Thing 23 - Reflection

  by  Auntie P 

23 Things - all done and dusted! I've really enjoyed the 23 Things for Professional Development programme, both as an organiser and as a participant. It's certainly been useful in assessing where I am with my professional development, and where I would like to be. It's encouraged me to find out more about CILIP Chartership, which I hope to start next year.

I'll be completing the evaluation survey after I've published this blog post so I've been thinking about which elements of the programme I have found most useful. For me, it's been the 'thinky' posts that I've got the most out of - particularly Thing 3 on personal branding, Thing 5 on reflective practice, Thing 11 on mentoring, Thing 21 on evaluating your skills and areas of development. Many of those things I have wanted to work on for a while but it's been really useful to have them included in this so that I had to dedicate time to them. Thing 5 on reflective practice has been the most useful to me - I'm now trying to evaluate all my professional development activities with the 'What? So what? Now what?' model and will be doing this on my main blog when I write about the 23 Things for Professional Development programme.

Another positive outcome is that I've also started commenting on people's blogs more and I'm really pleased about that as I know how great it is to receive comments and how the conversations that happen in blog comments can be really useful to all involved.

I've recently completed my first annual IPR (Individual Performance Review) at work and as part of that I worked on a personal development plan so I decided to wait until I had completed that process before blogging this final thing. I looked at what skills I needed to improve my performance at work, and I now have a series of targets and areas to focus on which I hope will also be the areas to focus on in my Chartership. These include:

• Networking
• Presenting
• Formal writing (e.g. academic writing)
• Organisation skills (including project management, event management, time management and delegation)

Some of these I have already been working on developing, but I think I can improve on each of these areas. Some I have specific targets for, others I hope to incorporate into my professional development activities in the future. I plan to continue with the committee roles I am currently active in for both CILIP and ALA, and next year will be involved in the ALA Emerging Leaders program (January-June) which in addition to helping me understand more about ALA and how I can get involved,  I hope will include developing most of the skills I need to (particularly networking, organisation skills and presenting).

I found this activity really useful for helping me focus future professional development - I sometimes find it difficult to prioritise activities and as I take more on, I have to sometimes turn down opportunities that I can't fit in due to time commitments or that aren't within my current scope. I think knowing my areas of professional development focus should help me prioritise in future which will definitely be beneficial.

23 Things for Professional Development has been an incredibly useful process and definitely something I'm glad I participated in. Three cheers to all organisers and participants!

  by  What What 

This will be the last blog post on this blog (though it will remain online and I will still chack comments) - if you want to continue following my professional development activities, including CILIP Chartership and ALA Emerging Leaders, please subscribe to my main blog, Joeyanne Libraryanne (you can subscribe by RSS or email from the links in the top left above my photo). Hope to see some of you over there and on Twitter :)

Thing 19 - Integrating things

I miss integration #lovemaths

 photo by  A Mulligan 

I've just had a look through my posts and I'm afraid I have to be honest and admit straight away that some of my good intentions I just haven't been able to keep up with. I'm still not checking my RSS feeds regularly enough, and am often behind on them. I'm not using ReadItLater frequently either - I have an article I sent there about 5 weeks ago that I still haven't got around to reading. I think maybe I have to learn to accept that I'm not going to be able to read it all during busy periods. I seem happy to accept that I miss things on Twitter if I'm not around but for some reason it's different for RSS feeds. Maybe I ought to take a leaf out of WoodsieGirl's book and learn to be less afraid of the 'Mark all as read' button.

The thing I've taken most from so far is thing 5 on reflective practice. It came at a perfect time as I'm preparing for CILIP Chartership and need to be more reflective. I'm now taking a far more reflective approach and am making sure that anything which might be relevant in a professional development context I am reflecting on using the 'What? So what? What now?' model of reflective practice. I'm planning to use this when I record activities during the Chartership process.

The other thing that I have managed to integrate more into my routine is commenting on blogs. Before CPD23, I only rarely commented on blog posts but having realised how valuable comments can be and knowing how nice it is to receive comments from others, I have now started commenting on more blogs, even if it's just to say that I enjoyed reading the post. Sometimes I know about a resource that the blogger might be interested in (and therefore also the blog's readers), so I've started making sure I also leave a comment in situations like this.

I'm pleased that some of the things from CPD23 will stick with me after I've finished, and I'm really glad I have this blog as a record to look back on to remind me.

Thing 5 - Reflective practice

Cookie cat reflected in the kitchen window

It's taken me a while to write this post - I think I've been reflecting too much it's taken over the actual writing! I'm a serial planner so I spend a lot of my time reflecting on where I am, where I want to be, and how I'm going to get there (in all aspects of my life). I'm not sure that I'm so good at sharing this or writing it down though.

I read Emma's post with interest, as I really enjoy reading her blog posts on Librarians on the Loose. She writes in a very conversational way which I like, but I also really admire the way she reflects on everything she does and thinks about how she can apply lessons she has learnt in practice.

My blog, Joeyanne Libraryanne, was always intended to be a reflective blog. I write the posts primarily for myself (though sometimes I like to stimulate conversation in the comments on a certain topic), and my blog post tend to discuss either things I have done or things I have been thinking about. However, I've realised recently that many of my posts aren't exactly very reflective, they're more of a descriptive nature.

So what am I going to do about it?

Well, I'm hoping to start the CILIP Chartership process next year, so I definitely want to develop my reflective writing skills in preparation for developing my portfolio. I really like the model described by Emma originating from Borton in 1970; a cycle of What? So what? Now what?

I think when I'm recording future things which might be of use for my portfolio, I'm going to use this structure. I'm hoping to set up a wiki to support the Chartership process and I think I might use these 3 questions as the basis for each activity I do.

I'd also like to try to incorporate more reflection into my blog posts, so I'm going to try to think about including the lessons I have learnt into my posts, as well as recording planned future actions. I'm a user of the GTD system (more on that in a later thing!) so discrete actions to follow up the lessons would be good for me to record in my to-do list app. Hopefully this should help catch the follow-up actions that I often miss due to not allowing enough time for reflection before moving on to the next thing. And by reflecting on reflecting I've definitely got some points to add:

• Use the What? So what? Now what? model for reflective practice in Chartership wiki and blog posts
• Attend a training session on reflective writing (often organised by CILIP)
• Include follow-up actions for relevant blog posts