Yes, in Toastmasters, we give prepared and impromptu speeches to develop public speaking skills.
But many (most?) aspects of Toastmasters meetings are actually intended to build leadership skills.
Grammarian, Ah-Counter, & Evaluator all develop critical listening skills.
Timer, Speaker, Toastmaster, & Table Topics Master all develop time management skills.
Speech Evaluator, General Evaluator, & Grammarian all develop skills on giving feedback.
Toastmaster develops people management and meeting preparation skills.
Club officer roles give additional opportunities to learn and practice leadership skills and provide a template for running an organization.

Three ways we’re putting a focus on leadership back into our club:

1. Paper signup sheet for meeting roles by the door at the meeting (to simplify the sign-up process)
2. Personal meeting role record sheets (to track individual progress)
3. Written evaluations for leadership roles (to provide feedback for improving)

Some clubs ask members to go online to their club website (easy-speak.org or toastmastersclubs.org) and pick a meeting role for each meeting. Other clubs have the Vice-President of Education (VPE) assign meeting roles for everyone in the website. We prefer to allow members to choose their role, but have had a problem with getting people to sign up on the website on their own. The solution we are going to try out is to have a paper sign-up sheet at the meeting.

Additionally, we’re providing a means for members to track their own progress on filling the different meeting roles. Yes, if your club uses Easy-speak.org, the VPE can pull this information from the website, but it is not easily accessed for all the members. So we’re exploring tracking this on a paper form.

Lastly, Toastmasters mantra is that the key to improving is in getting feedback after every speech or leadership activity. However, with Pathways, leadership roles are not addressed and no feedback is given for them. So we’re re-introducing giving each other written feedback when a member performs certain meeting roles to improve their leadership skills.

This is an experiment. Watch for updates on our progress!

Have you signed up for the new Pathways program yet?  Did you already choose a path and start preparing to do your Ice Breaker speech?  You might even intend to be the first person to complete DTM under the new program, yes?

On the other hand, are you one who might be stuck trying to decide which pathway to select?  Wondering — maybe fearing even — what projects await when you commit to a choice and unlock your first Pathway; uncertain if it is really the right one for you? No worries, I have what you are looking for.  Read on.

Right about now you may feel as if you’ve been thrown into the movie “Divergent” and now you must choose what faction you will join, hmm?

Or like the young wizard Harry Potter, you don the sorting hat at Hogwarts School of Wizardry whispering “Gryffindore? Hufflepuff? Ravenclaw? Slytherin?”

Some Toastmasters may find solace that during the first 30 days after you have selected a Pathway, you can change your selection.  But that doesn’t make it easier to decide which path to choose and it doesn’t help understand what each pathway contains. For that matter, having 30 days to switch doesn’t really help because you can’t see what all of the projects are that lie ahead.  You can only see the projects of the current level you are on.  The projects for the next level are not revealed until you complete the projects of the level your are on and unlock the next level (and your Vice President of Education has processed it.)  This can be quite frustrating for those of us who thrive on seeing the “big picture”.  As Morpheus explains it in The Matrix…

Not being one to accept artificial limitations imposed by others, I set out to discover what I could about each pathway in the new Pathways program.  And for the sake of my fellow Toastmasters who demand to know more, I will share with you what I have discovered.

Toastmasters has published these descriptions of the 10 pathways:
You might also read this guide that was published.

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Within each pathway there are 5 levels.  Applying the gaming metaphor to this (and yes, Pathways is definitely the gamification of the Toastmasters program), each level has several missions (projects) to complete before unlocking access to the next level.  Each level has a mix of mandatory and elective missions to be completed.  The details are as follows:

Level 1:  3 Required missions (projects) – These are the same for all paths
Level 2:  3 Required missions – These vary by path
Level 3:  1 Required mission and choose 2 electives
Level 4:  1 Required mission and choose 1 elective
Level 5:  2 Required missions and choose 1 elective

That is a total of 14 missions to complete to finish a pathway.
Complete 2 pathways to earn DTM.
Special thanks to Frank T. Storey, DTM from District 18.
Checkout his website for comprehensive more info.  It even shows all 59 projects currently available.  Scroll to the bottom of this page and view the .PDFs 1-4 posted.  I would link them directly here, but he is constantly updating them.

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The following table contains a list of the mission titles and which Pathway each applies to.  Special thanks to Ann DeMarrais and Kenneth Karru-Olsen for their work compiling this list!

Hopefully this offers a bit of help in deciding which pathway to take.  The differences between the various pathways does not appear to be as significant as I had expected.  Yes, it would be nice to have more details of each project, but at least this is a start.  I will post more details as I find it.  I encourage you to share the link to this article and to post what you have learned about Pathways in the comments below.