Evaluation and Feedback
This meeting featured three prepared speeches based on the Evaluation and Feedback project. In Toastmasters, we prepare and deliver speeches based on a project included in our education program, Pathways, and the Evaluation and Feedback project is so typical of Toastmasters, where members learn by actually delivering a speech and then receive peer feedback. These two factors, "Experiential Learning" and "Peer Feedback," are two of the four growth principles Toastmasters embrace.
The Evaluation and Feedback project consists of three tasks, to deliver a speech and receive feedback, to deliver another speech incorporating the feedback received on the first speech, and then to deliver an evaluation speech on another member's speech. One of the speakers, Dashe, delivered his first speech on the project while the other two, Maya and Maiko, delivered their second speech on the project. They both successfully incorporated the feedback they received for their first speech. Well done! After this, they will be serving as evaluators and will be evaluated on their evaluation speeches. As we do not have a teacher in Toastmasters, it is important for each of us to be better able to provide effective evaluation and feedback to foster growth in each other.
New hybrid format
Starting with this meeting, we made some adjustments to how we conduct our hybrid meetings. So far, our meetings were based on what we were doing while we were having online meetings. Back then, some members were sharing the links to comment and voting forms via the Zoom chat window to make it easier for members and guests to leave a comment to speakers and vote for the Best Speaker, Best Table Topics, and Best Evaluator awards. Recently, however, the majority of the attendees join our meetings in person, making it tough to continue that practice. This has created an awkward situation where some of the in-person attendees, who use their smartphones to scan QR codes for comments and voting, have to bring their own computers to help online attendees, who can easily access their email with the links. We decided it was causing some extra burden to in-person attendees and making it hard for them to concentrate on the meeting itself, and decided to say goodbye to that practice. Now that in-person attendees have less burden, members seemed to be enjoying the meeting more.
We are happy that we've noticed this hidden cause of distraction and that we've been able to address it. We will continue reviewing what we do and try to make adjustments to make our meeting even more effective and efficient.
