June 25 2025

This workshop, led by Abhijeet, first taught us the structure of a speech evaluation; then we listened to our brave volunteer speaker Ignacio, and volunteers practiced giving evaluations.

Key points in the workshop included the use of radical candor, I statements, and ideal feedback. Radical candor involves balancing caring personally with challenging directly. I statements (I saw, I felt, I heard) help provide specific, non-judgmental feedback. The ideal feedback includes a “why” and a specific example. The structure of evaluations should open with a connection, address what the speaker did well, areas for improvement, and conclude positively. Practicing evaluations and avoiding superlatives and rambling are crucial for effective feedback.

While evaluators prepared their notes, Abhijeet also acted as our Table Topics Master. Instead of a question, he chose prompts such as ‘An Unexpected Lesson’.

Thank you to Dawn, Nadya, Nitin, Lily, Amber, and Sana for being our evaluators!

See you at the next meeting!