Leadership Skills
The program is designed to mirror the activities of a typical unit over one month, but compressed into a single week. Leadership skills covered include Communicating Well, Finding Your Vision, Developing Your Team, and teaching skills described as "EDGE: Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, Enable." The youth staff is trained in presenting, coaching, and mentoring, enabling them to conduct the program. The NYLT program as designed by the Boy Scouts includes video and other training content available on a DVD. Participants are given handouts containing the information presented on the DVD. The presentations do not rely on the expertise or competence of the youth staff, helping to standardize what is taught in every program. They content allows participants to practice their skills. For example, during the Communicating Well I session, the boys practice reciting the alphabet using the skills they just learned.
The syllabus uses a sequence for learning that the Boy Scouts previously defined as Effective Teaching: learning objectives, discovery, teaching / learning, application and evaluation. Effective Teaching, which was adapted from the White Stag program, was taught in prior versions of the course Despite its importance to the course, Effective Teaching is not presented to the participants as a skill.
The training sequence for each leadership skill utilizes the EDGE process. Each skill is Explained and Demonstrated, then the learner is Guided through its application, finally the learner is Enabled through repeated use of the skills in challenging activities.
Read more about this topic: National Youth Leadership Training
Famous quotes containing the words leadership and/or skills:
“During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadership in industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)