Revalidation Submission - The joys of off, off, and away

Last Friday (the 22^nd of June) a glorious thing happened. Yes, I posted off my latest CILIP Revalidation portfolio. 

This is generally accompanied by a sense of profound relief by that point.

Simply because various parts of it are somewhat time-consuming and / or require a lot of thinking through. So it’s quite a long process overall in thinking terms, but with very intense periods in compilation and completion terms right at the end. So it’s nice to know it’s off and away, nothing else to be done to it in my terms.

So where does the time and effort go?

Thinking through approach 

This is otherwise primarily known for me as the content of the Personal Statement. I always think this is far and away the core the portfolio, think it through correctly and it gives the structure of the work, the detail of which will then be the Table of Contents as stage 2 of working the portfolio through. From the Table of Contents it’s then just a compilation job of the evidence items listed in it.

My personal statements always start with a reflection on the three-year period as a whole, then they’ll break down into further paragraphs on the key types of activities / learning I’ve been involved in and how it went, and then there’ll be an end paragraph kind going back into overview mode saying what I envisage doing next and why.  So I kind of end up with about six or seven headings each in total in the Personal Statement with a paragraph under each discussing what I did and why and that I know I can link to evidence items giving fuller picture, discussion, evaluation.

Usually evidence will be things I already have that were done for a specific purpose at the time, mostly by me, sometimes by other people. Occasionally I won’t have anything that really covers what I want to discuss and I’ll do a separate reflective piece on it just for the portfolio. But 90% of it is things that already existed.

But for me the ethos / approach of what I’m creating is encapsulated in the Personal Statement. The Table of Contents will flow on from that  as a fuller working out of that as a distinct spine broken into the various area’s and with different illustrative examples for each heading. I’ll usually also annotate the Table of Contents just giving a quick note on why each evidence piece is there / what purpose it fulfils, who it’s by etc.

Sifting and selecting

The basic problem here is I do enough CPD of all shapes to cheerfully reach Portugal several times over without trying one iota. Which is its own headache in then trying to hone down three years worth of material at once. Which things do you use as evidence examples out of the mass of possible?  I had limited success on this time round. 

It comes down to what are the key aspects of what I do that I want to use that fulfil the assessment criteria, how best do I approach and illustrate each of those, and which particular examples do I use for them in evidence.

That I only succeeded to a very certain point is amply illustrated by fact I didn’t tick the box allowing anyone to keep a copy of my Portfolio.  Because my mentor side says it’s far too long and there is no way I’m perpetuating the myth that submitting a brick is expected or needful. Not useful! Or good for the health of Qualifications Board!

Leaving out most of reality is still big. In the end I decided to call 'halt' and just go with what I had put together even though it was bigger than I'd realised once I'd actually printed it all out and put it in a pile together (see below). Because it was going to be really time-consuming to change track on at that point and other things I needed to get done this month.

Compilation

Compilation is more logistical complexity than anything else.  It’s about having decided what you want to use and why and in what order already, but you still have to actually bring it all together in one place and format as per the submission rules.  I half-thought about electronic submission this time round.  Because the end point is time-consuming and finicky doing a paper-based submission.

In the end I decided paper-based. Mostly because for me it’s quite useful to actually be able to physically look at everything together.

Paper-based means an awful lot of pretending to have a damp towel on brow and that I’m going ‘omm’ while trying to remember exactly which file or pile all the different bits of paper are in I need and in what physical locations. I do kind of keep everything together, but some is in work, some is at home… Then there’s exactly on which pc or device or blog or internet site are all the things in non-paper format. Some of which may have delightfully ceased to exist since last you looked at it if not under your control. 

The finicky bit

It is a delightful rule that photocopiers will decide to jam with parts of your work inside them, printers will decide for some reason to print 5 files meekly but throw a fit on no. 6 as you take out more and more formatting in mystified fashion trying to make it accept it. Toner will suddenly decide to give up life and produce faded patches down the middle of pages.

Then there’s the true evil which is called taking lots of things some internally paginated and some not, in lots of different formats, and trying to uniformly paginate them all and label them in relation to the Table of Contents so that someone can actually navigate it all as ‘one’ cohesive work instead of a lucky dip.  My portfolio is lop-sided, over the years I’ve come to the conclusion it makes my life far simpler to just do lots of label sheets of pagination and stick those on at the end.  Ideally you can print off one full copy, attach all the labels, and re-photocopy to avoid the lops-sided corner and run off three of those.  The photocopiers hated me last week so I didn’t risk it and went for lop-sided as more conducive to retaining my sanity and making the Friday post.

By this point a nice portfolio theory has turned into a mountain of paper all over the floor, desk, and any other bit of space surrounding as you try and get 3 ordered copies of everything. Actually I went for four, I was determined to have one complete copy for myself now rather than when it comes back. Mostly to prove to myself I had finished!

It is a truth, even if not universally acknowledged, that it’s always bigger that you supposed when you print it all out, that’s when you can count it all in order, and you actually see what size it is.

The End is Nigh

Thus you end up with ordered bundles of copies that now look like you’re getting ready to roast the chicken for Christmas (it’s all the elastic bands holding it in order somehow).  So, are all the pages there and in order as they should be, are they all the right way round.  If so, hurrah, it all together, put in the divider cards, and comb-bind it with covers and it’s done.

Then it’s just forms, cheque, packaging, posting. Major slump of relief to recover. Possibly for a week judging by it’s taken me a week to blog this, but actually just lots of other things going on that needed to be prioritised instead.

So what was different this time?

Down the years I’ve done Chartership portfolio, Fellowship portfolio, this is my second Revalidation portfolio since my Fellowship…  I’ve always done them, regular as clockwork!

The reasons I do them don’t change – it’s a really useful exercise every three years just looking back at what you’ve done and why and how it went and figuring out from it what you want to do next.  A way of getting perspective, being able to stand outside the day-to-day working life, of clarifying things for yourself. I learned that way back doing my Chartership portfolio, and it becomes more valuable, not less, with the years.

But every time I do one it also changes, because I will have changed, what I’m doing, the wider world around me.  So if I consider what I’ve just submitted, there’s a lot of blogs in it, there’s tweets, there’s photos. None of which would have been there before.

Crossing Things Off The List

This month seems to have been about trying to finish various things that have been going on for a while. Always a nice feeling…