The COPE Evaluation Model

Imagine that you’ve arrived at a meeting a few minutes late. The first speaker is about to finish, and a peek at the agenda shows you are assigned to evaluate the second speaker. A C&L manual gets shoved your way with a paperclip identifying the speaker’s project. He gets up and delivers a wonderful speech. Your immediate reaction is “what can I say about this speech?” and you start to feel like a deer caught in headlights. What do you do now?

Nothing. If matters have gone this far, it’s too0 late – you’re venison. The correct answer, the only answer, is to not get in that situation to begin with. Arrive earl, talk with the speaker, and – failing all else – have a model ready to apply to a speech.

A model is a tool for taking something complicated and reducing it to something you can work with. We have a model of the way cars operate that lets us start, drive, and refuel a car we’ve never seen with relative confidence. We may not know how to open the hood, or what to do once it is opened, but we can use our model of the way cars are built to get what we need to do done.
For evaluations, I use a model I call COPE , an acronym for Content, Organization, Presentation, and Extras. I like it because it focuses on the same elements a speaker uses to build a speech in the first place. This gives me a common frame of reference with the speaker that I can count on being there even if I’m not fully prepared. Beyond that, I can use it to evaluate my own speeches.

The Origin of COPE

Take a look at a judge’s ballot for a speech contest. You can use either the International Speech Contest ballot or the Humorous Speech Contest ballot – they are similar enough to one another for this purpose. They have several criteria, but the criteria can be grouped into four broad categories – content, organization, presentation skills, and other criteria.

I realized early on that if I was going to compete, I should look at each criterion a judge would use and do what I could to maximize the score (or minimize deductions) he would give me. If I was going to take a risk on how a judge might interpret something, I wanted to do it deliberately. Why would anyone do anything else?

It may occur to you that an evaluation should be based on the evaluation contest ballot. This is certainly true for the evaluation contest, but in my opinion it doesn’t help me build a model. That is, it can guide what I’m expected to do but doesn’t suggest things I should talk about. The speech contest ballots direct attention to the elements of a good speech, but there’s still a problem.

In a contest, you get five minutes to prepare your notes for an evaluation. At a club meeting, you may get a bit more, but time is limited and you get exactly one chance to do it. Judges can complete a ballot in a minute or so because they are interested only in scoring. Preparing an evaluation takes longer, and the judge’s ballot has too many categories. I decided to simplify the model.

Instead of listing all the criteria, I chose to identify four categories.
· Content – what does the speech have to say?
· Organization – how to the parts of the speech fit together?
· Presentation Skills – what did he speaker do?
· Extras – everything else, including features that made the speech unique.

Just as I can count on a car to have a steering wheel, an ignition key, an accelerator and a brake, I can count on a speech to have these elements. If I can say something useful about those elements, I can give a useful, if not inspired, evaluation. Let’ take a brief look at each of the four categories in turn.

Content

Every speech should have something to say. An informative speech has facts, a persuasive speech has arguments, an entertaining speech has stories, a humorous speech has anecdotes. A great speech probably has them all. If a speech has a message, that message is its content. The content is a speech’s primary deliverable – the reason a listener should give time to the speaker.
Even if you aren’t an expert on the subject matter, you can evaluate content. Do the facts appear to support the speaker’s point of view? Do they appear to contradict each other? If a logical deduction is being attempted, was everything you needed there? Did the speaker talk over your head? What did you learn? An evaluation can attempt to address any of these questions about content, and more.

When selecting items to present in your evaluation, make a conscious decision about content. A new speaker focusing on organization or presentation at a speech for the club may have no use for a Venn diagram showing a hole in his logic. If he’s planning to give that same speech in a context where lives and fortunes are at stake, content flaws may be the most important advice you can give. This problem shows up most frequently when a speaker cuts out pieces to stay within time. That’s his choice, but he should know the omission was detected.

Organization

The third speech in the basic manual is an exercise in organizing a speech, but every speech needs it. At its simplest, a speech has an opening, a body and a closing. The obvious way to build organization into a speech is to start with an outline. The goal in organizing a speech is to get the listener to follow the presentation.

Evaluate a speech’s organization for its effectiveness. Can you identify the speech’s outline? Were you surprised by something in the middle because the opening failed to prepare you? Did the ending tie up the loose ends created in the body? Was there a way you’d reorganize the outline to make a key point more effective? The best possible speech for a situation starts with the best possible outline. This applies equally well to your speeches and can be analyzed from a pap[r draft. Have you got the best outline possible?

Presentation Skills

Content and organization can be examined from the printed transcript of a speech. You can only evaluate the presentation skills of a speech by looking at the speech itself. The C&L manual has a number of parts dedicated to improving presentation skills:
· Gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact (project 4).
· Vocal variety (project 5)
· Word selection (project 6)
· Props (project 8)
· Persuasion (project 9)

This is the area where the COPE Model wants you to think about those things you’d usually discuss during an evaluation. The other parts get you to look into issues you might not otherwise consider – presentation skill evaluation is what most members need the most help with. Remember that whether your intent is praise or suggestions, the points you make should be specific and helpful.

Extras

What’s the one thing that made this speech unique? What’s the one thing y0u want to make sure you cover in the evaluation? What did the speaker do that really brought the audience into the speech? What opportunity did the speaker miss to accomplish this? For things like this, and everything not yet covered, I use the extras category.

In the few minutes you have to prepare an evaluation, you won’t be able to fit everything you want to say into one of the first three categories. The categories are there to help you think of things to say—if you know what you want to say, categorizing it isn’t important.

Using the Model

Create and label six boxes on a page – see the example on the next page. This gives you space to put notes on content, organization, presentation, and extras in the appropriate boxes during the speech. You can fill notes on praise and suggestions either during the speech or as you prepare notes.

Experiment with the way you use the boxes. You might list points to praise down from the top and suggestions up from the bottom. The organization section might work best simply by scratching the outline as the speech is presented. You might want to subdivide presentation skills into individual skills so you remember to think about each. Different ideas work for different people. Your goal is to have everything you might want to say about a speech on one piece of paper.

Finally, it’s important to remember that COPE is a model for analysis of a speech. It doesn’t lead directly to what you do when you present your evaluation. With practice, you should have several points worth making as the speaker finishes his speech. How do you turn that into an evaluation?

1. Your notes provide the content of your evaluation. What are the points you want to make? Pick the vital one, save the others for discussion later.
2. What order do you want to present the points in? Number the items on your sheet or copy them onto a blank page. If something comes to mind as an opening or closing, use it. In the worst case, you still have a minimal organization to your evaluation.
3. Pick an attitude to use during your evaluation. If you sopund upbeat, the speaker will feel it. This may be the safest for most evaluations, but there are times when a conversational or tutorial tone might be appropriate.
4. Was there some point in the speech that reminded you of something worth a mention? Some personal experience you want to share with the speaker and audience? In short, in the precious second you have left, is there any way to favorably distinguish your evaluation from the one someone else would make?
   
5. In terms of the presentation itself, many people like to use the sandwich model – encouragement, followed by suggestions and finishing with praise. It can and does work well in many circumstances. The key is that if the speaker doesn’t like the meat he won’t like the sandwich – suggestions need to be positive, helpful, and specific.

Keep in mind that three minutes will give you enough time to share one idea with the speaker. It will not allow more. If there was only one thing you coulod bring to the speaker's attention, what would it be? That's yourmessage. Stick to it.

Conclusion

The past few pages have described what the COPE model is trying to do and why it might help you avoid becoming that deer in the headlights. Whether you use the model or not, your goal is the same: give encouraging, helpful specific evaluations that help speakers and inspire others.
Please look in other files for specific recommendations on how to evaluate speeches for each of the categories in the model.