Your Turn to Talk: Comments from Survey on GSUSA Programming

 At the end of my survey on GSUSA programming, I had a "say whatever you want" item.  I complied posts with the comments about Journeys/TAPs and Badges.  This post covers the other comments--both those that didn't fit into the earlier posts and those which had not been posted when I wrote the previous posts.  Grab a snack or a drink and scroll away.  See something that rankles you or that you think is profound?  Discuss here in the comments or on the Facebook group where you found this link.  

• I think some of the points of journeys and take action are skewed. The gold leans heavily on teaching and education, when the girls want to take action more
  . I have seen where some girls get frustrated and stop working on their project because it becomes not their project anymore but just teaching what needs to be done instead of doing.
• I think what is undermining the quality of GSUSA programming and the Leadership Experience are Journeys in a Day. Leaders who do these are robbing their girls of the opportunity to actually learn skills and think critically, leaving them without the tools needed to do the TAP. Leaders need to stop being "badge baggers" and rushing through everything as fast as possible. The point of having so much variety in the program is not to "earn it all", but to have something of interest for every girl.
• Current program is way too "talky" and not enough learning and doing skills. 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.
• GS is about teaching the girls to be independent and have a voice, it’s difficult when the girl is willing but a parent is hindering their growth. They need to make more training on how to deal with conflict amongst adults.
• This is our first year doing a journey, so it was hard to answer your questions.
• Thanks for asking these questions. These are important topics we should be discussing as GS leaders. Our troop (started as Daisies and now are 1st year Juniors) haven’t done any Journeys because they seem overly complicated for young girls. I feel pressure (probably of my own making) to do Journeys but no one in our troop is clamoring to do them. I may be out of sync with GSUSA, but I think what the girls like best is being together and doing things outside. We recently did an outdoor skills weekend and by far, their favorite thing was the learning to start a fire with matches. At age 9, they don’t care about entrepreneurship or learning problem solving techniques. Good luck with the survey outcomes!
• Earning their Junior Aide badge has prepared my girls for Bronze (which they are just starting) more than the TAP ever could.
• 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.
• Not much of your survey talks about girl led so it was hard to choose some kind of answer
• We are losing Scouts, especially the older ones, because the activities are too much like school. We complain about kids having too much screen time yet so many of the badges are "research" and/or "find an expert." They want to try new things. They want to be active. Not everybody needs to show "leadership" by standing up loudly and getting people to go along. We need to reassess the idea of leadership so it works for all girls. Being a leader in STEM isn't the only thing that can give a girl confidence.
• Your questions are worded with significant bias. Additionally, it doesn't seem acknowledge that troops from different demographics may lack certain resources or have different abilities and that why steps are broad. We have members of our Service Unit who have been part of the GSUSA curriculum development team within the past decade and there is so much that goes into it that I think is very difficult to be aware of as a troop leader.
• I've never had a scout who wanted GS to be more curriculum heavy or strict on skill development. As a leader, I'm grateful there are no tests or requirements and we are given the flexibility to work with the spirit of the curriculum. The whole skill-testing feels like Boy Scouts and not something our scouts have ever expressed interest in. I feel the same about the Promise, Law, color guard etc. Feels like the military and that's not what we're in GS for.
• The badges they aligned with journeys do not fit the journey very often.
• Badges need to be more affordable
• GS needs to go back to basics on a lot of badges and programing
• With over 30 years of GS and having led in the 80's 90's early 2000's I'm finding that I'm not too happy about the changes that have occurred in the 2010- present time frame. Journey's are a waste of time. Just let the girls do their award and don't make it any more difficult.
• The VTK is clunky and leaves gaps that I end up filling in with the brochures. The original journeys just feel like extra school work. I based our journey on the VTK and used a lot of the handouts but put in a lot of time and effort to make it engaging for the girls. We would have skipped it entirely but we now have Juniors and want to make sure they would be able to do their Bronze award.
• As Daisies we tried to follow all the steps to badge earning. Now as Cadette’s we try to make any activities relate to any badge. There is no GIrl Scout police unless you are earning the highest awards. Do what you want!
• Our troop enjoys the flexibility of some of the patch programs- lots of field trips and fun things, but they take a lot of time to complete if done correctly and then it’s a little disappointing that the patch has to go on the back of the vest. Resilient. Ready. Strong is one example. The new trolls patch is another.
• We need more variety in badges - less stem that feels like school and more actual skills.
• I miss the range of badges under the previous (pre-2011) program; also wish that vtk offered more explanation for leaders to understand topics we're supposed to present. Would prefer if VTK had the badge booklets & not just the wordy scripts.
• VTK isn't a help. Too much babble, not enough meat. Completely useless at meeting time if you don't have online access.
• Current badges often don't need girls to show age-appropriate proficiency on a given topic.
• Range of badges is far too small.
• Gold Award review process is can easily be politically driven.
• The entire Gold Award process itself is designed with stumbling blocks and gatekeeping. We're supposed to be encouraging girls, not making them navigate their way through red tape.
• I haven’t even touched Journeys in my troop (D/B) because I struggle with how to introduce them and carry a thru-line since we only meet twice a month. Maybe a a JIAD, or the individual badge ones (eg outdoor journey), but not the books.
• My only experience is with Daisies, and generally I think the programming is way to structured. They're young, and most have been barely holding it together through school, it's not surprising that they kind of go crazy at GS meetings. The programming needs to be flexible and realize that nothing will go to plan with Daisies.
• I like your survey. I wish GS would de-emphasize STEM and go back to the old ways.
• My girls are now Cadettes, and have informed me that they are not interested in earning most of the badges, as they are not at all "fun". They feel like an extension of school. So we are in the process of designing our own activities that follow the program, but are more hands on. And they really dislike the journeys, but have agreed to finding one they can live with so they can pursue Silver.
• I love girl scouts and what it offers girls. However I am not a huge fan of the current programming materials. Unless you spend a ton of your own time, the girls don't get much out of it. It's way too much like school - between the badge topics offered (stem, etc) the steps (my girls often do the exact same activities listed in the badges IN SCHOOL the year prior, so it's not new, exciting, or anything for them). The curriculum is too broad and nebulous, especially for you g girls who need concrete based on their developmental stage. Then you get to order girls and the badge offerings are just blah and need to be hidden within a fun "theme" to be palatable for them to even consider.
• Our biggest wins have been in the building friendship bonds/self esteem/and offering new experiences (fire building, camping/trailblazing pin/road trips, etc).
• Thanks, this was an interesting survey. There's definitely too much happening in VTK for a typical volunteer to implement. As a service unit manager I've had several leaders tell me they are intimidated by many of the badges because of the volunteers of text involved.
• 1) Girl Scouts is not just for girls anymore, please be more inclusive in your language. Please use Girl Scouts as the official title but don’t say girls or daughter - you’re excluding scouts who don’t identify with those terms.
• 2) GSUSA is trying to cover a lot of material and appeal to a majority. Sometimes it works and some badges are written well. Others are obviously aimed at either small troops in small towns or huge troops in inner cities. I think less focus needs to be on making sure the checklist of exact things is one and more on the checklist of meeting general criteria and concepts as designed by leaders based on GSUSA intention. However the examples in the VTK and booklets are helpful to have especially for some leaders who may have less planning time!
• We always fulfil the intentions of the badges and journeys even if we slightly vary the steps.
• Journeys are too often adult led. My teen just completed their silver award and it really helped me to see what they had learned from doing journeys and planning taps. However it also took a lot of reminders and support. However all that was good practice for life and of course for gold award!
• I wish the girls had badge/handbooks so it would be easier to earn badges on their own like we used to do. I don’t like the content of many of the new badges.
• I like the old badges much better since there was a lot of variety and girls could easily earn badges on the same subject all through their years if they were interested. Also there were just so many more choices for the girls to be able to do different things.
• My main issue with the talking through and leading discussions on concepts is that I just don’t have the skills to make that work. We usually have an overtired but rowdy group that has a hard time focusing. And none of my coleaders or I have the kind of teaching skills to really make these in-depth discussions really work. It often just end up with one of us leaders doing most of the talking or one or two girls participating but the rest of the girls zoned out. But when we just do stuff…the girls have a good time and we can squeeze in a little of the learning but everyone walks out feeling positive.
• The girls want sewing badges. And nursing. They do NOT come to Girl Scouts to do more of what they do all day in school. I have no problem with STEM (BS in Physics) but not all girls want it shoved down their throats all the time. And not all girls want to be CEOs. Girls want to explore interests, not be seen as products to be pushed into a "pipeline."
• Good luck!
• Many people who are GS leaders and volunteers do not have daughters (or any children, for that matter).
• The skill and service aspect of badge earning has mostly disappeared. JGL wanted girls to give service in their earned badges’ skills—if they earned the badge, they could give service in it. The application of taking a skill (Junior Gardening or Flowers) and going out in the community to do a project seems to have been completed disjointed from the experience of Girl Scouting.
• I feel like there has to be a standard to make our higher awards carry weight. I feel leadership journeys and take action projects as they currently are meet those standards because the body of work that many of the girls achieve as they get older dwindles significantly as Girl Scouts is forced to compete with other extracurricular activities.
• Thanks for doing this survey. I hope you are able to share the findings with GS USA, and that they hear and understand!
• When my girls read the current badge book when new as Cadettes, they said their previous Brownie try its were harder as Brownies than the new badges as Cadettes. They also did NOT like the badge experiences and wanted to learn skills. I pulled badge requirements and skills from my 1963 badges for them to earn.
• Also, GSUSA fails to do much for multi level troops who work on these together. I have to recreate every activity to ensure our meets requirements for all levels involved.
• Higher Awards - it would be better to drop the journeys and require a more robust TAP as a stand alone.
• I am disappointed that GSUSA discontinued the physical Cadette Journey books. The VTK doesn’t provide enough to effectively lead the journey, although it’s nice that the journey has fewer steps now.
• I believe that the Cadette and higher journey materials should be written with the intention that the girls lead them, or could lead them; and help set them up for success to do so.
• The survey is a bit long
• I've never used VTK. When it was introduced, it wasn't available for CSA or multilevel. My troop was Juniors and Cadettes. I learned to get by without it. Although, I do think it has a use for newer leaders who feel overwhelmed. The original journeys don't feel very well laid out, at least when I was a new leader. I took over from a leader who did everything and just needed additional adults for ratio and to help out. We went through the book and thought that was it. GSUSA needs to stop constantly changing everything. Introduce new ideas but keep the other ones. We need life skills, art, outdoors, stem...all of it. The girls aren't cookie cutter, we need things that different girls are interested in.
• Journeys are terrible especially for older girls! A useless step. Let them work on projects. The VTK is pretty useless. Standing there reading a script is not effective and the way the VTK is laid out is really difficult to deal with. I never go in there.
• 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.
• I really am not a fan of VTK, I think it’s clunky for multi/level troops. I really dislike the fact of choosing a set path and if something happens to change in planning then you are a bit stuck. There is a lot of discussion points and main concepts I try to cover, but having two or three meetings to cover one badge is not feasible or optimal for my girls among many levels who want to try to earn all the badges they can in two years. I usually read through VTK and review examples and compare to the badge print outs (which I find way more friendly and concise). I plan accordingly to hit all required steps.
• 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, and over the years it’s really clicked with the girls. They had no problems with bronze and are cruising through silver.
• My troop has a wide range of learning abilities and physical abilities. I like being able to tailor the activities to what works best for our troop.
• Why cant they add badges for older girls. All the new stuff stops at juniors. And why can't the badges match grade levels. I feel like many of the newer ones are for 2 grades higher material wise than the girls earning them
• I am a firm believer in really completing a badge and understanding it. I do not understand how so many troops can earn a badge a meeting and think the girls really have learned something. My girls earn fewer badges, but that's OK.
• Thank you. I like doing GS surveys. I feel that every time they change the program we lose girls to BSA. Having done this a very long time it makes me sad that the numbers are done so low. In the late 1990s when I was SUM we had 60 troops. We now have 10. I blame all the changes and the hoops the volunteers have to jump through. I personally spend at least 6 to 8 hours sometimes preparing meetings because I want to. I want them to have the best most memorable experiences.
• I would like to see the program go back to the way it used to be for the higher awards where there were a certain number and type of badges to earn and leadership hours to complete, etc. as pre-requisites for gold and silver. It was more attainable and more worthwhile than today's journeys. Also gold and silver projects should involve leadership, but should not have to be sustainable or have a global link. It's too much. And girls don't see the point of staying in if they're not going for the awards and even my daughter sat through the silver training and doesn't think it's something she can do. It's very disappointing.
• 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.
• This survey raised a lot of good points I hadn’t thought about before. I believe that GSUSA programming has become too STEM focused, and I say that as a professor of science education! Many of the badges are fun and open doors for my girls, but getting rid of the badges they most want to do in arts and turning it into yet another STEM rooted badge is too much. The arts are a very legitimate way for people to learn about and understand the world and to take action. Having the current program so lopsided in excluding the arts, and to some extent social science that is anything besides civics, does the girls a disservice in exposing them to different ways of thinking and knowing. But maybe I am just an old school Girl Scout who misses the Worlds to Explore program.
• The girls like doing things, anything they is a lot of talk feels like school and doesn’t go over well. I wish Girl Scouts used some of the Bit Scout model, I feel like I am constantly reinventing the wheel and spend hours making a plan, instead of having compelling plans available to me. VTK resolves some of this, but needs more action based projects. Also when I read the badge and VTK, with some I have trouble figuring out how they match up.
• At the Daisy / Brownie stage I have each girl pick a badge and I figure out how to earn it. When they get to Juniors, I want to get them more involved in picking steps and planning out the meeting. I also wish they were all scripted to be earned in 1 meeting.
• Review the older materials for Seniors in the 40-s to 80-s. They got it right for older girls. Would like to see the Gold pre-requisites returned to actual skills that prepare the Girl Scout to earn the Gold.
• I don’t agree with having to pay for badge packets especially now that the girls are older and starting to lead badges. There is no way I can make it through a VTK guide, let alone a middle schooler. It’s too long and way too much talking. So much of the badges now are research or discuss or make a poster or do a skit. This isn’t teaching any skills. The most memorable badges they’ve done are things like cooking or building. I miss the way it was in the 90s.
• I think in general, the program is going too far into the territory of being school like. Too many of the badges feel like homework – particularly the cadette level ones. My girls love to help other people, do projects, and be outdoors. They don’t want to sit around and learn about the same stuff that they could get in class. We need to get back to more activity, less theory.
• My girls would much rather be involved in hands on service rather than theoretical TAPs. I also wish there were more practical life skills badges. Sewing is a way more useful skill than book binding.
• 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 troop had been looking forward to doing the sewing badge when Juniors and last year when they turned to Cadettes, they took it away! Very disappointed! I don’t think they should ‘retire’ craft badges for more tech based! I think that’s a huge disservice to our girls!
• I definitely use the badge booklets and o line information as a guide. And now that my scouts are leading badges, it’s a nice guide for them to follow to build their meeting.
• Girl Scouts has become less skills based and more of a "hey you learned about this here have a badge"...they have less new skills to show of for the badges earned.
• I think it needs to build with a start at survice 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.
• 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.
• As a leader of older scouts, we find that most of the badge work doesn't appeal to our scouts. If they don't find it interesting they lose interest and focus. Even if we continue to move forward, I will not award a badge to a scouts if she attend if she wasn't engaged during the activities. We also do a lot of our activities and work on life skills. GSUSA is slowly forgetting that is where this all started. Our scouts need this support in their lives, I would rather do these activities than any badge work any day.
• I think it's a shame they retire good badges like Brownie philanthropy and Junior drawing badge. Those two in particular were my girls favorites. I also think more outdoor and life skill badges are needed and useful. Kids today are inundated with STEM. Also, for girls younger than cadette level almost ALL of the planning for any activity, TAP or community service, has fallen on me the leader. Mainly due to time constraints and girls not understanding the assignment or being realistic with plans.
• I think the goal of take action projects is to lead to bronze, silver, gold progression, but I think it's really hard for new leaders and girls to understand how to do a take action project and how to pick something small enough that a troop can finish it in a reasonable amount of time. I also think all high school girls should be the same level and that badge opportunities should be expanded for older girls
• I really like journeys. They terrified me at first, but once I began working through them I found them to be fairly easy to implement in meetings, with the exception of the take action project. I like the idea of the girls working towards a larger goal, and I’ve seen real pride in the girls when they complete a take action project. When we did pass it down for our bridging award I remember one girl saying one of our take action projects was our troop’s biggest accomplishment. They can be daunting and you do have to figure out how to meet the girls where they are at, but they are a good thing. It pushes us as leaders to really see what our girls are capable of.
• survey is too long
• I wish we had more arts badges. At a time where they are cutting back on arts and music in school, it baffles me that we only have generic "maker" badges at the Daisy and Brownie level. It's very strange that there's absolutely nothing offered for music, too, while there are so many robotics/coding/computer badges. Also, I wish there was a campfire badge for Daisies and Brownies. Fire safety is a real skill to learn at that age, so why aren't we recognizing it as such?
• When it comes to the badges, I love having flexibility as a leader to hit the general requirements, but the activities to get there can be developed by my troop. My son in BSA does not have that flexibility, and I think it's made a huge difference in retaining girls in my troop.
• I think TAPs should be progressive; Daisies can think on a smaller scale and work on just identifying a problem. Brownies could do more, like identifying a problem and ideas of how to fix it. Then Juniors could do the TAPs as written.
• Overall, I'm very happy with the GS program and the resources available. I do feel that Seniors and Ambassadors have too few badge options, and especially desire life skills (they know they're coming up on high school graduation and are afraid they aren't ready to manage their life themselves). I think we could do better to have more career option badges - things that expose scouts to a variety of career options (not just STEM) as well as more mature hobbies, because we should be building leaders who have rich lives. I'd like to see retired badges (and the build your own badge) program returned to active duty.
• I like the old program with brownie try-its. Brownies literally could try 45+ different things. Badges were earned as COMPETENCY awards. Girls would demonstrate that particular skill to earn that badge. I personally didn’t care for the interest projects then, but girls could really hone in on their interests. Today’s programming doesn’t focus much on Community Service and the VTK leaves little room for just fun things like songs and games and just for fun crafts. I think that focusing more on community service would be a better way to get girls interested in and make connections for these take action projects. Young girls at the Daisy and brownie age are concrete thinkers and take action projects require abstract and critical thinking. They are too young to introduce these concepts but they’d clearly understand simple service projects.
• I think the Take-action projects expect too much of the younger girls and that having to be sustainable makes them very difficult to achieve. The VTK plans are not engaging in practice and we never use them. I wish there was more support from our council for the STEM badges. Having to plan those badge activists is overwhelming for leaders.
• “Girl led” is an illusion as long as we do not have badgebooks for the girls.
• Bring back Badge Books!! In order to make it girl led, girls need to have access to the badges and concepts and Girl Scouts takes place outside of meetings. As a girl growing up, I loved to read and learned so many skills from our Worlds of Knowledge Book. It’s also where traditions can be handed down.
• Our troop has binders and I was going to ditch them as we bridged to Juniors, but overwhelmingly the scouts said they wanted to keep them.
• If you actually put in the work to do a Journey-- and the original Jouneys ARE SUPPOSED TO TAKE A YEAR -- the girls learn skills, critical thinking and how to work through their TAP. If you skip absolutely everything and try to cram the Journey into 1 day, it's meaningless and the girls are not going to walk away without any benefits beyond vaguely being introduced to a topic. No wonder so many leaders hate TAPs and feel like they're doing the work, because they aren't preparing the girls in any way.
• This survey is soooo long, and has too many questions that don’t apply to everyone and too many answer choices where none of the answers fit my experience
• TAP seems impossible for Daisies and Brownies. They still require a lot of parent involvement. For us, it's better to do tangible steps like volunteering at a food bank or using cookie money for a toy drive as baby steps toward TAPs when they're older.
• My troop has no interest is discussing or planning anything - I lose them in minutes if we try. So we have to tweak a lot of steps to earn badges. They just want to do hands on things.
• GSUSA needs to give girls a chance to learn skills. Every year i have girls asking to learn how to sew, bake, crochet, knit. And they can't earn badges for that.
• Put out a badge book. That is 1 thing BSA does better. They aren't always tweaking based off the new CEO.
• STEM is important. BUT it's not the only skill with value.
• I think TAP are critical step in leadership and learning how to make a change in the world. GSUSA could to a better job making them progressive. You wouldn’t expect a daisy and a senior to have the same level of involvement in the planning of a TAP - so why does GSUSA present it that way. Help a leader out and make starting the process less intimidating.
• You should really seek out some survey design tips - they're frequently written to be quite biased, but I do love giving feedback! I also love the Journeys and am happy to speak more on why they work so well and how to lead them. The bigger issues I see are GSUSA threatening to get rid of physical badge booklets entirely, and how the VTK limits troops' activity variety.
• Some of the ideas on the steps in the badge booklets are outdated or unrealistic. For some I easily come up with a replacement, but for others I do not. I am fortunate to be an educator/curriculum specialist so I don’t need much guidance, but I could see it being hard for others to veer from the badge booklets or VTK.
• I agree that TAPS being sustainable are too much for younger girls. Its hard enough to get them to think outside the box for badges. While my girls were very willing to help others at a young age, there is NO WAY they would have come up with reasonable ideas on their own. My girls are 2nd year Juniors and they are just now thinking of ways to help people, but I still have to make prompts are real in some ideas that are not possible. Making a TAPS are single project rather than sustainable would make the WHOLE process much easier and enjoyable. Save the sustainability for the higher awards.
• I disagree with people that say there is too much STEM, but we need more outdoor/life skills. While camping this weekend, a third grader asked for help cutting up her pancakes (I assume this is because her parents do this for her at home), and my girls get wide eyed when I pass out knives to cut fruits and vegetables (some say they aren’t allowed to use them at home). I will keep teaching safety and proper knife skills, but GS should add this to the program. I also would love a badge that asked the girls to learn common trees/plants in their area, they could start at 3 or 5 plants as Daisies and build on that number each year. The girls love identifying plants with the app on my phone while on hikes.
• I would like to see the older girls C,S,A badges merge. They wear one uniform for several years and often don’t get to do the activities in the level they are currently. For example, I have a multilevel troop. We did sewing (textiles) this year. It’s a Cadette badge but my seniors didn’t earn it until this year. There isn’t a badge for Seniors for fabric or sewing. There are also so many less badge options as they get older.
• The book journeys are outdated and should be scrapped completely, especially for the older girls. I recently did the Girltopia journey with a senior group. Many of the “facts and statistics “ in that book were pulled from only one source which I could not locate to verify. I was especially interested in doing so because the information being presented did not match other info I was reading about the topic. The journeys often seem written to encourage the reader to view the world very negatively.
• My troop also did the breathe journey. Many of the suggested air activities did not work well and I had to look for another teaching resource to make that session fun and interesting