10 Aug 2017

Pathways Paths and Projects, Post by George Marshall, D57 Chief Pathways Guide

George Marshall is the Chief Pathways Guide for District 57. He managed the launch of Pathways in the very first pilot district. He is also the District 57 Statistician, the author of Tools for Toastmasters (www.marshalls.org/tmtools), and the producer of Toastmaster Time TV, District 57’s television show: https://www.youtube.com/user/ToastmasterTimeTV  

In this blogpost there are valuable informations, video and a link to Path & Projects all should have at their fingertips, to help them to chose their Path after studying it.

Here are all the Pathways Guides from District 57, the first Pilot District for Pathways. 

George Marshall's guest Post:
The Pathways program projects are organized in a way that is easy to understand, and offers clear guidance on reaching a member's goals.

Replacing our traditional program's 16 communications manuals and the Competent Leader manual, we have 10 paths, each with five levels of increasing skill levels.  

Each path emphasises a specific combination of skill development, with projects on the core competencies of Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communications, Strategic Leadership, and Management.

Each path consists of fourteen projects, organized into five levels, each level with two to three projects. Each path achieves its target skills learned with a unique combination of required projects, with ten required projects in each path. These required projects lead the member through developing the skills indicated for the path.   

The other four projects in each path are electives, which allows the member to tailor any path to provide a secondary emphasis.

The contents of the Pathways projects are a mixture of familiar material, and completely new material, created for Pathways.

The "familiar" material was adapted from projects in the traditional program manual, including both the Competent Communication manual, and selected advanced manuals.  Experienced members may recognize projects like the Ice Breaker, Creating Effective Visual Aids, and Body Language.

All members will find challenges in completely new projects created specifically to help members building skills for today's careers.  These projects include Building a Social Media Presence, Write a Compelling Blog, and Manage an Online Meeting, among others.

Many Pathways resources are available on the District 57 Pathways web page. Be sure to download the "Pathways Path and Projects Catalog", a compact guide to paths and projects.

The Pathways program is the first attempt to restructure the Toastmasters curriculum in over forty years, and the first new addition of any kind to Toastmasters since 2006.  Pathways is well-organized and offers benefits to both new and "veteran" members.
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Here it is the video taken in May 2017 at Witty Storytellers Online club meeting. George was our special guest first speaking and showing great slides while explaining the Pathways structure, then answering to Q & A from our members and guest who came to participate to this special online "about Pathways" meeting.


For this blog post, I have taken separately only his contribution for best understanding.

For George Marshall, this appearance at Witty Storytellers Online Toastmasters club, at which I am VPE was also the Project of Q / A from Level 4 of his path, for me it was the "Planning a special event and making it known". Both the planning (we had 4 speakers) and lots of guests, and George's Q/A went specially well. I wrote about them at the time, in May in this blog.

6 comments:

Lynda Lee said...

I like to start reading from your 1st article in this pathways blog and found this very interesting...thank you.

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Lynda Lee said...

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