https://youtu.be/8NNo50jjC7A
A ScoutmasterDave exploration into Start, Stop and Continue, or as you may know it as Roses and Thorns, which is a feedback and investigation technique to improve your scouting program.
Transcript:
The scouts BSA folks in the audience might be more familiar with Start Stop and continue. As it’s more common to happen at the Troop level than it is for it to happen at the cub level.
Basically, what starts stop and continue is is a reflection. For an event a meeting or just any type of interaction that you might have, and it breaks down like this.
First you get all of the youth and the adults in the circle where they could all hear each other and then you lay down some ground rules.
You explain that we’re going to talk about a specific event and we’re going to break it down into the three pieces the start which are things that you should start doing the stop are the things that you should stop doing and the continue. The continue is the things that worked out well that you should keep doing.
Reflection is an important part of a community-based organization as it give the people involved an opportunity to voice things in a (hopefully) non-judgmental way where you don’t just focus on the bad things, but also the things that went well.
It gives everyone an opportunity to talk about the event and it’s really amazing that they start to play off with each other about what went well and what they can improve so the next time they go out and do this activity they can make it even better still.
Like I mentioned you see this a lot more at the troop level as older boys and girls can voice what they liked didn’t like a lot more coherently but there’s no real reason you can’t do this at the cub level.
It becomes more in the approach of how you do it than whether to do it or not do it.
Everyone likes to be heard.
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While it’s important to have everyone participate it really is a forum for the youth as it’s a youth run program to voice their opinions and concerns about what they like and didn’t like.
So as you lead this reflection you point to people to speak, you have everybody raise their hands so you can focus more on the youth than on the adults. It gives the opportunity to raise issues before their issues most often when a child doesn’t have a great time or there was some sort of incident you’ll hear about it after the fact after the parent has questioned the child and the parent then brings it up to the leaders.
So, being proactive about this lets you know what’s going on before the adult tracks you down and tells you about an issue it also gives you the opportunity to experience this in an unbiased way before the parents raise a head of steam and really think through how to enhance the story to make it more effective from their point of view so it does serve multiple purposes.
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 start stop and continue.
