TAP have their place but GS puts TAP on fun patches. Just stop. Why can’t we just have fun. Not everything we do has to change the world. It feels like so much pressure for girls to think we have to be the ones to change the world.
I think it needs to build with a start at service projects for the Daisy/ Brownies. The girls I have worked with just have not been able to really identify problems and they need help with every step. But they can do a lot for teaching and getting others involved.
I think that the TAPs for Daisies and Brownies are inappropriate for their developmental age. Juniors start to get it, but need heavy guidance.
My personal opinion is the TAPs for younger girls (elementary age) are too much. If my girls do 3 TAPs each level to earn a summit award, it feels a lot like they are working on something that will require someone else to maintain. It's passing the issue off onto someone else to deal with. It certainly makes it harder to do Journey in a Day type activities for our entire Service Unit when we have to find someone else to take over the maintenance of whatever the girls create during the Journey in the Day. It feels like we're pushing responsibility off to other people instead of actually helping our community. I'd rather the journeys have service components and leave the take action portion to just the bronze, silver, and gold awards.
We do a lot of Journeys and that has been helpful in building the TAP thinking. We do a mix of big in- depth and small easy projects, and over the years it’s really clicked with the girls. They had no problems with Bronze and are cruising through Silver.
I really think for younger girls TAP are super tough and more busy work compared to what they get out of it; however, my Brownies understood these concepts much more concretely. I think these are important, but for daisies too overwhelming and time consuming.
The TAPS are absurd at the younger levels, but if they are done correctly at the older levels they prepare the girls for the higher awards.
When it comes to TAP’s they need some guidelines of what to do exactly. I need to be able to bring ideas and choices to my troop. Just saying what a TAP is and to come up with their own idea would never had happened. We never made it through a full journey in Brownies, now we are juniors and I have 4 who completed a Journey and now I have to figure out how to explain to them they need to do a TAP and come up with something. I have no idea how to do it with part of the troop or even when to do it. I have to lead meetings for all the girls. It’s overwhelming being a leader sometimes. (Blogger note: Go to GSUSA's store and buy the Think Like a Citizen Scientist download; it does a better job than anything else I've seen GSUSA put out of leading the girls through the TAP process.)
I personally have no issue with Take Actions - they are pretty simple to execute. I think the new Journeys are far better than the original ones which my scouts have found so repetitive and boring that we never got through more than two meetings (with the exception of the Senior Sow What Journey, although I made some very different choices to have a much more immersive experience with that one).
TAP as currently implemented actually seems to take away agency and accomplishment from the girls since so much ends up being “education”. If a girl coordinates a neighborhood beach cleanup and gets 100 people involved and permission from the county, it doesn’t “count” as a tap because it’s not sustainable. If a girl makes a 10 minute video about how it’s important to clean up the beach and posts it online where no one will watch it, that “counts” as a sustainable tap. Which one taught her more leadership skills? Which one got Girl Scouts more involved in their community? Which one made the world a better place?
Journeys are just a chore and no one likes them, leaders or girls. We've done best with the Outdoor or Think Like ones because they fit better into a multi level troop, but they do not naturally lead girls into a TAP. Let's drop the journey and TAP connection, keep them separate. You can still require a TAP for higher award, but my girls would be more excited to work on a longer TAP of they hadn't just spent 6 meetings on a journey.
It’s my opinion that no journeys should have take action projects and that instead they should have a community service component that does NOT have to be sustainable. Save the sustainable component for higher awards only. The sustainable aspect of TAPs is really lost on the younger girls and if they try to earn their summit at every level they get really burned out on the TAPs.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. It’s asking too much of the girls at too young of an age
DeleteThank you for this information. I like your beach clean up comparison. I think it’s more beneficial to get the job done vs the video to demonstrate sustainability. I see this too often in the Girl Scouts community and it seems like a weak cop out. I have 1st year ambassadors who have earned bronze and silver. Some are working on gold proposals now. They hated Journeys, and the TAP. If TAPs are prerequisites for high awards, I wish it would be a stand alone and not attached to the journey.
ReplyDeleteI do like the way the BS have the badge progression to get ready for Eagle. It would be helpful if we had something similar, that way we could see girls earning certain badges to get to the high award prep, vs getting through the journey.
Also it would be helpful to incorporate parts to help them with the gold proposal. If I had to do it again I’d definitely work in stages on that gold proposal completion.
I wish I could take credit for the beach clean up comparison, but it was from someone who took the survey.
DeleteAs far as the Gold Award goes, as I noted in the survey, Journeys were supposed to be the core of our program. I read somewhere "Take Action Projects are what Girl Scouts do". I think the people who put the program together envisioned your Journey as being your theme for the year with all programming tied into it in one way or another, such that your TAP kind of grew out of it and that your troop TAP would teach the girls the steps they needed to take for their TAPs for the higher awards. I question whether that could have worked with even the best programming but the fact of the matter is, the original Journeys were not good programming. If you followed the directions given, you lost your troop. If you did it your way, you picked what was important and few leaders (including me) "got" the concept of a TAP and that that was where Journeys were supposed to end up. So, you got leader-selected service projects with flyers to make them "sustainable".
First, I want to say Thank you for checking in with the leaders. We are rarely asked for our thoughts and then when we are it usually changes very little. I agree TAP and journeys are overkill. I also have an issue with sustainability being prioritized over making a positive change. I have lead my
ReplyDeleteMultilevel troop through 2 rounds of Bronze awards, I’m going through Silver the 2nd time now and starting Gold with my Seniors. It is too much to require these girls to change the world. National Honor society doesn’t ask that of them, Boy Scouts doesn’t ask that of them and the Girl Scout Higher awards are regarded as lesser by outside organizations and colleges. Our Girls do not get the recognition for the work the they do.
Speak for yourselves, Journey Haters!! While I agree that the original Journeys are awkward, the entire point of them is a way to organize a year of scouting. I (and my girls) love Journeys because they actually get to learn skills they WANT to learn (just like those BSA folks keep wishing for), they have the opportunity to explore their interests deeply, and by the time they're done, they're actually EXCITED about their TAP.
ReplyDeleteIf your girls can't come up with a TAP after a journey, they didn't accomplish the learning outcome, they didn't learn skills, they didn't "discover, connect, take action". And that's on leaders trying to zoom through opportunities, not on the programming from GSUSA.
Stop badge bagging and rushing through the program, and maybe your troop will get more out of the experience. If you're doing JIADs just so you can bag a summit award pin, you're not actually helping your girls.
If doing a service project (like a beach clean up) is what you want to do, then do it. More power to you, that's an awesome way to contibute, but you should accept the fact that you don't get a LEADERSHIP award for participation under someone else's direction. If you want a leadership award, you need to teach your girls to lead. It should be both, not either/or.
That's always been my criticism of the "GSUSA needs to be more like BSA". BSA creates awesome followers who have skill sets that allow them to rise through a rank system that rewards kids who excel at Top Down learning. GSUSA has higher expectations for for our members. BSA is "follow the lead", GSUSA is "be the lead".
I would love to interview you about this comment and Journeys in general. If willing, please email me at ruthjoec at aol dotcom
DeleteI'm so glad I'm not the only person who loves Journeys!! They're an evidence-based program for EFFECTIVELY TEACHING LEADERSHIP and they work really well with the Girl Scout processes - I could gush for hours about the growth in Girl Scouts I see when we're on Journeys and it's so cool!
DeleteSend me an email if you'd like to be interviewed for this blog about Journeys
DeleteI think instead of making the lower levels think of something... We should have pre planned options to present to them and how to do them and let them pick a take action plan or if they want to create one... Sometimes ideas come from pre planned options.
ReplyDelete