willray

I love the Tootsie Pop idea. That's exactly the kind of insight I'm looking for. The Fireballs idea is pretty good too, but can you think of any way to spread the "eyes" around so that the scouts were watching and rewarding as well as the adults? Despite a scout being Trustworthy, I'm thinking there might be a bit of self-rewarding going on, if they had fireballs to hand out themselves 🙂

That's a valuable two cents, and, exactly why I think it's worth thinking about, and trying to develop some tested and effective ideas for "doing it right". The other folks who gave your SPL positive feedback and weren't heard, weren't trying to be invisible, but somehow failed to leave an impression. If we can learn what works and when - even just in general form - we can build a resource to help people do better. And I hear you about your father. Mine was the same way. I truly treasure the "You did good, Will" memories.

Ok, I guess I was asking for that... But, if you'd like to be even more helpful, consider, if my survey results are anywhere close to accurate, as a community we're doing a pretty poor job of looking for those things. In both of my troops, we have highly dedicated groups of adult volunteers, we're solidly scout-led, and we're still not doing anywhere close to well enough. One possible reason for that is that many of the scouts and adults don't have a clear vision of actions that go with the words. I'm interested in collecting an "idea book" of specifics, for all of us who aren't necessarily as insightful at noticing the right actions as you might be. You might think it's obvious (in general, I think it's fairly obvious too), but think about the number of times you've responded to people here asking for help on the most basic general scouting topics. There are clearly a lot of people for whom your, or my "obvious" isn't. I can build this "idea book" entirely from what I think is obvious, but I hardly think I've got a universal perspective. I'd like input from other people who think they know what "obvious" is, in the hopes that I can help the people who obviously don't think it's so obvious. In addition, while I agree, a kind word from someone (adults and scouts carry rather different, though not necessarily unequal weights), is worth its weight in gold, there's only one of you. To maximize benefit, we need to give your brain to everyone else who has eyes on your scouts. That's where a distributable idea-book comes in.

Sorry for the mild thread necromancy, especially by the new guy on the block, but, if you don't know why explaining the utilities to your house should be exciting to scouts, you've fallen for the bland simplification of scouting that the bureaucrats are selling. (Don't worry, most of the scouts in my troop don't seem to get this either. I'm working on it...) Why would someone think that a scout should know about the services that their family consumes from society? Because a scout is prepared. What is his (or now her) family's plan for when the power goes out? Flashlights? Candles? What if it goes out for 5 days? In the winter? Are they prepared to help others around them, as well as keep their own family safe and well? The requirement is an invitation to think about how _they_ are going to help prepare their family for a disaster. It's a civics lesson couched in an invitation to teen-fantasy heroics. Feed the fantasy. At the same time, you'll help them create a plan for the more likely minor emergencies that their family will encounter, and that probably better than 9 out of 10 families have not planned for. Everybody wins, and you turn what looks like a bland and pointless "assignment" into something fun.

Definitely, the more immediate the feedback, the more effective it will be. Unfortunately there are a couple competing goals here that don't always line up perfectly. Immediate thanks maximize the reward/satisfaction potential, but public rewards maximize the "hey, I want some of that" potential for getting more scouts participating. Public doesn't always allow immediate and vice versa. I'm definitely interested in input regarding how to optimize, and what has worked, or not, with different mechanisms for different units. We're doing out best to turn the "thanking" into a scout-led activity. So for us, it's primarily the scouts doing the thanking rather than the scoutmaster, though as I mentioned initially, there are some things that I think are inescapably on the adults. You bring up an interesting and complicated point about the scout not feeling embarrassed. It's definitely true that we don't want this to be embarrassing. At the same time, learning to accept thanks with grace is a valuable growing experience, and so there's a balancing act to be carried out here. I think it's worthwhile to discuss ideas for walking that tightrope here as well. Yours in Scouting Will Ray

Exactly. So how do we catch’em? What do we look for, and how do we engage the scouts (and adults) in looking? Possibly as interesting, what kinds of things are possibly “conditionally Scoutly”, where the action might be exceptionally scoutly from one scout, and either no big deal, or potentially an ambiguous, neutral, or even un-scoutly behavior from another? Lest you think the last is not possible, remember that BSA is trying to be more inclusive, and cultural norms of courtesy are not universal. Yours in Scouting Will Ray

Greetings all, New-guy to the forum (well, I've been lurking for a few years), but not to Scouting here, looking to gather ideas for an experiment my troop is doing. The request first, details after, so you can just jump past this if you're not interested. Many, many more details if anyone wants to discuss in greater depth later... Requested: * I'm looking for ideas/methods that you may use or have tried in your unit, for noticing when Scouts are living by the Scout Oath, Law, Motto, etc. and ideas/methods that you may have use or have tried for providing recognition for those acts. Any information on ideas that worked, or didn't work, would be most appreciated. * I'm also looking for ideas regarding behaviors that you think are worth noticing and recognizing. Philosophy: Far too many scouts pass through the scouting program without acquiring the lifelong habits of character that the scouting experience is intended to instill. In some cases these are young people for whom the activities of scouting simply held no appeal, but many are scouts who have acquired numerous ranks and badges, yet who still learned only the words, and not their meaning. We have failed these scouts. Whether it is because we have allowed ranks and badges to become prizes to be won, rather than rewards for a job well done, or because it is easy to be lazy about uniforming or flag etiquette when everyone around you is similarly lax, or simply because there is no reward for picking up litter, scout activities that fail to reinforce the Scout Oath and Law as habitual behaviors, are lost opportunities for furthering the BSA vision. Because repetition is habit-forming, I'm working to collect and test a series of approaches for rewarding Scoutly* behavior in a regular, intentional and consistent form, to assist in reinforcing the development of Scoutly behaviors into habits. I'm planning to eventually collate this into some kind of sourcebook of ideas for other units to use if they like. [*] I don't have a better term than "Scoutly" for "habitually possessing of the general characteristics of an exemplary Scout, and acting in accordance with the Scout Oath, Law, Motto and Slogan". Any suggestions for better terms, most gladly accepted! Observations, Thoughts, and Rambling: I asked a large group of Scouts "When is the last time someone thanked you for doing something Scoutly?". The overwhelmingly most popular answer was "I can't remember the last time someone said 'thank you'". That may reflect a large number of Scouts who aren't living by Scoutly values in daily life, but I suspect it's more about a large number of Scouts, Leaders, and Parents, who don't bother to take the time to say "thank you". I think that's sad. Some people will probably argue that Scouts should be living by the Scout Oath, Law, Motto etc. as a matter of course, and since that's "part of their job", they shouldn't expect thanks. It's not a bad argument, if one ignores the fact that a Scout (and presumably Scouter) is Helpful, Courteous and Kind, and that Scouts are generally typically-developing human beings. The Courteous and Kind bit says that we ought to be thanking them, whether they "require" it or not. The Helpful bit hopefully recognizes that human beings require (a lot of) repetition to develop an action into a habit, and, that you get huge biochemical bonuses on creating a habit if you can tickle the brain's reward system (ie, by saying "Thank You") for performing the activity, until the action itself becomes its own reward. The official BSA program only recognizes Scouts for being Scoutly by the awarding of ranks and badges. This is great, I love the program, but, it's not optimized for reinforcing Scoutly behaviors in day-to-day life. The longer you wait between an action and rewarding that action, the less effective the reward is at reinforcing the action into a habit. We are testing a variety of ideas in my troop, that range from campfire "Scoutly Scout" callouts, where anyone who wants to stand up and say "I noticed seniorscoutJohn dropped his gear and went to assist newpatrolleaderTim mentor some younger scouts setting up their tent, Thank you seniorscoutJohn", to troop meeting "Scoutly Challenges" like "Next week, everybody bring in a photo of that yucky spot behind the toilet where the cat-hair collects, and how well you cleaned it, and we'll vote on the most-improved", to campout "Scoutly meta-challenges", like "Each patrol gets a batch of (differently) colored clothes-pins, and they hang them on other patrol's flags when they notice someone in the other patrol doing something scoutly. Both the patrol that received the most clothes pins, _and_ the patrol that gave out the most clothes pins, win prizes at the campfire". I'd be delighted if the whole thing could be scout-run, but I am forced to the conclusion that there are behaviors and actions that are easier for the troop adults to notice, both through simple logistics (we have more luxury of observing activities, rather than participating), and experience/insight (for example, a watchful scouter may recognize the amount of additional effort that a scout with disabilities puts into something that looks trivial to other scouts). We are experimenting with everything from "Thank you" callouts as rewards, to occasional physical prizes. The prizes have so-far been random "swag" that I collect for handing out to the scouts, so hand-sanitizer, sharpening stones, choice of a desert for all the patrols cooked by the adults... Little stuff. I'm open to suggestions on how we might do "bigger stuff", if perhaps there was some way of "collecting rewards by patrol", maybe over a year, or like old grocery-stamp-books where you can trade them in for prizes once their filled up. I'm sensitive to the argument that we shouldn't be "buying" compliance with Scoutly values with rewards, but, at the same time, see my previous commentary regarding reinforcement of activities and generation of habits. Somewhere between no-reward, and too-much-reward, there should an optimum (and honestly, I'm not above bribing scouts into developing good habits as habits, just so long as they come out as actually self-reinforcing habits in the end) I doubt we'll find the optimum precisely, but, it's worth doing a bit of looking. I will say, general reward/reinforcement paradigms say that to optimally reinforce a behavior, you don't want to reinforce it consistently, you only want to reinforce it occasionally, so hopefully the optimal lies somewhere around "occasional and amusing" rewards, rather than "constant/buying-behavior" rewards. And, as just a bit of evidence that this isn't completely insane, our Senior Patrol leader has really taken to this idea and has been running with it for the past 8 months. At a recent campfire "Scoutly Scout" session, one of our traditionally "less Scoutly" scouts raised his hand and thanked the SPL for doing the Scoutly Scout program, because it was making the campouts and participation have a lot more meaning for him. If that's the best I do, I think I'm ok with that. Yours in Scouting, Will Ray