Assistant Scoutmaster

The Game of Scouting

Before you can do this job well, you need to understand what Scouting actually is. It isn’t a class, and it isn’t a program that adults run for kids. Scouting has best been described as A Game with a Purpose. It’s open-air game, played by scouts, owned, led, and created by scouts, and the whole of the troop program is their field of play.

What Scouts Do

Imagine there were no Scouting at all: no badges, no councils, no paperwork. Someone shares an idea with a group of young people: get outdoors, go camping, and become better people along the way. They get excited, gather their friends, and organize a trip. To camp comfortably they need skills, so they learn them. To pull off the trip they need to divide up the work, so they do. It’s never perfectly organized, but they love it.

That’s the whole game. Scouts go camping, and cook food they chose, bought, and packed themselves. They hike and find their own way. They swim, paddle, and learn to be safe on the water. They serve their community and help people who need it. Character grows as a side effect of doing these things, not from lectures about it. Advancement, policies, uniforming, and logistics are all A MEANS TO AN END, and must be kept in check to support the true Game of Scouting, rather than usurp it.

Read: Do What Scouts Do

The Scout’s World

In Aids to Scoutmastership, Baden-Powell says the first step to success as a Scoutmaster is to know your scout. To describe the nature of the boy, he quotes Mr. Casson, writing in the magazine Teachers’ World on 25th December, 1928. This is perhaps the best encapsulation of Scouting’s youth-centric spirit:

Judging from my own experience, I would say that boys have a world of their own—a world that they make for themselves; and neither the teacher nor the lessons are admitted to this world. A boy’s world has its own events and standards and code and gossip and public opinion.

In spite of teachers and parents, boys remain loyal to their own world. They obey their own code, although it is quite a different code to the one that is taught to them at home and in the schoolroom. They gladly suffer martyrdom at the hands of uncomprehending adults, rather than be false to their own code.

The code of the teacher, for instance, is in favour of silence and safety and decorum. The code of the boys is diametrically opposite. It is in favour of noise and risk and excitement.

Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy’s world. These are basic. They are what boys are in earnest about; and they are not associated with teachers nor schoolbooks.

According to public opinion in Boydom, to sit for four hours a day at a desk indoors is a wretched waste of time and daylight. Did anyone ever know a boy—a normal healthy boy, who begged his father to buy him a desk? Or did anyone ever know a boy, who was running about outdoors, go and plead with his mother to be allowed to sit down in the drawing room?

Certainly not. A boy is not a desk animal. He is not a sitting-down animal. Neither is he a pacifist nor a believer in safety first; nor a bookworm, nor a philosopher.

He is a boy—God bless him—full to the brim of fun and fight and hunger and daring mischief and noise and observation and excitement. If he is not, he is abnormal.

Let the battle go on between the code of the teachers and the code of the boys. The boys will win in the future as they have in the past. A few will surrender and win the scholarships, but the vast majority will persist in rebellion and grow up to be the ablest and noblest men in the nation.

Is it not true, as a matter of history, that Edison, the inventor of a thousand patents, was sent home by his school teacher with a note saying he was ‘too stupid to be taught’?

Is it not true that both Newton and Darwin, founders of the scientific method, were both regarded as blockheads by their school teachers?

Are there not hundreds of such instances, in which the duffer of the classroom became useful and eminent in later life? And doesn’t this prove that our present methods fail in developing the aptitudes of boys?

Is it not possible to treat boys as boys? Can we not adapt grammar and history and geography and arithmetic to the requirements of the boy’s world? Can we not interpret our adult wisdom into the language of boyhood?

Is not the boy right, after all, in maintaining his own code of justice and achievement and adventure?

Is he not putting action before learning, as he ought to do? Is he not really an amazing little worker, doing things on his own, for lack of intelligent leadership?

Would it not be vastly more to the point if the teachers were, for a time, to become the students and to study the marvelous boy-life which they are at present trying vainly to curb and repress?

Why push against the stream, when the stream, after all, is running in the right direction?

Is it not time for us to adapt our futile methods and to bring them into harmony with the facts? Why should we persist in saying dolefully, boys will be boys, instead of rejoicing in the marvelous energy and courage and initiative of boyhood? And what task can be nobler and more congenial to a true teacher than to guide the wild forces of boy nature cheerily along into paths of social service?

Process, Not Results

Adults are more experienced than the scouts, and can produce better results. If an adult plans the menu, runs the meeting, or teaches the skill, or puts their thumb on the scale of the youth leaders’ decisions, it’ll probably go more smoothly. But smooth results aren’t the point.

A troop run by adults is focused on results: requirements signed off, badges earned, nights camped. A troop run by scouts is focused on process: scouts setting their own course and learning to work together to make things happen. That process is what shapes the scouts, and it’s the whole reason the troop exists. Its results are real, but they’re hard to measure, and it takes a trained eye to see them.

Read: The Troop Pivot Point

The Patrol Method

The patrol is the heart of Scouting. The troop and its adult leadership exist ONLY to support the patrols and their Patrol Leaders.

In 1927, William “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt, who went on to write the first Handbook for Patrol Leaders, described a Scoutmaster whose troop was falling apart. The Scoutmaster had worked hard for his scouts, but he’d made himself the center of the troop. He taught every skill and made every decision, because that way things got done the way he wanted. The scouts lost interest, and the troop would have collapsed the day he left.

Hillcourt’s fix was to put the work on the shoulders of the youth leaders. Train them, trust them, and let them lead their patrols. Scouts do more when they’re trusted than when they feel supervised. The adults’ main job is to work with the youth leaders, not to run the troop over their heads.

Read: A Troop Revolution

The ASM’s Role

So if the scouts run everything, what are the adults for? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The Scoutmaster and ASMs train and coach the youth leaders, mentor the scouts, keep everyone safe, and handle the things only an adult can do. What they don’t do is take over. Everything below is about doing the job without doing the scouts’ job for them.

Hands Off

Above all, the job is hands-off. The scouts run the troop, and your job is to help them get better at it, not to do it for them. Holding back is harder than it sounds, especially when you can see a better way to do something.

At a troop meeting, you’ll mostly be observing. While you watch, look for:

• Safety risks
• Youth leaders who are struggling or stuck
• Scouts who are being left out
• Moments worth coaching on later

Step in immediately only for a safety risk. Otherwise, don’t intervene or offer your opinions while an activity is underway. That includes the Patrol Leaders’ Council meeting: let the Senior Patrol Leader run it their way. A small nudge in the moment is occasionally helpful, but it has to be a genuine suggestion.

Coaching

Most coaching happens before and after the activity: while it’s being prepared, in the debrief, and informally during downtime. Coach by asking questions, so that the scout discovers the answer rather than being handed it.

Most problems with an individual scout are really leadership problems. If a scout is struggling or getting something wrong, point it out to their Patrol Leader instead of correcting the scout directly.

That doesn’t mean keeping your distance from the scouts. Getting to know them and mentoring them is an important part of this role. ASMs don’t hold Scoutmaster conferences for rank advancement; those are held by the Scoutmaster. But you can and should talk with scouts and mentor them individually.

Guided Discovery

When a youth leader is falling short, the natural adult response is to tell them what they did wrong and what to do about it. Resist it. Advice and reminders put the adult in charge of the problem, and repeated reminders turn into nagging. Questions leave the solution in the hands of the scout, where it belongs, and let them work their way to the answer themselves.

A common case is a youth leader who “hits the wall” a couple of months into their position: things stop working, they get discouraged, and they go quiet hoping nobody notices. Instead of a lecture, the conversation might go like this:

ASM: What’s the plan for Monday’s meeting?
Scout: Uh, we’re going to do this, and then this…
ASM: Can I see the plan?
Scout: I don’t really have one written down.
ASM: What have you done to prepare this week?
Scout: Not much, I guess.
ASM: What do you think your patrol has a right to expect from their Patrol Leader?

From there, the scout describes the expectations themselves, and you ask what’s getting in the way of meeting them and what they’ll do next. Notice what the ASM never did: tell the scout they were unprepared, or tell them how to fix it. The scout said both.

A few things make this work:

• Ask, don’t tell. Each question should move the scout one step closer to seeing the problem and the solution on their own.
• Separate the problem from the person. Talk about what anyone in the role should be expected to do, not about what this scout failed to do. Young leaders tend to take a problem as a judgment of themselves, so make it clear that every leader runs into this.
• Follow up. Check back a few days later. Look for any sign of initiative, even a small one, and encourage it.

Read: Hitting the Wall

Listen: The Guided Discovery Process

Campouts

On campouts, you’ll also:

• Camp and cook with the adult patrol
• Count toward the adult leadership required for the trip
• Help with driving and logistics
• Teach a skill when the youth leaders ask for it, but only if none of the scouts already know it. If an older scout knows the skill, they should teach it.

When your own child is in the troop, the guidance in A Parent’s Role and Parent Camping Guidelines still applies to you.

Scoutmaster Meetings

The Scoutmaster and ASMs meet once a month to discuss Scoutmaster Corps business.

When the Scoutmaster Is Away

When the Scoutmaster is absent, an ASM takes over their role. That means acting as the Senior Patrol Leader’s coach and making the decisions the Scoutmaster would normally make.

Specializations

Some ASMs take on a specialty in addition to this role:

• ASM for Merit Badges
• ASM for High Adventure
• ASM for Eagle Advancement

Training

ASMs share the Scoutmaster’s position-specific training requirements.

Position Trained Requirements

Resources

Scoutmaster CG is a treasure trove of practical advice for Scoutmasters and ASMs, written in the youth-led, patrol method tradition this troop follows.

Scoutmaster CG