is your crew's favorite service project?

And you're also crew advisor? It sounds like until you get more folks to hold the different essential positions, you don't need another committee. Maybe you could have three joint committee meetings spread throughout the year (e.g. pack-troop, troop-crew, pack-crew). This would be instead of the regular individual committees. That way you aren't asking anyone to add another meeting to their schedule, but you are making sure that folks get introduced to the adults from other units as a matter of course. Also, how are the older youth involved in this? For example, the crew QM and troop QM should be putting up a roster for scout hut duties. Crew VP Program and troop SPL or ASPL should have a major say in the end of year campout. Your Crew President should be making a report to the Charter Org (ours does that formally at Scout Sunday). The clearer it becomes how the youth are expected to cooperate, the easier it becomes for committees to work together.

My crew being one of those closely related to a partner troop, I guess we've been cooking up disaster for the past 6 years! One of the ways we've "dodged bullets" is to make very clear to the troop that enrolling in the crew is not automatic. I invite 8th grade boys once at the end of the year. The first step is to fill out *your own* youth application. The only thing they are to do is get their parent's signature. I give out a lot of applications, but don't follow up and don't worry about getting them back. This keeps our older boys from feeling like they have to commit to more than they can handle. This means we lean on other youth as our recruitment base. Works: Active members recruiting friends. Set aside one or two evenings a year for an open house involving a campfire or picnic. Works half-way: Asking active venturers to invite younger sibs coming of age. Hardly ever works: Boys inviting girlfriends to join for a night camping! What I found is our crew can provide a unique service by holding campfires throughout the summer (even on Halloween). We devote about 15 minutes to going over program. The rest of the time is spent watching wood burn. A lot of youth show up, (parents are ok with girlfriends going out to a supervised evening) a few eventually sign on. Obviously your youth will have their own specialty activity that would fit into an evening. Just like scouts, have a fun program, attract youth. Beyond that, unless the youth have told you THEY want to make recruiting a priority, it wont fly.

Lbob, Do us all a favor and don't try to recruit E61. I'll happily live with a dad's second guessing and anxieties, but not his misery! If he'll drop us off at the edge of a canyon and be there waiting somewhat patiently for when we come back, I'll take it! I'm fine if adults who weren't there jump on my case for adjusting hike plans at the last minute. Every now and then the armchair quarterbacks are right. E61 - No. An adult isn't required to be in each canoe. I usually keep the adults together. (My experience is they are the ones more likely to roll their boats!) If two boys are struggling, I may have one swap with an adult boat until they get their strokes down. But, each canoe should have a buddy boat. And who's in which boat should be accounted for pretty tightly. Sounds like the best thing you could do for the boy is keep him in the program, but let him know that you're not sweating the advancement stuff (just his safety)! When he's back in town, offer to drive his patrol to a ball game or something.

K, As much as I sympathize with your view of BSA leadership training as post-modern jingoism. I'm really not interested in EDGE as it pertains to a concept like patrol method -- even if it were in the syllabus old school style. We need to know its impact on youth as it pertains to teaching a scouting skill. You and I can claim it has none. Beav can challenge it's compliance to best practices. We might demonstrate its uselessness in adults learning methods of scouting. But, all of that would not speak to the environment where it's explicitly required to be implemented.

Here's a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone first night pseudo-campfire suggestion ... Have everyone's cell phones cycle through a bunch of background picks. Toss them in the middle of the circle. Tapping the buttons to keep them lit replaces the throwing logs on. Lights out once the batteries are dead. Then for the rest of the weekend you don't have to worry about regulating that electronic devices ban!

Guy, You almost had me there. April fools to you. Now, by way of testimonial from the opposite camp, one SM of ours had a dreadful fear of public speaking. (I had no clue until the first Court of Honor that we let him lead.) This guy has a lot of outdoor skills, but was really intimidated by the concept of teaching. He appreciated having EDGE in his head because it gave him an outline of what he needed to do to instruct kids. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences, but this is anecdotal evidence. What I'd really like to see is some trial, maybe at summer camp. Randomly assign 1st years to EDGE-training or some alternative (maybe even no training), teach them a scout skill. Then have them teach the skill to Webelos. Quiz the Webelos the following day and see if there is a significantly higher rate of skill-retention in the group taught by EDGE-educated scouts. Why do this? Because for every other skill, I can explain to a boy its importance. (E.g., why talking to a community leader about rights and responsibilities is better than showing me a grade report on your civics test, why "Reach, Throw, Row" is likely to save your life, why a sloppy lashing is going to make your trebuchet fail.) Life experience tells me that meeting these requirements helps one integrate into their community, forestall death, launch projectiles farther. But, I can't explain why a boy being able to decipher an acronym is going to do any better than a boy just spending time helping his brother until he learns it. If I can say to a boy "Weblos taught by scouts using EDGE scored higher on their knot test. So learning EDGE will make you a more efficient instructor." Well, that would be a game-changer.

Aw buc, At least whatever these posters are saying is there for everyone else to judge. (Note that some have gotten flamed with more vitriol than you could stir up on your own.) The sad part about troop and crew life is this stuff goes on behind the leader's back. It's in plain English, it's more divisive than you could ever imagine, and it shuts the kids down because they're old enough to know what's being said, but not old enough to assert themselves and put us all in line. Some the scuttlebutt takes years to resolve. So if we're treating your "Chatty Kataryzna's" like a molehill when you think it's a mountain, it's because some of us think we'd be better off trading a problem like yours for one of ours. Fact is, you are well within your rights to pick and choose which advice (even down to the "PC or not" arguments) applies to you. Just 1. remember the cubs are listening, and 2. let us know how it plays out for you in the long run. Never know when our "mountain" might look an awful lot like your "molehill"!

E61, I am a little nervous the times I am not out with my boys -- especially the youngest who has had asthma his whole life. (Oldest is in college -- takes the girlfriend on wilderness outings with the youth fellowship, so now I'm nervous for her, too!) That's why I said understanding the SM's "risk equation" is so important. Unfortunately, that involves time around campfires getting to know the man (and his assistants). You may get answers of why he did what he did at a committee meeting or some other venue, but the tone may be different. How my parents could drum up the courage to just trust me to my SM, I'll never know. (Of course being the youngest child, they were battle-hardened.) One of our dads did make a serious bonehead move on a hike a while back. The boys were furious at him. When he reviewed it with me I replied, "Well, at least it's not me they're mad at for once." A seasoned adult leader should be used to a little humble pie. If you're able to approach him in a friendly tone, he should be able to talk to you about the incident: what went wrong, what went right, and what he would do differently.

The "who" should probably be documented on your council's annual report. Chances are the name and number is on the campership application form. The "how much" should be a line item on your council's budget, unless managed as a separate fund. If that's the case then it would be on the income/expense report. And as E92 mentioned, that could in several places depending on how your council is organized. Your's is an important question. Every year I hand out our church financial report to my 3rd-5th grade Sunday school class. I tell them, "This is the one document that you should use to decide where you will worship on a regular basis."

I agree that waiting for kids to grow out of the middle-school drama-every-minute behavior is what makes the Venturing program work as a co-ed thing. The 14-16 year old "flirt" (male or female) can be confronted by older youth and brought in line. The 12-13 year old typically is getting too much of a rise out of the attention (negative or positive) to realize that there's a need to cut the act and get with the program! Bottom line: lacking moms who will push for a culture change, nothing is going to happen. And this nation still has plenty of moms who are very happy with the GS-USA culture for lil' Mary and the BSA culture for Bobby. We only have a minority of girls who feel they should be immersed in the BSA ethos. Moreover, when a venturing young lady starts with the anti-GS speach (most of them have at least one), we instruct them to tone down the rhetoric and do something constructive like promote our next super-activity. Bottom line: Unless there's a groundswell of youth who look around them and say, "Hey, things could be different," things aren't changing. And I don't see a lot of US boys (or girls) who consider the co-ed programs of other nations as anything more than a curiousity. Seriously, do any of you have BS Troops asking their SM's why the Jr. High girls can't come around?

Or, you could tell a kid: Read the handbook, have them read the handbook, do the handbook, have them do the handbook. Why? Because the purpose of the knots (and anything you need to explain) IS IN THE HANDBOOK. RTHHTRTHDTHHTDTH is not a catchy mnemonic, but it doesn't need to be. And because it's content laden, I'll warrant it's easier to remember. But I'm just guessing. Where are those education grad students looking for a research study?

F.Y.I. - I had two very responsible parents, and I got bullied my first year in my troop. So, don't blame it on the single parent thing. The bullies didn't back off, but more of us stood up to them. Eventually they left, we stayed. The SM tried to maintain discipline. I don't know if he talked to my parents or not. From my perspective it didn't work. On the other hand, I stayed, they left. I had experienced bullying before scouts. My mom's advice, "stop whining, get big." I didn't quite know what to do with that at the time she gave it, but she did raise three older boys and one girl, so I figured there was no point in disagreeing. At the same time she let the bullies know in no uncertain terms that expected better from them. Somehow it all worked out.

bt - Choosing the right number of partners is part of the hike plan, isn't it? I see nothing precluding family hikes. However, I would encourage the boy to team up with another youth or two in his community to work on this. They might appreciate the company. (You didn't hear me say girlfriends, but ...) As Beav's post indicates, summer may be no less perilous than winter, and a partner who can't see identify heat stroke or hypothermia would do you no good. So you want to teach the boy to aim for quality, not a certain number.

Peri - References are a fairly modern thing. They require written language. We've been teaching as a species long before we had writing. .... (I've seen no evidence that cave paintings were instructional.) Well, since we don't know who was allowed to look at the paintings, we don't know how instructional they were. I'm only speculating there. So, yes as a species with implicitly EDGE-type methods, we all got along quite nicely before cuneiform. (at least until the ripe old age of 40, the half of us who didn't die in infancy, but who knew it there were ways to beat that gambit?) Modern, as in civilization-as-we-know-it modern? Just a generation (600 B.C.) before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, Josiah instuted what would later become the synagogue model of teaching young men in the absence of a temple. From that point forward Jewish (and Christian) history was riddled with the use of references for instruction. Pliny the Elder's natural histories were so first century, but people refered to them. Lost to us was a treatise of his on "Throwing a Javelin from a Horse," but I'm pretty sure the Roman calvary gave it a read -- much to their enemies' dismay. Arabs (and many other Eastern cultures) were very referential in their learning. (Read one or two Hadiith and you'll get the idea. Each is a saying so-and-so son of so-and-so brother of so-and-so heard from the Prophet.) They built hospitals and astrolabes and wrote travel documentaries and propogated symbolic arithmetic. For Europe, on the other hand, it was The Dark Ages. Folks were mostly illiterate and taught non-referentially. Life was on the EDGE, literally. I'm pretty sure that I don't want to throw my kids back in the dark ages. We teach our own kids skills (using similar methods to EDGE) long before they can use a reference. Maybe until they're eight -- and that's only if we discount TV as a reference. After that they get a book from the library or an article online, and start explaining to ME what I should be doing! I'll grant reference require's literacy. But I think that's the point. If a boy knows "reference" is an important part of teaching a skill, he'll know that his ability to read and interpret are important parts of learning a skill.

And Beav, I'm not joking. I decided to get off of my high horse and make sure I understand what people are thinking when they promote this "made up poppycock". Why? Because my scouts are critical thinkers, and sooner or later one or two of them will ask the "what's the point" question. Even if I don't believe it, I want to be able to give them some useful background so that they know why some people do.

Peri, Thanks for the article. It's not exactly what I wanted but it was very insightful. But here's the rub ... based on your last comment -it's really no different than people have been teaching other people from the beginning of humankind (except of course for the catchy mnemonic) Well, actually it is. Because from the beginning of humankind we've been making references (cave paintings, wall diagrams, statues, books, blogs, ...) that were central to skill acquisition. Or, at least we thought they were. By omitting "reference" (or handbook, in the case of teaching scout skills) EDGE implies that that step is non-essential. The question remains, were we being inefficient by telling kids to involve reading a reference as part of skill acquisition/imparting? Will kids be taught just as well not learning to take that step at some point in their teaching process? Further questions are: Is EDGE too much of a deviation from deDICT for the sake of maintaining an nmemonic? Do kids without the mnemonic teach as successfully as kids who've been given it? OGE, I guess you've figured out that I'm interested in the teaching method. (BTW, I'm the kid who learned all of the FC knots from the book before my first meeting -- except taught-line hitch.)

On the bright side, you got 13 more crossovers than we did this year.

Does anyone have a bibliography on the EDGE method? I've decided to stop being an armchair skeptic until I've learned how it does or does not improve a person's teaching ability. I tried Google scholar. "Trainer's EDGE" comes up with a couple of books on computer and distance instruction. "EDGE Method" brings up lots of articles in physics and math. Nothing to do with pedagogy. Is it out there under another name? What would really be interesting is some type of randomized trial. What would be gravy is if the trial involved 12 - 15 year old instructors and learners.