Tag Archives: pathways

Toastmasters Pathways – Research and Presenting

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing your icebreaker.

Again, you watch videos and answer questions interactively. The videos and questions cover both research and how to organize your speech. This means that the research and presenting speech is a mix of the old CC (Competent Communicator) speeches 2 and 7.

You get two worksheets to prepare. One is the speech outline to cover main points with support/evidence. The other is a guide to researching and citing your sources. The worksheets are another thing that differentiates Pathways from “the old way”. Both are useful if new to giving a speech. You don’t have to follow them if you want to organize your speech in a different way.

I gave my speech about SpeechCraft. Which is something I researched a few months ago. So research did happen. And it was great because my evaluation was done by someone who had never evaluated anyone before. He had a good observation that I hadn’t heard before. Different perspectives are great!

I was also Toastmaster at this meeting so I marked it off in my profile. See the logging your roles section for more on that.

Toastmasters Pathways – an overview of the levels and projects

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If you are in Toastmasters, you’ve probably heard that the education program is changing to Pathways. The new program has ten different paths each of which has three levels that you proceed through on your path. I started with the Presentation Mastery path as I expect that to be the most common choice in my club. You can read about my experiences in the Presentation Mastery path. It turned out to be less important than I expected in which path I choose for learning about the program. But more on that in a moment.

First lets start with some key references.

  1. District 57 (the home of Toastmasters) has a great Pathways site with lots of reference material.
  2. District 57 also has a 66 page PDF which lists:
    1. A paragraph description of the 10 paths
    2. A one page description of the projects and electives in each of the 10 paths
    3. A list of the requirements for each project
  3. A list of links to the evaluation sheets for all projects. In order for this link to work, you must already be logged into Pathways. (Don’t bother trying to login after clicking the link). This is useful if you are evaluating a member and they haven’t handed you the sheet.

Back to the paths. While the emphasis of each path varies, you have a lot of choices in common; especially in the electives. Also, the paths are mostly an equivalent amount of work. (Something that was not true of the old advanced communication manuals.)

I really liked the information in the 66 page PDF mentioned above. But I wanted to see in a view that let me compare paths. As a club officer, this is really helpful. So I made my own. I got permission from George Marshall to share my view and here it is.

This 12 page deck compares the paths level by level and gives you an idea of what to expect in each. If you are viewing this post from a corporate firewall, you may see a blank page here as this file is hosted at SlideShare. So try again from your personal computer.

Toastmasters Pathways – Evaluation and Feedback

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing your icebreaker.

About the project

After some background, you watch three video evaluations of the same speech. With a timer counter in the corner of the screen. They show why the evaluations are better as they go. Which helps give an evaluation to others.

I like that Toastmasters is encouraging members to become a speech evaluator once they have given three speeches. (the icebreaker and the two in this project.) I notice some members are afraid to give a speech evaluation at that point so this will be a nice nudge of encouragement.

I also like that this project gives you the choice of using feedback to improve the same speech or to apply it to a new speech. This project had a three question quiz at the end to review what you learned and reinforce the key messages. Like saying “I” instead of “you.”

One thing I found confusing was that the links to download evaluation guides and such were a screen after “complete your assignment.” With completing, I thought there would be nothing else needed to start. Like the Icebreaker, I like that they provide the PDF version of the whole project. It’s good for a reference. It’s also good for seeing what people who opted for paper instead of base camp get. (aka seeing the value of base camp!)

PDFs

Up until now, I had been using a scanner to create PDFs of my evaluation sheets. This time, I took a picture with my phone and converted.

Logging your roles

Also, this project is the latest you have done a meeting role. In addition to completing the project, remember to go to your base camp profile to indicate that you did the role. This needs to be done to log the date of the first time you do each of the following roles:

  • Ah-Counter
  • General Evaluator
  • Grammarian
  • Speech Evaluator
  • Timer
  • Toastmaster
  • Topicsmaster

To mark yourself off:

  • From the Base Camp home page, click “Settings”
  • Click “My Account”
  • Select the date you did the role
  • Click “Save”