Meeting Criterion 3 for Chartership: sharing my tips
Category: Blog, Professional Development
Keen to get started with professional registration but unsure of where to begin? Or perhaps you’re midway through compiling your portfolio and wondering how to approach criterion three?
In this timely blog, CILIPS member Xiaowei Jie shares how a CILIP eLearning webinar helped her to tackle the potentially tricky question of criterion three, along with her top tips for creating an outstanding portfolio for your assessors.
Meeting Criterion 3 for Chartership: sharing my tips
Since I found a mentor in May 2020, I have been working towards my CILIP Chartership. I had always been curious about what to do to meet the requirement of criterion 3 – ENHANCE your knowledge of the wider professional context and REFLECT on areas of current interest – until I watched a webinar delivered by experienced professionals at CILIP’s Member Services in March 2021.
In this blogpost, I would like to share my experience of working on criterion 3 that has been inspired by the above webinar. Compiling my portfolio, I had found that meeting criterion 3 in particular could be difficult. During the early stages of Chartership, I heard the suggestion that I should visit school libraries or prison libraries in order to gain knowledge of the wider profession, but I wondered how it would be possible to gain knowledge of all that school libraries or prison libraries do through one visit. My instincts told me that a single visit would not be enough for me to gain knowledge of the wider profession. So how could I achieve it?
Three Steps to Meet Criterion 3
The webinar that helped me a lot in this respect was first shared online in January 2021 and it can be retrieved via the CILIP eLearning hub. Its title is ‘The wider professional context: how to approach criterion 3 for Professional Registration’. In this webinar, Helen Berry and Sonia Ramdhian from CILIP were joined by CILIP assessors to give their insights into how to fulfil the requirement of criterion 3 with plain language and clear instructions.
The explanation from assessors in the webinar echoed my curiosity by pointing out that, ‘yes, a simple visit is not enough!’. At the same time, they also showed me what to do to make it ‘enough’. There are three steps to follow, which I will illustrate by taking an example of a visit to a school library.
Step one: making a visit. If I visited a school library recently, I would find out that the school’s teaching had moved online during the 2020 lockdowns. Apart from online courses delivered by teachers, the school is likely to have also integrated some online teaching lessons provided by other sources into its curriculum. What courses were sourced outside the school? What were the other sources? These were some of those questions I would need to find out either during the visit through interviews in person or afterwards in emails. For example, a Music & Movement session could be delivered by an enthusiastic person on a social media channel, with the teaching and demonstration offering both physical exercises and a fun, relaxing time; again, a biology course could be delivered by the BBC, with the course coordinators being scholars in the field. This first step is the starting point of meeting criterion 3.
Step two: post-visit research. After the visit, there is research to be done. This research should focus on what else the school had been doing to continue its teaching activities online during lockdown, and what future challenges they were facing in order to mitigate the negative impact of lockdown restrictions on the student learning experience. This research can be done via many channels: by reading the school’s online magazine, by browsing government publications related to the education sector, or by collecting the research findings of professional researchers. After this step, I would be getting closer to meeting criterion 3.
Step three: writing a reflection. The step that will let me fulfil the requirements of criterion 3 is reflection, and the technique of reflective writing should be fully applied at this stage. In this reflection, I would address the relevance of what the school had done to what I do in my own work environment. If possible, I would also apply the successful approaches of the school library within my organization. Further, I would consider what more I could do to achieve even better results.
CILIP webinars are an excellent place to start your professional registration journey, with recordings available online 24/7
Professional registration submission = professional ‘shout-out’
The CILIP webinar also refined my understanding of what ‘evidence’ means in the professional registration submission. At the beginning, my understanding of Chartership was to gather evidence, supported with impartial narrations of why some professional activities took place and why they were worthy of being included in the submission. After watching the webinar, my understanding was enhanced by a summary of ‘professional registration submission = professional ‘shout-out’’. But how to ‘shout-out’? I would like to share my tips.
First, reflective writing helps with this because reflective writing is about recording what I think, or how I feel about certain things, what the outcome of the discussed activities is, and the impact that these activities would have on my future career development. As such, words like ‘I’, ‘I think’, and ‘I feel’ will be used a lot.
Second, telling stories through evidence. Evidence should not be presented as it is; rather, some background should be given, how it developed should be outlined, and how it is related to other evidence should be explained. This will create a story-telling structure that will help assessors to make sense of your professional development process.
Last but not least, demonstrating your personality in your professional profile. I think this is very important. When I was writing, I had an assessor in my mind and imagined that the assessor would like to know more about me. Therefore, where appropriate, I put some paragraphs showing what I do in my spare time, and how I draw inspiration from my hobby to develop myself professionally.
Whichever stage of professional registration you are working towards, the CILIP eLearning hub offers a comprehensive range of webinars and event recordings to support your learning.
Thank you so much Xiaowei for sharing these insights into how to approach criterion three and what makes a ‘shout-out’ (and standout) professional registration portfolio.
To access the CILIP eLearning hub, a comprehensive and continually updated suite of learning resources to support you at every stage of professional registration, please click here.