Adding a safety net for speech evaluations in Toastmasters meetings

Every Toastmasters manual in the Communication series contains a set of projects. The first page for each project has a list of Objectives. For each project the last page has a one-page Evaluation Guide. The guide has a list with about a half-dozen written questions to guide the speech evaluator. Before the meeting begins, the speaker hands the manual to his evaluator. After the speeches, the evaluator gives a two to three minute verbal evaluation. Later he also provides a more detailed written evaluation by answering all the questions in the manual. For more details, see the Effective Evaluations publication.

That’s how it should work - assuming the speaker doesn’t forget to bring the manual to the meeting. But, what happens if he forgets? Then the evaluator might get lucky and find a spare manual in the club’s files. What if he isn’t lucky though? You have a situation like a fire minus the safety net shown above.

It would be very useful to have a generic rubric as a safety net for that occasion. The August 2009 Toastmaster magazine contains an article by Carol Dean Schreiner on pages 16 to 19 titled The GOOD the BAD and the UGLY: How speech evaluations can help - or hurt. On page 19 there is exactly such a rubric - a Handy Evaluation Checklist. It has a dozen specific points, plus the following four general ones:

Suggestions..........

The part I could really appreciate was..........

The best suggestion I can offer is ..........

The best thing about this speech, overall, was ..........

That article was published when I was Vice President - Education for Capitol Club. So, I formatted a version of her Handy Evaluation Checklist to fit on a single page, indicated the source at the bottom, saved it in Microsoft Word, and put twenty copies in a folder for emergency use at our meetings. I emailed Carol to suggest that she put a printable version of it on her web site. She didn’t. Unfortunately the html version of her article on the Toastmasters web site also doesn’t contain that checklist. You can find it in the pdf file for that entire issue of Toastmaster magazine though.

However, you can find an uncredited printable version to download at a web page about evaluation tools on the web site for Calgary Toastmasters. Why isn’t it on the main Toastmasters web site? Was it just Not Invented Here?

The image of a life net was adapted from a Puck magazine centerfold published in 1911.