Good meetings don’t just happen, they take planning and coordination between scouts and adult leaders.
Show Notes:
- They say a “Boy Led Troop” isn’t a way to run a troop, it’s the ONLY way to run a troop.
Resources:
- The Scoutmaster’s Other Handbook (Amazon)
- Boy Scout Program Features (Amazon)
- Fieldbook: Scouting’s Manual of Basic and Advanced Skills for Outdoor Adventure (Amazon)
Transcript:
I have been fortunate enough to visit other troops and while you might consult the official books and see how a meeting should be run, you will soon find out by visiting around that most people pick and choose from the “official” way of doing things and run meetings all different ways.
I think a lot of this comes from general troop flavor, as you rarely are starting a troop from scratch, you just become part of the working organization for your time in charge as a scoutmaster or an assistant scoutmaster and things just move forward.
It also comes partly from lack of training. Not that people don’t take the training, although that is also and issue in scouting, but by the time you take the training you’ve already become part of the system.
I’m a big proponent of doing what works for your scouts, but I am also a big believer in a boy led troop through the patrol method.
Now this doesn’t mean just tossing it to the boys and letting them run with it.
In our troop, we have a framework we set once per year at the Yearly Planning meeting. We hand out sheets with all the months laid out, highlighting the meeting dates and from here we choose a theme, who is running the program, and who is running the service patrols. It’s up to the program patrols to come up with what happens during their part of the meeting.
So to come around to the topic itself, I get to the meeting 15 minutes before we’re supposed to start, and ask the boys to get there so we are ready start at 7:30pm.
We do an opening with the flags by the service patrol of the month. This is followed by inspection by the Senior Patrol Leader and his assistants. Then we go into the program for the day, which usually includes some kind of game. When the meeting is coming to an end there are announcements, which we request parents to poke their heads in to, this is followed by my scoutmaster minute, and then the service patrol cleaning up our meeting space.
I’ve seen some troops that do some or none of these things. I have heard of some troops ending with a prayer, or the adults running part of the program, but this is what works for us.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was running a meeting.
