General Evaluator

Purpose:

To guide the members through an evaluation of the meeting. With the help of your evaluation team, you will offer your opinions on the strengths of the club and the areas where the club can improve the quality of their meetings.

Before the Meeting:

As general evaluator you are responsible for facilitating the evaluation process. In preparation for the meeting you should:

Contact all the participants that you are responsible for introducing (a formal introduction such as the toastmaster would give is not necessary to introduce these participants). They include:

• Speech Evaluators

• Reports from:

• Ah counter

• Grammarians

• Voice Projection Monitor, and

• Timer

Review the sections of this guide for the various roles of the meeting that you will be evaluating.

Prepare a brief explanation of evaluations.

At the Meeting:

During the meeting, you must be attentive. Your role is to be a active observer of the meeting. You gather information on the performance of the members during the meeting. Your job includes:

• Listen and observe during meeting.

• Explain purpose of evaluations in the Toastmasters program:

ask for report from:

• Ah counter

• Grammarians

• Voice Projection Monitor, and

• Timer

• Deliver general comments on meeting.

• Return control to the Toastmaster.

Tips and Traps:

The job of an evaluator is not as easy as it might seem. Your job is to deliver your opinions on the performance of members in their various roles in a toastmaster meeting but first and foremost on the Evaluations provided by the speech evaluators. These evaluations must be constructive and positive in nature. Your responsibility is to outline the strengths of members' performances. You must also point out areas where members could improve their skills. Make sure you read the literature provided to you when you joined on evaluations.

Let your evaluation team make your job easier. Do not waste effort covering ground they have already covered. Your comments should be short and to the point. Observe the time restrictions as they are outlined on the agenda. You should do everything possible to keep the meeting running on schedule. Your comments may be short if your program is running behind schedule. If this is the situation, focus on the important comments you wish to make and end as close as you possibly can to the schedule. If the meeting is running behind schedule, you may want to focus on areas the club can work on to ensure the program is running on time.

Treat the role of general evaluator as a learning experience for yourself as well as for the club. It gives you an opportunity to practice your listening skills. It allows you to learn more because of increasing your listening skills. This is an extremely important portion of the Toastmasters program.

If you have any further questions, consult the evaluations handbook that was sent to you as a new member. It contains valuable information on performing effective evaluations.