Somebody takes an observer every few months. Somebody signs preceptorship paperwork. Somebody advises a club, funds a scholarship, or answers the emails nobody else answers. None of it is written down anywhere, so none of it adds up to anything — and a student looking for exactly what you offer has no way to find you.
The Kaleidoscope is a record of what this profession offers students outside the classroom. Not a ranking, not a review site, not a lead product. A record.
The unit is the offer, not the practice and not the organization. If you run one observation slot, that is one entry. If you run six programs, that is six entries — each in the same frame, at the same size, as the solo practitioner's single slot. Nobody's entry is bigger because they are bigger.
These are published rules, not assurances given to you privately. They apply to everyone listed, including the person who built this.
Not being listed means nothing. Absence is never a signal here. Plenty of excellent people have no entry, and an empty field on an entry is an honest answer rather than a mark against anyone.
If your institution already has an entry — a program, a board, an organization, a technique body or a student organization — how it was sourced and how to correct it are on the page for institutions.
The same fields for everyone, with no exceptions. Nobody gets extra fields for being large, well known, or generous.
That last field is the one that makes this different from every stale directory you have used. An entry nobody has confirmed in a year stops claiming to be current. It is never deleted for going quiet, because a vanished entry looks like a withdrawal, and withdrawal is your decision and nobody else's.
Most directories ask for one broad yes. This asks three narrow ones, and you can answer each differently. Saying yes to one commits you to nothing else.
The public part. One entry per offer. "Nothing right now" is a complete and perfectly good answer, and it is the answer for most people most of the time.
Your name, your own description of how you work, a recorded conversation if you have had one with us. You can be listed without being quoted, and quoted without being named.
Hosting, teaching, advising, contributing, funding. This one is operational — it tells us who to ask about what. It never appears on your entry, because an entry showing who participates most would be a ranking of generosity wearing a different hat.
One submission is one offer. If you have several, you will be sent straight back to add the next without re-entering who you are.
It takes about a minute. Describe the offer in your own words — plain facts do far more for a student than a description of how committed you are to the next generation.
Submitting is not publishing. Nothing goes live until you have confirmed it, and you can ask for it to come down at any time, without giving a reason.
Two honest reasons, and neither of them is exposure.
The student who observes well is the associate you would hire in three years, and this is where you meet them first. Practices are looking for people and students are looking for practices, and there has never been a map between those two facts.
And it makes the invisible countable. Nobody can currently say how many practices took a student this year, how many observation days existed, or where in the country a student has nowhere to go. Every contribution is invisible to every other one. That number only exists if the offers are written down somewhere neutral — and the number belongs to the profession, not to us.