Category Archives: Toastmasters

starting pathways level 2 before level 1 is approved

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start Toastmasters Pathways Level 2 after you submit level 1 and your VPE (Vice President Education) submits/approves. I”m the first person from this club to complete level 1 so my VPE doesn’t yet know how to submit. Yet I had a meeting speaking opportunity before that. What to do? What to do?

Getting a level 2 (or any level) evaluation sheet

Level 2 is three speeches. You can download the evaluation sheet for all three easily.

  1. Go to the Base Camp home page
  2. Click “Speech Evaluations” (the rightmost option)
  3. Choose the project you are interested in and click Launch

This opens a PDF with the sheet your speech evaluator needs. Some of them you could do most of with just this information. For example, Intro to Toastmasters Mentoring is to give a speech about being a mentee. It is also supposed to include how Toastmasters envisions mentoring. For that, you need the full project. Googling for “pdf introduction to toastmasters mentoring” showed me that a club has uploaded the full project. This was useful in learning what the rest of the project was.

I imagine that Toastmasters doesn’t want people to upload the whole PDFs. But given this project is in all level 2 paths, it is a great start. The PDF for Understanding your Communication Style is also online and in many paths.

The actual project for Intro to Toastmasters Mentoring

After reading about the difference between mentoring and coaching (which is interesting), you give a speech that largely includes a story about when you were mentored. I’m currently leading a SpeechCraft program so I gave a speech on how mentoring helped come up with speech ideas.

Submitting

I uploaded the PDF of my evaluation from this speech. I can’t mark it off in Base Camp until my Level 1 is approved. Also read how I completed level 2 before level 1 was approved.

 

pathways – submitting level 1

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing the other level 1 projects:

Once you’ve completed all three, the final project of the level activates. “Level 1 Completion”. Clicking “launch” opens a PDF. There isn’t much to it. You click “launch” and that notifies your VPE that you completed the level. There’s nowhere in the system to submit your evaluation sheets to the VPE so I emailed them.

The status goes to “pending completion” until your VPE.

I don’t like this submission system. You can’t even look at the level 2 projects until your VPE approves level 1. But by definition, you just finished level 1 and are ready to start what is next. So the day you are most excited about moving forward you have no access to the project.

Note: I”m the first person from this club to complete level 1 so my VPE doesn’t yet know how to submit. Here’s what we learned when he actually submitted. (Not to worry; I did all the level 2 projects while waiting!)

Once the request goes through, the member gets an email. Here’s what mine looks like.

Dear Jeanne Boyarsky,

Good news! Your completion request for Level 1 Completion—Presentation Mastery was approved on 2/13/2018 6:10:00 PM. This means you have completed all of your educational requirements for this level and are ready to start the next level in your path. Visit your Education Transcript on Base Camp to view your completion approval.

In recognition of this exciting accomplishment, you have been awarded a certificate of achievement. To see or print your certificate, view the Training Details section within Level 1 Completion—Presentation Mastery. Watch the Accessing Certificates tutorial to see how to view and print your certificate.

To continue your Pathways journey, go to your Education Transcript and select the next level in your path to begin a new project. Congratulations on completing your level!

Sincerely,

Toastmasters International
www.toastmasters.org

The member also gets a level 1 badge accessible on “My badges”

Additionally, the member can go back to level 1 and look at the final project to view the certificate. It looks like this: certificate-level1

Toastmasters Pathways – an overview of the levels and projects

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If you are in Toastmasters, you’ve probably heard that the education program is changing to Pathways. The new program has ten different paths each of which has three levels that you proceed through on your path. I started with the Presentation Mastery path as I expect that to be the most common choice in my club. You can read about my experiences in the Presentation Mastery path. It turned out to be less important than I expected in which path I choose for learning about the program. But more on that in a moment.

First lets start with some key references.

  1. District 57 (the home of Toastmasters) has a great Pathways site with lots of reference material.
  2. District 57 also has a 66 page PDF which lists:
    1. A paragraph description of the 10 paths
    2. A one page description of the projects and electives in each of the 10 paths
    3. A list of the requirements for each project
  3. A list of links to the evaluation sheets for all projects. In order for this link to work, you must already be logged into Pathways. (Don’t bother trying to login after clicking the link). This is useful if you are evaluating a member and they haven’t handed you the sheet.

Back to the paths. While the emphasis of each path varies, you have a lot of choices in common; especially in the electives. Also, the paths are mostly an equivalent amount of work. (Something that was not true of the old advanced communication manuals.)

I really liked the information in the 66 page PDF mentioned above. But I wanted to see in a view that let me compare paths. As a club officer, this is really helpful. So I made my own. I got permission from George Marshall to share my view and here it is.

This 12 page deck compares the paths level by level and gives you an idea of what to expect in each. If you are viewing this post from a corporate firewall, you may see a blank page here as this file is hosted at SlideShare. So try again from your personal computer.