2. Planning the Patrol Year

• Get started

• Plan the year

• Patrol Meetings

• Patrol Points

• Communicate

• Participation

• Greenbar

• Teamwork

• Celebrate

• Advancement

• Merit Badges

• Skills

• Track Progress

• Things you need

    You are off to a good start, but now you must look ahead. If you want to succeed as a leader, or in many other tasks, you must have a plan. This is true in school, later in life when working, and certainly in Scouting.
    As a Patrol Leader, you need to plan for next week’s meeting or next month’s trip. But, how do you make sure that your patrol and all its members reach a goal? How do you make sure that when you finish as Patrol Leader, you can be proud of how much your Patrol accomplished with you as its leader?
    The key to success is to agree on the goals for your patrol at the beginning of the year and then plan a program to achieve those goals. There are only three steps involved:

There is already set of goals for the Troop as a whole.  Your job is to put both the troop goals AND the goals of your patrol members into a plan for your patrol. Enjoy your year as a Devon 50 Patrol Leader. Plan and work to make your patrol the best in Devon 50.

At the beginning of the year sit down with each member of your patrol and plan their rank advancement with them.
* What merit badges do they want to earn during the coming year?
* What required merit badges do they need for advancement?
If you have a lot of scouts who haven’t made first class, there are lots of Scoutcraft activities that could be planned. For example if you have a 1st Class Scout, find out what required merit badges he needs for Star, and what other merit badges he wants to get and agree on how to reach that goal. You should also discuss what skills each scout feels he does well, and which ones he needs to improve. You should probably check it for yourself, sometimes you get a scout that thinks he knows more that he does. Then agree on how he will improve those areas that need it.

Overall plan for your patrol
With a plan for each scout (and yourself), and the goals of the Troop in mind, you need to set an overall plan for your patrol. Make sure you discuss it in a patrol meeting. You should decide together on things like:
- what merit badges you want to take as a patrol?
- what skills do you want to do first in your patrol?
- what is a good day of the week to have patrol meetings?
- do you want to take a trip or two as a patrol, without the troop?
- are there any special things you want to accomplish this year? ( like win patrol-of-the-month 3 times? )

Organizing the time
Knowing what you want to do is a great start. Next, you need to figure out how much you need to do each month in order to get there.
    At the beginning of the year, everybody thinks they have lots of time to make it. But just like at school, you can’t get everything done in the last week or two. You have to make progress every month, or you’ll run out of time. So get out the Troop calendar and mark your patrol meetings.
    You are going to be busy at your patrol meetings with lots of things, planning events, talking about what you found out at the Greenbar meeting, having a game or a song or a competition. Maybe you want to have someone come in and show you something interesting. So your plan for the year has to fit in somehow.
    After a while, you may find that you are trying to do an awful lot in one year. It’s good to be ambitious, but nobody likes to fail, so you need to discuss with your patrol whether you want to set your goals a little lower, and have a better chance to succeed, or to go for broke, with the risk of not getting there. As long as you agree on the goals, either way is fine, and you will learn a lot from the experience. It’s also OK to change your goals, if you see you are falling behind, but don’t let it get to be a habit. If you changed it once, try twice as hard so you don’t have to change a second time.

Now that you have a plan, all you have to do is follow it, right?   Right!

    Don’t just do the plan and then forget about it. More good plans are made that are ever followed. Good planning is a great skill, but the only thing that matters in the end is DOING IT!  Think ahead about getting merit badge counselors scheduled to come to your patrol meetings, arrange for someone who is really good at it to teach skills, make sure you sign off the scout handbooks whenever something is completed.
    Talk to your scouts, ask them how they are doing, and get them some help if they need it. The troop staff and the adult leaders are more than willing to help.
    To help you plan, each patrol leader is expected to hand in a plan for the year to the Senior Patrol Leader at the first Greenbar meeting in September. This plan should include:
- The names of each patrol member,
- The current rank and current merit badges of each patrol member
- The planned advancement and merit badges each Scout intends to achieve between September and June,