Scouts BSA Troop Resources Website

[John-in-KC]

Found this elsewhere. National is consolidating resources. 

That said, I’m not sure the US Scouting Service Project will be obsolete any time soon...

https://troopresources.scouting.org/

[mrkstvns]

Thanks, John!  There's some good stuff there.  I looked through the section for SM/ASM and was pleased to see so many useful videos about Pioneering (IMHO, this is a skill set that a lot of us aren't particularly good at, but that can be a lot of fun to do as a campout theme / weekend activity).

[RainShine]

Its a great site, so many ideas for fun troop meetings. I'm enthusiastic about it but when I mentioned it to PLC they were not so much. I mean they were interested but I very much doubt any of them went home and explored the site. I brought it up at PLC months ago and it appears to be forgotten now. Lots of our troop meetings are boring, sit and listen type stuff, uhg.

I'm convinced this site has programming gold, but the boys are in charge. Any suggestions on how to nudge the PLC on this?

[MattR]

The scouts need to see a problem big enough to out weigh the cost of trying something harder. It's really easy to just stand up and talk. It's also hard for most scouts to try something new. Hence, ruts.

This is about motivating teens so I sure don't have a magic recipe. What I used to do was, before planning the year we reviewed the previous year. If the meetings were boring that's where it came up. Then it was easy to talk about making them fun. I had them set goals, like number of "doing" meetings vs "watching" meetings. After that I held them to it and, just as importantly, provided enough support, encouragement and guidance to be reasonably successful. It was a boatload more work than just deciding everything for them but they learned and had some better meetings.

 

[qwazse]

21 hours ago, RainShine said:

... very much doubt any of them went home and explored the site. ...

In other words, they didn't do their homework? What a surprise. Nobody wants to do homework!

If they can't browse this stuff at a meeting, they won't. I mean you'll get the one scouting wonk who may, but then he has to pitch it to the other guys and their enthusiasm will depend on his communication and salesmanship skills.

Here's what to do instead. During a meeting, have the librarian go to the stack of old Boys Life magazines (your librarian does collect them, right?) or MB Pamphlets. Randomly distribute a couple to each patrol. Give each patrol 1/2 hour to find bookmark a page or two or ten that has something cool on it. (At this point, don't even suggest that you all would do that activity.) Give a prize to the patrol who has the most cool things that another patrol also identified as cool and a prize to the patrol who has the most cool things that no other patrol identified as cool. Then ask, "Can we do one of those winning cool things as a troop?"

There are dozens of other ways to get the scouts to brainstorm. But, one sure-fire way to keep them from doing it is to tell them to go home and come back with ideas.

[Thunderbird]

They have also made the Program Features for Troops and Crews (volumes 1-3) available online here:

https://troopleader.scouting.org/program-features/

They include troop meeting plans and ideas.