Tag Archives: level1

Approving a Pathways level request

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I submitted my Pathways Level 1 award in early January. Due to a combination of club officer vacations and the officers not knowing what to do (since Pathways is new), it took over a month to get it approved. I completed level 2 in that time.

Today, I screenshared with the club President and we approved my Level 1 award. Now that we know what to do,we know it should take under ten minutes. Here’s the process to quickly and easily approve a level for members of your Toastmasters club!

Step 1 – the club officer gathers info that the member  has completed the projects in the path.

There are a few options for doing this

  1. The member provides sufficient evidence that he/she has completed the speeches in the path. I went this route and emailed all my evaluations to the President and VPE. (I had chose this option because I’m a member of two clubs so the officers of the Pathways club have no other ways of validating)
  2. Past meeting agendas
  3. Speak easy or other online tracking system.

I recommend having the member at least provide you with the dates for validation if not the evaluations.

Step 2 – sign in to base camp manager

The club President, VPE or Secretary has to do this step.

  1. Sign into toastmasters.org
  2. Click “pathways”
  3. Click “go to basecamp”
  4. In the middle tile, you’ll have two options – you could choose “log in as a member” – but don’t. That takes you to Base Camp rather than Base Camp Manager. Instead, click the button under it to go to Base Camp Manager.
  5. Click “Pending Requests”
  6. Clcik the members name to view the transcript to verify. This could be cross referencing PDF evals or looking at agendas
  7. Then click the green checkbox to approve or the red x to reject. Either way, you can leave an optional comment to submit.

This process (starting from step 5), is described in the official docs with screenshots.

The member gets an email. I got mine a few minutes after the club officer hit approve.

Step 3 – getting DCP credit

Then go back into toastmasters.org and file an educational award. This increases the member’s title and gets credit towards the club’s DCP. It’s easy though – no need to type in titles:

  1. Club central
  2. Submit education awards
  3. Select member from pull down
  4. Education – level 1 (or whatever level)
  5. Submit

Toastmasters Pathways – Research and Presenting

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing your icebreaker.

Again, you watch videos and answer questions interactively. The videos and questions cover both research and how to organize your speech. This means that the research and presenting speech is a mix of the old CC (Competent Communicator) speeches 2 and 7.

You get two worksheets to prepare. One is the speech outline to cover main points with support/evidence. The other is a guide to researching and citing your sources. The worksheets are another thing that differentiates Pathways from “the old way”. Both are useful if new to giving a speech. You don’t have to follow them if you want to organize your speech in a different way.

I gave my speech about SpeechCraft. Which is something I researched a few months ago. So research did happen. And it was great because my evaluation was done by someone who had never evaluated anyone before. He had a good observation that I hadn’t heard before. Different perspectives are great!

I was also Toastmaster at this meeting so I marked it off in my profile. See the logging your roles section for more on that.

Toastmasters Pathways – Evaluation and Feedback

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing your icebreaker.

About the project

After some background, you watch three video evaluations of the same speech. With a timer counter in the corner of the screen. They show why the evaluations are better as they go. Which helps give an evaluation to others.

I like that Toastmasters is encouraging members to become a speech evaluator once they have given three speeches. (the icebreaker and the two in this project.) I notice some members are afraid to give a speech evaluation at that point so this will be a nice nudge of encouragement.

I also like that this project gives you the choice of using feedback to improve the same speech or to apply it to a new speech. This project had a three question quiz at the end to review what you learned and reinforce the key messages. Like saying “I” instead of “you.”

One thing I found confusing was that the links to download evaluation guides and such were a screen after “complete your assignment.” With completing, I thought there would be nothing else needed to start. Like the Icebreaker, I like that they provide the PDF version of the whole project. It’s good for a reference. It’s also good for seeing what people who opted for paper instead of base camp get. (aka seeing the value of base camp!)

PDFs

Up until now, I had been using a scanner to create PDFs of my evaluation sheets. This time, I took a picture with my phone and converted.

Logging your roles

Also, this project is the latest you have done a meeting role. In addition to completing the project, remember to go to your base camp profile to indicate that you did the role. This needs to be done to log the date of the first time you do each of the following roles:

  • Ah-Counter
  • General Evaluator
  • Grammarian
  • Speech Evaluator
  • Timer
  • Toastmaster
  • Topicsmaster

To mark yourself off:

  • From the Base Camp home page, click “Settings”
  • Click “My Account”
  • Select the date you did the role
  • Click “Save”