Table Topics Secrets Revealed

DTM Ron Kirchgessner, the Immediate Past District 11 Governor, share these tips:

Running Table Topics is one of those areas that I really enjoy.

• Have a membership roster that has people with duties marked off. That way you are calling on those who don’t have speaking opportunities. And it will help when you don’t know someone’s name.
• Have three levels of questions: softball, regular and challenge. That helps everyone feel comfortable, from the novice to the pro. Make sure there is at least one super challenge question for that 20+ year veteran.
• Variation on the challenge question is to take some figurines (I used Lord of the Rings) in three sizes. Let them select a small, medium or large figurine and then receive the appropriate easy, standard or hard question, respectively. This also works with candy or mints which the speaker can keep.
• A variation on the Picture entry in your document is to assemble a collection of vacation pictures of you and ask them to describe what is going on in the photo. The pictures were collected over several vacations with no two the same place.
• The Academic Challenge is modeled after Jeopardy. I have five topics (Religion, Gender, Math, Politics and History), each with a softball, standard and challenge question. They choose both the topic and difficulty level.
• This Day in History is a great source of topics. The site http://www.butlerwebs.com/holidays/default.htm is useful for finding and developing questions for a session on a particular day.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Table Topics ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.