JLT course outline (Opinions wanted)

[Murphy]

Hello all.

Recently, I was asked to develop a troop leadership program for the SPL & PLs. I'm not quite sure why...I think they assume that showing some leadership qualifies one to teach a class on it . Regardless, I've typed out an outline, <which you download here in .RTF format.> I'd like to get some feedback on it, especially on two points...

*The fifth and sixth discussions (Motivation and Diplomacy) seem pretty weak to me. I tacked them on because I'm required to have most of the day spent on the training, but my real material stops after the section about handling conflicts (Not meaning that these aren't important, but there's not that much that I can think to say). Does anyone have suggestions on what could be done to strength these two sessions, or am I being too critical?

*This Tuesday I will be presenting the plan before our commitee for approval. Some of the parents on it are..."mildly" overprotective of their children, and I'm sure they will object to certain parts (namely, the head wound simulation, and certain parts of handling conflicts in the troop). I think that it's important for the boys to experience situations like this, so they can have a better idea of how they would react. I'm not use to dealing with them (that burden is placed on our SM most of the time), so any thoughts on how to handle this would be appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

[scoutaholic]

The outline looks like a great start. One thing you may want to work into is changing some of your discussion time to 'learning activities' or 'games'. Classroom style training only works for a few minutes at a time with most scout-age boys.


Your council scout shop should have some resources available to help you on this.

There used to be a "Scoutmaster's Junior Leader Training Kit", which included job descriptions for each position, a 1-day training sylibus, and a training video. The training was mostly done using games and learning activities rather than classroom style training. This was discontinued in January, but with luck you may still be able to find one.

The replacement for that discontinued item is called "Troop Leadership Training". It is much less detailed, but gives a few ideas on planning your own troop leadership training. It doesn't give any detail about actual activities to include. Just basic ideas.

You can also buy the sylibus for the "National Youth Leadership Training". It is intended to be a weeklong course, paterned after Woodbadge. Many councils offer this training under different names. Our council calls it "Silver Moccasin". Obviously the weeklong course is not something you can do in a 1-day training, but you may be able to borrow some ideas from it.

You may also find some useful ideas in the Training and Leadership thread titled "In - Troop JLT Program Help", and "New Troop Leadership Training"

[616kayak]

Impromptu speaking is always good. 5-20 mins. Give a few mins of time between learning of their topic and speaking. Have each scout do this a few times and you should see improvement.

[Murphy]

Scoutaholic : Good point; I forgot about their attention spans, especially the younger patrol leaders (not that the old boys are much better). I guess I'll make some more "back-up games for parts of each discussion, and when their attention wanes I'll get them to play one. Although, I never meant for it to be a straight lecture...more scenario based, like "Okay, the SM has asked your patrol to build a bridge, but you're not too sure on how to do this. What would you do, Tom?". That should keep them a little more focused, since they'll have to think a little.

I've looked over the JLT kit video and tried to include most of the information with a few changes; in fact, the Blind Leader game is just a reinvention of the Blind Square from the video. I haven't seen any of the new course though, so I'll have to check that out.

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Kayak : Ah. That's a good idea for a "game" as well. Perhaps after we talk about stressful situations, as a reinforcement. Or maybe just scatter them throughout the day, so we don't have some kids having too much time to prepare (plus, listening to 15 speeches one after the other would start to bore them).

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Thanks for the great suggestions so far. I really hope the boys can get something out of this.


-Murphy