How TO COUNSEL Merit Badges

Thank you for your interest in serving as a Troop 78 Merit Badge Counselor! This is a fun, rewarding, and low time-commitment way to serve our Scouts. 

First-Time Counselor

If this is your first time signing up to be a Merit Badge Counselor, follow these steps: 

How current/recent counselors can Add/Drop Merit Badges

If you have been a Merit Badge Counselor before and you want to add/drop merit badges, follow these steps:

How the merit badge counselor process should work

The Ask

A Scout approaches you to begin a merit badge or open a merit badge class. This could be a Scout or perhaps the Scoutmaster wants to kick off some new classes. 

Permission to Start

Confirm that the Scout has Scoutmaster permission to start a merit badge. This used to be through paper "blue cards" but today happens mostly over email or even in-person confirmation. The Scoutmaster wants to be aware of how many MBs a Scout is juggling at once.

Opening a Class

If you prefer to work with Scouts 1:1, that's great. Go for it! (Remember that parents may not serve as counselors for their kids unless it is part of a class including other Scouts.)

Opening a merit badge class of about 5 Scouts can be a great way to have more fun as a Counselor (more than 5 can get hard to schedule) and also make it more fun for Scouts. 

Opening a merit badge class as part of training for a Summer Adventure is an excellent idea -- please talk with the Scoutmaster about the best ways to do this. Merit badges like Camping, Cooking, Backpacking, Hiking, Swimming, Personal Fitness, Canoeing, and others are very much in alignment with Summer Adventure preparation. 

To open a class, it's best to make 2-3 in-person announcements during weekly troop meetings. Announce that you are opening a class for XYZ Merit Badge, which is really fun and a great learning opportunity for XYZ reasons. Talk briefly about the kinds of things Scouts will do. Then ask for Scouts to sign up on a piece of paper, preferably with an email address.

Scheduling

Classes: To manage scheduling, some counselors prefer to keep their classes together by setting meeting dates/times that work for everyone. This is often done as a pre-meeting before weekly troop meetings. In theory, this is a good way to keep everyone moving at the same pace and completing the same requirements. In practice, there are always Scouts who fall off the pace and that's okay. As a counselor, you don't need to make them do things. It's up to Scouts to take responsibility, initiative, and do the work.

Schedule of Availability: Other counselors will send out a schedule of dates/times that they will be present to work on merit badges and then whatever Scouts show up can keep working ahead. The issue here is that sometimes Scouts will no-show.

Kickoff with Scout-driven follow-up: Other counselors will set a kickoff meeting for the whole class and then it's up to Scouts to schedule follow-ups with the counselor. This works better for older Scouts doing "90-day tracker" merit badges like the "Personals" (Personal Fitness, Personal Management, and Family Life). Younger Scouts generally forget they are in a merit badge class and never follow-up.

There are scheduling methods that are better or worse depending on the nature of the merit badge. Swimming, for example, requires Classes or Schedule of Availability. Communication MB, which has some fun group opportunities and also some independent work I think works best with 2-4 Class meetings and then should move to Scout-driven follow-up.

Merit Badge Class Kickoff

If you will offer merit badges in a class format, it's a good idea to begin with a kickoff meeting where the main goal is to get everyone together, acknowledge that they have made a commitment to beginning and finishing this merit badge, and to review the requirements and suggest a strategy for completing them. I highly recommend that Counselors ask Scouts to bring a printed/stapled "merit badge worksheet" with them and urge Scouts to use it and keep careful track of it. These are basically homework-style worksheets that match merit badge requirements. They do feel a little like homework, but they are the only way most Scouts can keep track of which requirements they have done and still need to do. If a Scout independently writes in their worksheet, then all they need to do to get signed off in most cases is bring the worksheet to a meeting with a counselor and review it. Bingo! Worksheets are the main reason my son Ben completed several merit badges that took him over a year -- he always knew what he had left to do.

Tracking Merit Badge Completions

For merit badges I offer, I like to use Google Sheets in "anyone can view" mode to track completions. I just create a sheet with a summary of the requirements in a column, add Scouts in columns, and then mark off what they have completed with an X, mark off what is a partial with a slash /, and leave blank what is not started or not done. Email Dave Trendler to see an example merit badge tracking Google Sheet for Swimming, Communication, Photography, Camping, Backpacking, or Citizenship in the Nation merit badges. 

Trying to track individual requirements in Scoutbook.com can be challenging because Scoutbook is user-unfriendly. Many Scouts don't actually have access to Scoutbook because their parents don't know that only parents can grant Scouts access to their Scoutbook.com account. Here are instructions for parents to grant Scoutbook access to Scouts (or see below). Only parents can grant this access; other troop leaders cannot do this. 

Syncing to Scoutbook

There is a great feature of Scoutbook called "Quick Entry" for Merit Badge Requirements that allows users to bulk edit completed requirements. The Merit Badge Coordinator and Dave Trendler use this to bulk edit for larger groups of merit badge requirement signoffs, like Summer Camp, Merit Badge University, and merit badges tied to outings or Summer Adventures. 

It is a good idea for counselors, after reaching a good "stopping point" with a group of Scouts, to transfer larger swaths of completed requirements from whatever method they are using to track completions (like Google Sheets) into Scoutbook. Please contact Daniel Kundert, the Merit Badge Coordinator, or Dave Trendler for training. In some cases, if you just send your list of Scouts and all the requirements completed, Dave, Daniel, or the Merit Badge Coordinator may be willing to do the Quick Edit in Scoutbook for you.

Then I simply create one email group with Scouts (and perhaps parents, depending on the Scouts) and always use that email group to schedule new classes and send periodic reminders of completions/work left to do. 

How Parents Can Grant Scoutbook.com Access to Their Scouts

Many Scouts don't actually have access to Scoutbook because their parents don't know that only parents can grant Scouts access to their Scoutbook.com account. Here are instructions for parents to grant Scoutbook access to Scouts. Only parents can grant this access; other troop leaders cannot do this. Here's how to grant access:

Earned!

When a Scout has completed all requirements as written, simply email the Scout, a parent if you like, and our Merit Badge Coordinator saying "This Scout has completed all requirements needed to earn XYZ Merit Badge. Would you please mark this complete in Scoutbook?" The MB Coordinator will confirm and the Scout will be awarded the MB at the next Court of Honor.