China Advanced Toastmasters

We’re always watching evaluations. Sometimes the General Evaluator will evaluator the evaluators, but rarely for more than a few moments. CAT Secretary Wendy Wang ACB ALB did a particularly good job at Lighthouse yesterday afternoon.

I especially liked how she broke up the five evaluators into four ’styles’ of evaluations. It was a speech marathon so there were a lot of evaluators, though each had a different style. Instead of just describing each the style of each evaluator, she highlighted the similarities and differences.

To me, this showed that Wendy wasn’t just passively watching the meeting, but that she was analyzing and thinking critically about what she was observing. And, as one of the evaluators myself, that made me know that at least one person in the audience was paying attention!

It’s the same when we give individual evaluations. A great evaluator won’t just repeat what was said but rather will add a layer of analysis so that the audience can understand the lessons contained in the speech more deeply. Like reading a review of a film might help us better appreciate it, or listening to a book review might help us better understand it, an evaluator can not only highlight the strengths of a speaker but can help their audience grow and become even more.

To me, a great evaluation is a mini-training session. The evaluator uses the speaker as a stimulus to which they respond to the audience – highlighting the strengths of the speaker as examples that the audience can emulate, and areas for improvement that the audience may seek to amend in their own speaking.

That’s why evaluations are so important. They can be more demanding than table topics. More challenging than a prepared speech. More varied than being the Toastmaster of the meeting.

CAT is preparing our members for the coming evaluations contest through the next few months. As well as our usual array of training sessions, we will be having evaluations of evaluators and having some CC-level speeches so that we can get more used to evaluating at per contest requirements. One of our members competed at the District (National) contest last year and we have an array of other experienced members.

Hope that you can join us!