Meeting Structure

Regular Meetings

Each meeting has a speaking portion and a business portion. The three parts to the speaking portion of the meeting are:

Table Topics— Each week, a new topic. You learn impromptu speaking skills; each presentation is a 1- to 2-minute mini-speech. Guests are welcome to participate!
Prepared Speeches— Two to three members will have had 1-4 weeks to prepare a speech using assignments from a variety of Toastmaster manuals. Speech lengths vary from 5-15 minutes.
Evaluations— Learn how to listen and provide skill-building feedback. We learn from each other every week and from every speech!

The speaking portion is followed by a short (15 min.) club business meeting.

Special Meetings

Our club likes to have special meetings every month or so. We have fun with special events such as our annual Ha Ha Holiday meeting, our Souper Bowl Open House, a club picnic and a variety of special theme meetings. We’ve had backwards meetings, dessert buffets, TableTopics marathons, Speech-a-thons, and meetings celebrating friendship. During the summer months, we like to hold the meetings on the church lawn — weather permitting.

Members fill any one of 13 roles at each meeting. These roles are assigned on a rotating basis:

Toastmaster - leads the speaking portion of the meeting, introduces speakers and is charge of the flow and pace of the meeting.

Pledge - a member leads us in the pledge of allegiance.

Thought for the Day - a member provides an inspirational, motivational or thought-provoking idea

Grammarian - provides a word of the day to build our vocabulary. They also listen for good usage and poor usage of the English language and provide a report during the evaluation portion.

Table Topics Master - leads the Table Topics portion of the meeting, provides the topic and selects and introduces the randomly selected speakers.

Table Topics Speaker – this is a non-prepared role - members are selected at random to speak on the specified topic without advance preparation.

Speaker - 2-3 members deliver prepared speeches from the various Toastmaster manuals. They will have had 1-4 weeks notice in which to select an assignment and prepare a speech.

General Evaluator - leads the evaluation portion of the meeting, introducing the evaluators and providing feedback to each evaluator and on the meeting as a whole.

Table Topics Evaluator - provides feedback to the Table Topics Master on the topic selection and how they lead this portion of the meeting as well as evaluating each speaker that participated.

Speech Evaluator - each speaker is assigned an evaluator who uses the guidelines provided in the speech manual to give feedback specific to the assignment the speaker used for their presentation.

Timer - every aspect of the meeting has a time limit. It is standardized for Table Topics and evaluations and variable for the prepared speeches. The Timer operates the lighting system that signals the speaker when they have reached the minimum, median and maximum time and provides a verbal report to the club on how well each presenter did in keeping within their assigned time limits.

Vote Counter - each meeting we select the Best Table Topics Speaker, Best Speaker and Best Evaluator – voting is based on the speaker’s level of experience and on how well they met the guidelines for their presentation.

Jester - each meeting has a humorist to share a joke, anecdote or funny story to ensure at least one good laugh per meeting.

Come join the fun — and grow personally and professionally too!