The Training Panacea

[SR540Beaver]

You know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The training is available, but sometimes even those who go to training fail to put it into practice. That is on them, not a lack of training material on the BSA side.

 

From the much maligned "management theory" Wood Badge course:

 

Listening to Learn

Stages of Team Development

Communication

Project Planning

Leading EDGE/Teaching EDGE

Leading Change

Valuing People and Leveraging Diversity

Problem Solving and Decision Making

Managing Conflict

Coaching and Mentoring

Self Assessment

 

The tools are readily available, it just depends on how the craftsman applies them.

[scoutldr]

So, maybe those skills (WB21) need to be the FIRST training given...before they have to face that first den meeting or troop meeting as "The Leader". For whatever reason, if WB comes too late in one's scouting career to do any good, what's the point? Maybe WB21 should be required to be considered "fully trained" for one's position. (yeah, good luck with that).

 

The key to training is to deliver the right training to the right people at the right time (just in time). I think we do a poor job of that.

[emb021]

"The key to training is to deliver the right training to the right people at the right time (just in time). I think we do a poor job of that."

 

I don't know. I think we do a pretty good job. Better then other groups. Is it perfect, no. Could we do better, yes. But keep in mind we are all volunteers.

 

We have Fast start, job specific training, supplemental/ongoing, and advanced.

 

With FS and several of the supplemental training available on-line, there is little excuse that some people can't get some immediate training.

 

Roundtables are intended to be on-going supplemental training. But if people don't go to them &/or the people running them don't do their job, it can be a problem (one RT commissioner seemed to want to turn RT into nothing more then an announcements session).

 

Councils do need to do a better job of making available job specific training. A good council will make sure they are done about twice a year. So no one should have an excuse of not taking it within a year of joining, if not sooner.

 

[SR540Beaver]

scoutldr,

 

You know, there are some who complain that WB has been watered down. Back in the day, it was by invitation only. You had to be deemed worthy. Plus, there were different WB course depending on which program you were in. The issues we are discussing in this thread are not new to scouting. The revamping of WB was an attempt to give the folks what they wanted and needed.....leadership and management skills. WB today is a course that can be taken as soon as you have taken the prerequsite training....some of which can now be done online at a person's leisure. I know for a fact in our council that we specifically target Cub leaders for WB. Why? Because they are newer at the scouting game and Pack's don't always have the same level of continuity that Troops have. Pack's tend to reinvent the wheel. Think what an advantage it is for Pack leadership to have the whole bag of WB skills in their back pocket instead of having to try to figure out how to handle all those different personalities getting exposed to scouting for the first time.

 

My son joined Cubs in September of 2002. I became Pack Committee Chair in April of 2003. I went to WB in September of 2003. It was one of the best scouting decisions I ever made.

[OldGreyEagle]

A limiting factor of Wood Badge is its length, 2 3-day weekends. If we said you have to do Wood Badge or a Wood Badge like course to be a leader(currently configured of course, not the older "better" version) we may really see a drop in volunteers.

 

Has anyone had sucess is breaking the Wood Badge Curriculum up and presenting segments, such as the Managing Conflict module at various training sessions. I do think its telling that the title is "Managing" Conflict, not Conflict "resolution", big difference!

[Kudu]

Wood Badge is the uniform police of Leadership Development!

 

Since the day of its invention in 1972, the goal of Leadership Development has been to destroy the Patrol Method by cancelling position-specific training for Patrol Leaders and asserting that Scoutcraft skills are not leadership skills:

 

In general, Patrol Leader training should concentrate on leadership skills rather than on Scoutcraft Skills. The Patrol will not rise and fall on the Patrol Leader's ability to cook, follow a map, or do first aid, but it very definitely depends on his leadership skill (Scoutmaster's Handbook, 1972, page 155).

 

As such, Wood Badge will provide the muscle for Chief Scout Executive Robert Mazzuca's bid to "Reinvent Scouting." It is only a matter of time until smiling holders of the Wood Badge stand in front "Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmaster Leader Specific Training" in soccer uniforms and repeat the following:

 

"Camping is not necessarily a big thing with them, as a matter of fact in some cases it is not big at all. So we need to kind of think about, is it more important that we reach that child with the kind of things we have for children and we have for families in character development and leadership skill growth and all of those things? Or is it more important that we get them in a tent next week? And so I think the answer to that is fairly obvious to us.

 

"The other is that marvelous passion for family in the Hispanic world and when we say 'we want to take your twelve-year-old son but you can't come' we're making a mistake there. We have to engage an entire family. We need to reach out and do those sorts of things that recognize their cultural issues and accommodate them. For example one of our pilot programs over the last recent years has been Scouting and soccer, using the attraction of the soccer game to gather Hispanic families around...."

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#29491940

[scoutldr]

I hear ya, SR540...but I think OGE has a good point. I believe cost is also a big roadblock. That's a huge investment in time and money for the fresh-caught Den Leader, who tend to be younger, with small-fry at home and limited budgets. The training may be excellent and I will freely admit, I have not budgeted the time and funds to complete it. But as the "silverbacks" in the movement, we should be coming up with ways to eliminate perceived barriers to training. As the district training guy, I went outside the box and delivered my training on weeknights, when every other district was doing weekends. My courses were always FULL of people from ALL districts who were grateful for the alternative. If we are in the business of "servant leadership", then we need to accomodate our customers, not expect the customer to accomodate us. I like OGE's idea of delivering modules...it's much easier to carve out 2 hours at a time than it is 3 days or a week. That needs further exploring.

[Nike]

While the out of the book trianing goes over some fairly important stuff, it leaves our freshly minted SM/ASM to a trial by fire unless he already has expereience working with youth and/or in the outdoors. The SM training I've had has been relatively useless in showing me how to get a troop of boys not only pointed in the right directions but motivating them to go forward, let alone adults. In truth, I think I went to the worst SM training ever produced in our district. It seemed all the participants got much more out of talking to one another and comparing what worked and what didn't than a trainer literally reading the book to us.

 

Glad I'm a MC, fully trained. Give me forms, policies, and paperwork over a teenager having a rotten weekend any day.

[SR540Beaver]

scoutldr,

 

I agree with you on beingg user friendly. In my previous district, our training chair offered many classes at roundtable so folks could kill two birds with one stone rather than having to take a part of a saturday. Some of the districts will do a training blitz were many trainings are offered so people don't have to find individual classes on individual days. About half of our districts are in the metro area and if one districts schedule doesn't fit your needs, chances are another one will.

 

Eagledad (Barry) used to do SM specific two districts over from me. I believe he split it up with half on Friday night and the other half on saturday morning. That way, folks didn't have to sit thru 8 straight hours of class and still had half a saturday for other things.

 

I don't know that you could do WB in modules. There is so much that would be lost doing it that way. Part of the experience is working and interacting as individual patrols and as a troop. WB is more than a collection of presentations.

 

Cost and time for WB is an honest factor. But by splitting a week long course into two weekends as most councils now do allows for people to onlt need two fridays off a few weeks apart instead of a full week. This really helps with little ones at home as the spouse will most likely be home with the kids afteer school on friday and then the rest of the weekend. Many councils have scholarships for those needing financial help and many units choose to help pay for leaders willing to go.

[Eamonn]

Sure at times the "Go get Trained" mantra in this forum seems to me a bit like "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning"

I think we all know that not everything can be covered in Training's

I think we kinda know that a lot of the Training's take it for granted that things which might not be in place to start with are there.

For example. Chartering Organizations.

How wonderful it is to tell someone to see what the CO has to say.

When we know in the "Real World" a good many CO's don't care and some are just on paper.

"Talk with your Unit Commissioner"

I checked the list of U/C's serving the 43 units in the District I serve and we have five. (Two are over 80, one works out of town a lot.)

 

Having been around Training a lot for a very long while.

I think the people who do attend do come away with something. Some with more than others.

I do firmly believe that knowledgeable volunteers know far more about how things work or should work than most of the professionals.

I like the on line training's because they tend to get things right.

Sadly very often trainers feel the need to add or subtract things.

There are some trainers who seem to latch onto things and see whatever this might be as their "Thing".

People involved with YP and First Aid seem to suffer from this a lot.

 

Most of the material that comes from the BSA is good.

Sadly at times the presentation is very poor.

People come away feeling cheated and having wasted their time.

I really wish that we did more to train trainers and prepare them for the task they are taking on.

This was one good thing about the old Cub Scout course.

Ea.

[Twocubdad]

I think the biggest deficiency in the training program is the supplemental training. I've got a room full of ASMs who don't really understand the program. The problem is that there is no program specific training beyone SM/ASM specific and outdoor leadership skills.

 

I am a big fan of WB21C, but it's not program-specific. There's a lot of good stuff there, but except for the leadership skills (which applies mainly to the Boy Scout program), but, as we know, it doesn't really address many of the problems we hear about there.

 

Announcement night -- excuse me, I mean Roundtable -- is a joke. In ten years I bet I've probably missed 5 district Roundtables and I can honestly say that I've attended fewer than that when the staff even attempted to provide real supplemental training. It's just the wrong format to try to accomplish any sort of training. District Scouters (and really folks throughout BSA) are so petrified of that a meeting will turn into a gripe session that substantive conversations about real issues never occur. From that stand point, the squabbling we get here is a much healthier and productive exchange the the plastic presentations we get at Roundtables.

 

My "King for a Day" solution would be for BSA to develops a number of in-depth, online training modules around many of the topics we catch here. Advancement issues, working with COs, dealing with problem volunteers, council relations, the job of a DE, new unit issues.... The topic index these boards would be a good resource to start with. And the topics need to be covered at different depths. If the Advancement module only covers the four steps to Boy Scout advancement, forget it.

 

I know a lot of this info is out there in various forms. But BSA does a fairly poor job or organizing it's material. Have you tried looking for something specific on Scouting.org? Good luck. I spent 10 minutes this morning trying to find the new medical forms (I finally found them going through Google). Maybe the first module needs to be on how to find the info you need.

 

Here's an idea, BSA needs a Wiki -- you know, a web site like the Wikipedia where ordinary Scouters contribute info on the topics they feel are important. People with particular knowledge in an area could post the info they feel is helpful. Chances are if you think something is helpful, other people will, too. Sure, you get a bunch of wacky stuff, but it's self correcting based on the democracy of ideas. If someone posts something that's way off the curve, there will be a bunch of folks jump on it. I would even say it needs to be staffed so that things which are clear policy violations could be edited.

[gwd-scouter]

Getting back to Beavah's original post - what I've noticed over the years is while many Scouters take the training required for their position, the majority do not.

 

Also just my observation, those that go on to the advanced training such as Woodbadge and Commissioner Science tend to fall into two categories: 1) The "look at me" types (those that talk about how well trained they are, have better ideas than anyone because they have more training, wear a whole bunch of square knots, are never seen actually putting any of it into practice) and 2) Scouters that genuinely want help to do their jobs better. Of course, there is that third category - Scouters that get talked into going only to find out they spent a lot of money and time and didn't get any real benefit from it.

 

We have new ASMs coming in a couple of weeks with their Webelos crossovers. I have told them about the training and given them the dates. One is attending our Council's outdoor leader skills this weekend. I can honestly say that of all the training I've been to, the outdoor leader skills weekend is the best. I learned a lot as a new SM when I took the course. I learned a lot from the instructors, but learned much more from the other Scouters during those times when our patrol was working on something or just hanging out.

 

I always cringe when I read someone post "get training" in response to another's problem or inquiry. The BSA trainings are good for what they do, but to really get a handle on how to be an effective Scouter we have to seek out others and share experiences. Beavah's right - no amount of training is going to fix, as he puts it, a dysfunctional bunch of adults. Neither is the BSA training going to make a new leader a great Scouter if he/she isn't willing to admit he/she doesn't have all the answers - even after training.

 

Now that I think about it, in all the training I've taken the Cub Scout Promise and Law of the Pack or the Boy Scout Oath and Scout Law were only mentioned during New Leader Essentials. Perhaps it's just our area, but they should be given more emphasis. After all, we expect our Scouts to know and live up to the Cub Promise or Scout Oath, right? Shouldn't we, as Scouters, be expected, and reminded in training, to do the same?

 

[Mike F]

I've found our most effective adult training takes place on Saturday night of a campout over a last cup (or 2) of coffee after the guys have gone to sleep in their remote campsites. When things have finally calmed down, there's time to discuss everything that has transpired over the weekend in terms of leadership development, objectives, philosophies, etc. I lead structured discussions like this on almost every campout. The older, active leaders participate energetically and the newly crossed-over parents mostly listen, but get a new appreciation for what it's all about.