A Melbourne Toastmasters Club - Beaumaris, Mentone & Surrounds

People join a Toastmasters club to improve their speaking and leadership skills. What can you do to help them? Evaluations are a major contributor to this improvement and when evaluating, your purpose is to help the speaker become less self conscious, more confident and more effective.

There are three types of evaluation in Toastmasters:

1. Speech evaluation.
2. Table topics evaluation.
3. General evaluation.

The idea is to identify both positive points and negative points and then deliver these in a manner that encourages the evaluee.

Concentrate your comments on the characteristics, structure and presentation of the speech rather than on the topic (content) of the speech.

At Sandbelt the structure for most evaluations is Praise, Improvement, Praise, Summary or PIPS for short.

Praise

Start off your evaluation by thanking the speaker and commenting on the speech using two or three points of praise. You could start with “Here are two things I loved about your speech…”

This builds confidence and highlights what the speaker did well.For example:-

• Was it was enlightening, humorous, enthusiastic, dramatic, colourful etc?
• Did it tell a great story? Did it “take you there”?
• Did it hold your attention throughout?
• Did you feel motivated to follow a course of action?
• Was the language descriptive?

Improvement

Follow your points of praise with two recommendations that you believe will help the speaker improve their next speech. For example:-

• Were they pacing up and down?
• Speaking too softly?
• Stuck like a ramrod behind the lectern?

Provide examples to show how it might have been done better.

In delivering recommendations, you should try to be as encouraging as possible and less of a harsh critic. So rather than saying “Your vocal variation was terrible and meaningless”, you might say “I recommend in your next speech that you try to vary your voice to accentuate points or gestures and that this will help to convey the point or issue”.

Praise

Complete your comments by giving a final point of praise.

Summary

The evaluation concludes with a brief summary that should reinforce all the points raised so far. Your summary should not introduce any additional points.

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As an evaluator don’t get too carried away and make a long, laundry list of points in your evaluation.

For Table Topics where there is less time, get in at least one recommendation sandwiched by two points of praise.

In summary, evaluations are there to help fellow Toastmasters improve. You can improve your evaluation technique by using the PIPS structure and using aids to make notes. Be encouraging rather than critical and use examples to demonstrate.

Have Fun!

Toastmasters Evaluation Templates

You might find some of these templates useful during evaluations.

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