The Table Topics Master
The role of the table topics master is to prepare and lead the club through this portion of the meeting.
Prior to the Meeting:
- Must pick a desired style and format for how he/she wants to conduct this session.
*example: standard topics, debate style, standard topic immediately followed by individual evaluations.
- Must pick appropriate topics. There should be a range of difficulty (easy to challenging) for the different levels of your fellow club members.
- Check to see if the Toastmaster has decided on a theme for the meeting to aid in picking topics.
- If you need help in table topic ideas check here.
At the Meeting:
Review agenda roles and identify which people present are not in speaking roles.
Start to align people available to speak and the difficulty of the topics.
When called upon by the toastmaster your session should include the following:
- An introduction of Table topics if guests are present.
- An introduction of the session you are about to conduct and the rules
- Ask if any body does not want to participate (especially guests)
- How table topics will be run today
- An intro. to the topics
- Timing instructions
- Conduct the actual topics session
- Align topic difficulty with level of experience.
- If choosing people versus asking for volunteers, pick a couple experienced people first before picking a junior person.
- Preferably pick people who do not have an assigned speaking role in the meeting to ensure all have the opportunity to speak in the meeting
- Conclude your topics session, thank all participants and ask all to vote for their best TT speaker.
- Turn lecturn over to the Table Topics Evaluator (if applicable) or the Toastmaster
Suggestions for techniques:
- If no speeches that day and there is lots of time, one technique that Frank introduced to the club was to have each speaker do their topic twice. First off they make an initial attempt . The whole club give an around the table feedback (at least one good thing and one thing to improve). Then the person goes up and tries to fix the things in the second repeat session of the same topic.