Summer has definitely come! July is time of vacation, but
for many of the 40 million Boy and Girl scouts in the world is also time
for summer camp, the culminating and final event of the year.
Next Tuesday we’re also leaving for our summer camp: 10 days
in the mountains, 200 km far from home. Thus for me as a Scout leader this is basically
working time, busy with all needed preparation activities.
I have always found many similarities and common approaches
between being an Agile coach and being a Scout leader: I learned a lot from
both worlds, lived many resonating values and principles and re-used
successfully experiences from working time in my volunteer cause and vice versa.
In particular you know that I’m interested in training
and how people learn: I’ve been actually interested in that for more
than 20 years, just because educating boy scouts is basically giving them the
opportunity to learn and become the best they can be.
Our founder Sir Robert Baden Powell
said there is always at least 5% good in any person, so a Scout chief’s goal is
to pull that 5% out and make it bear fruit. BTW, “to educate” comes from the
Latin “ex ducere”, which literally means “to lead out” what a person already
potentially is.
Therefore I understood a lot about how kids
and people in general learn out of scout educational model.
Basically it is an experiential model and one of the pillars
is represented by the triplet Experience-Symbol-Concept.
- Experience
The person is offered a
meaningful experience, which is different depending on the context, not just
for the sake of the experience, but to let her elaborate it by means of a symbolic
language. It is generally a concrete experience lived at level of feelings or
physical emotion.
- Symbol
The symbol joins the experience with its
meaning, i.e. the learning point. It is a concrete object or fact which is used
for reminding the emotions lived during the experience and mediating its
conceptualization.
- Concept
By debriefing and recapping the
experience, you get an understanding. And just because you live again the experience
through the glasses of the symbol, you are able to make it kind of universal
and conceptualize the learning.
Of course this is the path followed by the trainees. A
trainer has to go the other way around: she must start from the concept, from
the learning she wants her scouts to achieve, in order to build a suitable
experience which can exactly lead to the concept she started from.
This method, supported by other concepts like self-development
and co-education (basically a concept of collaboration in helping each other
grow), proved to be very much effective over more than 100 years, especially
in teaching and learning skills like self-organization,
leadership, ability to plan, collaboration, imagination, improvisation, dealing
with uncertainties and the unknown, which ended up in being so crucial in
the 21st century industry.
What’s your opinion about that? Feel free to comment.
