Fast Track -One Stop Training.

[Eamonn]

A parent of a Sea Scout serves as a Trainer in another Council.

As ever there was a clash of dates between a Ship activity and the date of the Spring Training that this District /Council is presenting. He is a presenter and his son is a participant.

He explained to me that they have combined all the Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmaster Training courses into one weekend.

Friday Night NLE is done and the Specific and Outdoor Skills have been combined and are covered starting Saturday and ending on Sunday.

I think while this does save time, the participants are being short changed.

I'm not a great lover of the Specific course.

Mainly because the participants have to sit for way too long. It is a nine hour course.

The Outdoor Skills course is a good one, but for people new to Scouting who have never learned the skills, trying to get them feeling at ease to be able to teach our Scouts the skills in a weekend is hard.

If anything I'd like to see both course combined and spread over two weekends!!

Is this new "One Stop Training" becoming the norm?

Does it work?

I know when it comes to basic skills I tend to be a bit of a stick in the mud!!

Ea.

[emb021]

I don't believe in shortchanging training, but considering the previous courses for SM were one weekend, what is the problem?

 

I did Six Sessions (the old SM course) back in the late 80s. It was one weekend.

 

Its replacement, Scoutmastership Fundamentals, was done in one weekend.

 

Remember, this is Basic Training. The scouters need to put in experience AND do supplemental training at roundtables, etc.

 

[CNYScouter]

Our council combined SM Specific and Basic Outdoor Skills over 5 years ago.

One of the reasons was that adults were taking Basic Outdoor Skills but not the SM Specific.

This is the only training that our council holds that fills up and has a waiting list.

 

We do the first part of SM Specific on a Tuesday night from 7pm to 10pm.

Two weeks later the rest is cover from Friday night to Sunday afternoon getting out about 3:00pm.

Before they leave on Tuesday night each patrol has to have a Patrol name and elect a patrol leader

The time between these sessions allows the participants to come up with ideas for a patrol flag and patrol yell.

Usually by the time the weekend is over the Patrols have come together and are doing a pretty good job working as a team.

I think this time in between helps with this.

 

On Friday night, instead of going to cracker-barrel, NLE is given for anyone who needs it.

 

I do admit the schedule is tight to run it this way.

There no down time.

I think the biggest complaint is that if you need to use the latrine (or bathroom if they are open) you will miss part of the training as there is just no room in the schedule for free time between sessions.

 

I do think that 2 weekends may be better but finding the time would be tough.

Not only for the participants but finding enough trainers to be able to attend two weekends may be even more difficult.

 

We are also experimenting with running WLOT at the same time as the Outdoor weekend of SM Specific/Outdoor Basic.

There are few session that can be combined such as knots and campfire planning.

For both of these we do foil dinners for Saturday night so by doing this together we can share Quartermasters.

 

One positive thing it does give the WEBELOS leaders an idea of what a troop program is like.

It also allows us to share recourses, as we usually have some of the training staff show up to do one specific area, such as map and compass, which they can run at both levels.

 

We have done these together a couple of times and have run them on separate weekends a few times also.

It will decided after the spring training if we will stay with the combined courses or not.

 

I think this works out well.

I don't think we short-change anyone.

As most of the SM Specific is classroom it gives a way to break up the Outdoor stuff and move inside for a short-time.

This really helps if the weather isn't cooperating.

 

[Lisabob]

One advantage of doing WLOT and OLS so that they overlap a little bit as CNY describes is that it might help webelos leaders make contacts with troop leaders (and vice versa of course). Working on webelos-scout transition matters, that's one thing I have heard a lot, that the personal connections and networking opportunities are weak or non-existent in many cases. So anything we can do to strengthen them may be good.

 

I hear Eamonn's concern about packing too much into a weekend. On the other hand, the best training session in the world is useless if people don't attend it. Ideally, what I guess I'd like to see (as a novice outdoors-woman, myself) is more of a graduated training program, where the basics (SM and OLS) are offered in one weekend, and more advanced skills training opportunities for adult leaders who want them are offered later on. Yes I know we have OKPIK, Woodbadge, University of Scouting, Safe Swim/Safety Afloat, Roundtable, etc.. But of those, really only OKPIK is a "scout skills" course. In the others you may talk about scout skills but you don't really get a hands-on opportunity to try them out and develop them.

[Eamonn]

The Specific course does take nine hours!!

Much of the material covered could be cut back, but some of the material that I think is important (The Methods) need more time.

We tried offering it over 3 weeks one night a week. But by the time people got to the course location after working the earliest practical start time was 1900 add the three hours and then the drive home? It made for a very long day.

So we went to offering it on a Saturday.

The Outdoor Skills course is supposed to start on Friday night and end on Sunday afternoon.

Trying to cram all this and NLE into one weekend just seems like way too much! Something has to suffer.

Maybe the Eagle Scout with good outdoor and Scouting skills doesn't need as much attention as the Den Leader who has just crossed over? But the Eagle Scout is a wonderful resourse to the Patrol he is placed with. It also gives him the opportunity to work at passing on his knowledge to others.

While WB groups are called Patrols, the opportunity to come together and work as a Boy Scout Patrol (Yes Team Development is part of the course.)is limited. WB Staff are busy presenting the course and the time they have to help anyone who needs help with a basic skill just isn't there.

Last night the Ship started looking at Navigation. I started with a basic compass (a Silva compass) Three Eagle Scouts had no idea how to use it!

They didn't know because they were never taught. They were never taught because their leaders didn't have the skill.

When we don't train the adults, they can't train the Scouts. Untrained Scouts don't get to enjoy the full measure of the program and they quit!!

The Ship has been going for just over a year and so far I have yet to meet a Boy Scout who can tie even the most basic of knots.

They have never got to enjoy building pioneering projects. If they can't use a compass I'm sure they will have problems with maps so I wonder if they have ever really been on a hike.

If we as an organization are happy with the Merit Badge Class mindset? Then the outdoor training is a waste of time.

I just don't see Scouts as sitting animals, they yearn for the fun and adventure that we promise in the Boy Scout Handbook. When the leaders don't have the skills they really can't deliver the program. Without the challenges and the adventure the best we can hope for is holding the interest of a Lad is about 3 or 4 years.

I know I'm now ranting!!

But when we fail to deliver the goods we fail the kids we are supposed to be serving.

All the other stuff is very important. But teaching a Lad Leadership when he isn't able to use that skill because all he knows is leadership is just silly.

Ea.

[SR540Beaver]

If they are cramming NLE, SM Specific and IOLS into a single weekend, major corners are being cut somewhere. The material can not be covered in that time frame.

 

I know that back when EagleDad (Barry) was teaching SM specific, he did the first half on Friday night and the second half on Saturday morning. Food was provided at both sessions. It broke it up so they were not sitting so long and didn't end up killing a whole weekend day. I almost signed up for his course even though it was in a different district. By the time I sat thru the all day course in my district, I wish I had gone to Barry's.

 

I just don't see how you can do it ALL in one weekend and do justice to each course.

[kb6jra]

In our district we provide the SM/ASM Specific training over 4 week nights (2.5 hrs/night) culminating in a weekend that also includes OLS. We eliminated the NLE on this coarse and made it a pre-requisite. Our are offers it at least once a month for about 4 hours on a Saturday morning. Other Districts in our council do the two Saturday approach. We have a friend on the training team that says "the mind can only absorb what the butt will endure". He's absolutely right about that. A 2.5 hour weeknight meeting a few times seems better on the attention span than the lengthy 8 hour course...

 

Of course when I took it, I got to go to Philmont and it was more like a 6 day vacation...(nothin but smiles and grins from me).

 

I know when we (my district training team) present a SM/ASM specific, we use the patrol method as is done in WB and present all of the materials in rapid fire order with as many different presenters as possible. I think on our last course we had as many as 15 staffers supporting the course. The course participants seem to appreciate that effort. We get a lot of good reviews about our course from the participants. It's good to keep the customers happy at any rate.

 

The materials are usually all the same (they're supposed to be anyway), but the philosophy of the training team charged with presenting the material can absolutely have an enormous impact on the effectivness of the training. There's a lot to be said about the way things "used to be". I realize that we all need to move on and change is good, but I think we change things without thinking them through just for the sake of change.

 

Here's one on the whole other end of the scale. This weekend my troop went rock climbing. We have one climbing instructor in the troop and borrowed 2 others from the local BSA Onbelay group. These guys took the time to get trained. To get to the point of being labeled an instructor, they trained for several years...YEARS. That's amazing given the drive through mentality you noted in your post.

 

 

[CNYScouter]

When I look at the OLS syllabus I can see where we have cut down on time for some of the sessions.

To get everything in, we start hour earlier one morning and 1 hour earlier the other morning.

But I dont see how making the trail lunch 1 hour instead of 1-1/2 hours and eliminating the 2 hour open discussion period takes away from the course.

 

I do agree that tying to cram too much in such a short time is not a good thing but I think the council training staff decided that its better to have leaders get training this way than then them not taking it at all (which was happening when we ran them as separate sessions).

 

We also require that leaders take NLE before they come.

On the form they fill out to sign up it says participants need to take NLE before coming.

Its also in the letter all participants receive about a month before the course starts

Still at the Tuesday night session about 25% (8 to 10 people) show up not having taken this.

At the end of the Tuesday night each person who hasnt taken NLE is given how to find it on-line, is told ask their Unit Trainer to get it and they are also given contact information for their district training chair to call if they dont have a unit trainer so they can arrange to take it from one of the district trainers.

 

We still have 6 to 8 people show up, 10 days later, on Friday night that havent done it yet so it was decided to offer it Friday night rather then send these people away.

It makes for a long day, (runs from 9:30pm to 11pm) but if we didnt offer it these are the ones who would never get around to taking it.

 

The one thing I find amazing is the training staff gets 2 or 3 requests every time we run this asking if we can add more training on this weekend.

 

[SueM]

CNYScouter,

 

That's pretty much what we do too, only over 2 weekends. The first weekend is NLE on Friday Evening and then Scoutmaster Specific all day Saturday. As part of the schedule on Saturday then, we divide them up into their patrols and they have a PLC and get the info they need for the IOLS weekend 2 weeks later...which starts out on Friday evening with the Health & Safety and YPT for those who cannot produce evidence of having taken it in the past 3 years (our council requires it to be done at least every 3 years) and then all the IOLS stuff on Saturday and Sunday. Our training chair makes taking NLE a pre-requesite for taking the other sessions so we don't often have anyone go through the course and not get their "Trained" patch!

 

Sue m.