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Volunteering at Scouts is changing to help us reach more young people

Volunteering is changing to help us reach more young people

Volunteering is changing at Scouts. Read more

Discover what this means

Expedition aims

Hold a team forum to help decide the aim for your DofE expedition
Plan a session with this activity

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You’ll need

  • Pens or pencils
  • A4 paper

Before you begin

  • Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
  • Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Preparing this activity

  • Before this activity, ask everyone to think of one expedition aim each to bring to the table. They will need to prepare what their aim is, a brief explanation as to why and how they think it can be achieved.
  • Have a look at this fun expedition aims page on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) website to help with ideas.

Share your ideas

  1. Explain to everyone that they’ll be taking part in a forum to discuss and decide the aim of their Duke of Edinburgh’s expedition.
  2. Have a chat about what a forum is and how they work.

A forum is defined as: “A place, situation or group in which people exchange ideas and discuss issues”. The Talking tables activity explains one way of running a forum.

  1. Decide the running order of who’s going to share their expedition aim idea.
  2. Give everyone a few minutes to present their ideas. Encourage everyone else to take notes so they can remember what everyone said.
  3. Once the whole group has presented their ideas, remind everyone that the aim of this forum is to choose the aim for the expedition and then open the table for discussion.

Make sure there are adults around to help keep the conversation on track and to make sure that everyone has the chance to speak if they want to. This part could happen quickly or slowly, depending on the number of ideas there are to talk about. Let the conversation flow until you feel it’s necessary to intervene.

  1. At the end of the discussion, make sure the group has made a joint decision on what the aim of their expedition will be.

Reflection

This activity needed you to communicate and be a team player to help decide the aim for you DofE expedition. How did it feel making this decision together as a team? Was the decision easy to make or were there lots of discussions first?

You had to communicate your idea to the rest of the group, how did that go? Did you manage to put your point across and also take part in the discussions? Would you do anything different next time?

Safety

All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.

If anyone’s not comfortable enough to present an idea to the rest of the group, let them work in a pair with someone else to help share the ideas. They could write their idea down instead.

All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.