On Tuesday, London Victorians held an evaluation workshop with guest facilitator Catherine Casale. Eleanor G was Toastmaster, Fahad as Sergeant At Arms and Stephen took on the role of timekeeper.
Catherine hosted an interactive workshop, including a visual presentation and there was lots of audience interaction. Toastmasters has a longstanding tradition of evaluating and there are many benefits to this practice.
During the workshop Catherine highlighted the fact that the practice of delivering constructive feedback builds emotional intelligence, develops critical thinking skills and these transferable techniques can easily be incorporated within scenarios outside Toastmasters. She split the Evaluation workshop into three main sections; why evaluate, key evaluation concepts, and practice makes proficient.
During the workshop we explored how each participant benefits during the evaluation process from the three main stakeholders; the evaluator, the audience, and the speaker’s perspective.
In the third section, Catherine invited 6 volunteers to evaluate two speeches, and after Rob’s speech she invited three volunteers to try out new structures in order to experiment with technique and explore ways to develop and improve the evaluation process.
First speaker on stage was George who delivered his icebreaker. His speech informed the audience of his multi-faceted life; from being in the Royal Air Force, to writing books on ebay selling techniques and most recently acquiring a farm in Uganda. It was an entertaining and informative speech which was very engaging.
Robert delivered a well-structured speech educating the audience in some of the psychological aspects of playing tennis, and how the game is not just a physical sport. Whilst training at professional level, Robert recounted the lessons of sportsmanship versus gamesmanship. During his tennis training he was taught techniques such as breaking your opponents playing rhythm when they had built momentum with stalling techniques for example, tying shoelaces or bouncing the tennis ball.
An excellent workshop…Join us on for our next meeting on 3rd of May!
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