A Typical Meeting
What's a typical meeting of the Dynamic Speakers like?
The Presiding Officer (usually the Club President) begins the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance, the reading of the Mission of the Club, opening remarks, and a welcome to guests. The meeting Toastmaster then introduces the Word of the Day and discusses the meeting theme for 2-3 minutes.
Meetings typically include two speeches given by members in satisfaction of projects from one of the multiple Toastmasters manuals. Each project focuses on a unique presentation skill and includes a tutorial to assist in the successful completion of the project objectives. Most speeches are 5-7 minutes, but some are longer and limit us to only one speech during the meeting. Members work through the projects at their own pace. After completing the first 10 projects, members achieve the level of Competent Communicator (CC). Members continue to achieve advanced levels of communication while simultaneously working on leadership projects and skills.
We follow the speaking portion of the meeting with a 10 minute impromptu portion of the meeting called Table Topics. Toastmasters answer questions or speak impromptly for one minute. This portion of the meeting is typically related to the meeting theme. Table Topics Masters aim to involve all members at the meeting without assigned roles. Guests are never involved unless they are members of another Toastmaster club as we prefer that guests only serve as observers at our meetings to make the experience be comfortable and non-intimidating. Most Table Topics sessions require members to answer questions. Some questions are easier than other: "Tell us why you prefer dogs to cats." Others are much harder: "Who did you vote for President in the last election and why?" Table Topics can also be completely off the wall. We've had meetings where we've played Pictionary, Hot Potato, and even provided voices to actors in silent films.
Following Table Topics we enter into the evaluation portion of the meeting led by the General Evaluator. The General Evaluator introduces members who provide a 2-3 minutes constructive evaluations for each of the speakers from earlier in the meeting. The evaluations focus on how well the member met the project objectives, skills performed well, and areas needing improvement. Evaluations focus on helping members achieve their goals. Following the speaker evaluations, functionary evaluators report on our use of grammar, how close each member came to meeting time requirements, and the number of "ah's", "um's", and other crutch words members used. Our Competent Leader (CL) Evaluator provides a one minute evaluation on how well a member performed in a leadership role. This section of the meeting is closed out by the General Evaluator reporting for 1-2 minutes on the meeting overall.
Finally, the meeting ends after one hour with awards handed out for Best Speaker, Best Table Topics, Best Evaluator, and Special Recognitions, plans for upcoming meetings, announcements, guest comments, and and closing comments by the Presiding Officer.