COT First Round Training 2023-2024

Club Officer Training Schedule for 2023-2024 First Round (Summer)

One of the ways that District 31 works to achieve its mission to “…help all clubs achieve excellence” is by providing Club Officer Training (COT). All COT sessions are open to any Toastmasters member and cover a wide variety of topics to help clubs to improve in order to better serve their members. Based on feedback received from surveys of club officers, training will once again will be conducted in shorter sessions between 60 and 120 minutes long with offerings not only on weekday evenings and weekend mornings, but also at noon during the workday to accommodate a larger number of people’s availability. Most sessions will be virtual, but there was a single in-person session on August 26, in Waltham for those who were interested in the networking benefits of meeting people in person (pre-registration is required). See below at the bottom of the page for more details.

Club officers who attend at least 2 hours of training including at least one club officer peer session will earn credit in the Distinguished Club Program (DCP) for their attendance. Don’t stop at 2 hours, though, as the more training you attend, the more you will learn and grow and be able to help your club. And if that wasn’t incentive enough, clubs with an average total training time per club officer of at least 3 hours who get credit for at least 4 officer roles in the DCP goals will receive reimbursement for 6-months of Zoom access (or an equivalent prize). Who will be the most trained club officer team in District 31?

Please email COT@district31.org with any questions, suggestions, or offers to help. Session dates and registration links are being added as they are finalized.

Virtual Training Topics

To allow for maximum flexibility, District 31 is offering a wide variety of training topics from which you can choose. Per Toastmasters policy, each club officer must attend training that is specific to their club officer roles, which means that attending one of the many offerings of the Club Officer Peer Sessions is required. In addition to this mandatory session, club officers must choose at least one other training session to attend from the choices listed below. Having a hard time choosing which topic to attend? Why not attend all of the topics that are of interest to you? Not only will you learn more by attending more sessions, but you will also help your club towards earning the training incentive.

Please note all of our Peer Sessions and Electives for the summer have been posted. What you see is what you have available so please plan accordingly.

Elective Topics Navigation:

Kickoff With The Fab Four:

Come join and kick off our Club Officer Trainings with the Fab Four elect. Come here what their visions and goals are for this year in their elected offices. We may even have some incentives already in the works to share with everyone.

Opportunity Is Knocking:

Still on the fence of leadership and not sure if you want to take on an officer role for this year? Come and find out all about what District 31 has to offer with club leadership. Learn a little about each officer role on what they entail.

Toastmasters Basics:

New to Toastmasters? Come learn about the Toastmasters basics. Learn about Free Toast Host, the Toastmasters Dashboard, mentoring, and more.

Successful Toastmaster Season:

Come join us on a special two part session on planning for a successful Toastmaster season. Part 1 will be going over on how to create strategies for a successful Toastmaster year. Part 2 will entail a hands on workshop on building your club strategy.

Club Success Plan and Moments of Truth:

Come learn about how to use moments of truth with your club and integrating that into creating your club success plan.

Free Toast Host:

In this session you will learn how to navigate Free Toast Host and the different items you can use with it.

Yoodli:

Learn all about Yoodli and how it can help you with enhancing and performing your Toastmasters projects at the next higher level.

Running Effective Hybrid Meetings:

As more and more clubs are leaning towards hybrid meetings, come learn the details of how to run a successful hybrid meeting.

Slack:

Come and learn more about the different features of Slack and how you can use it to communicate with the other like club officers in the District. 

Club Officer Peer Sessions (required)

Are you struggling with your officer role and looking for guidance? Or have you found a great way to execute your role and want to share it with others? Come to a club officer peer session to learn about how to execute your responsibilities of your role and share challenges and successes with others in the same role. There will be breakout sessions for each officer role. It is required to attend at least one of these sessions for club credit in the DCP program (along with another hour or more of the topic of your choice). The offerings in June will entail step by step details of what the role is all about for those new in club officer roles. In the months of July and August we will NOT be doing a step by step review of what each role entails, but will instead encourage participants to ask questions and share advice with each other. We may have more of the basic step by step trainings in July and August depending on interest, if that is the case it will be noted on the calendar and schedule. Otherwise expect the more participant discussion session for the later months.

Pre-work: It is expected that you have read through the requirements of your role in the Club Leadership Handbook PRIOR to attending this session.