My Professional Formation: stages 1 - 3
After expressing my intent I received an email letting me know it had been received and that the professional formation webfolio template was now available within REfLECT. Indeed it was – just had to go to ‘My Pages’ on the IfL website, login and go to the REfLECT tab. Once in REfLECT I found the professional formation webfolio template on the ‘tools’ button.
Note: I still need to download the ‘declaration of suitability’ form, complete it and send it to IfL. At the moment this cannot be done within REfLECT as it needs a signature to confirm that the information is correct. Must remember to do this soon, otherwise it will delay the process.
It’s also a good time to be thinking about who will be supporting the application. Knowing the supporter’s membership number is useful, as this makes it really easy to look up in REfLECT. The supporter doesn’t get notification at this stage, mainly because the webfolio is still open for completion and it may be that circumstances change, so well worth dropping the person an email to let them know you have started the process and nominated them.
First big task is stage 3 of the webfolio template. Need evidence here of a teaching qualification, higher education qualification (if appropriate) and also evidence for the level 2 numeracy and literacy requirements – you need to scroll down to see these elements. Just a matter of scanning my Cert Ed certificate, MA (Education) certificate and also my O Level Maths and English certificates. Phew – I have all of those so scanned them and uploaded them – very easy.
If I didn’t have evidence for numeracy or literacy, the system offers me the opportunity to provide a narrative account of how I meet the standards (guidance on IfL website). This is probably best done as a word document which is then uploaded to the webfolio in much the same way as attaching a certificate. A thought came to me when thinking about this. Given the many Word file formats now, I think I will convert all documents to a PDF file format using one of the many free online conversion tools (PrimoPDF is good), as this will make it a lot easier for the reviewer and will also stop the accidental changes that can happen when working with live Word documents.
Don’t forget stage 3 is the time to say if you teach skills for life – you will need to choose the ‘I don’t teach skills for life’ option here, unless you have evidence that you meet the subject qualification requirements for skills for life.
That’s the first three stages completed – took about 20 minutes or so, including scanning the certificates. Now on to stage 4 – my ‘teaching biography’. Think this will be a little more difficult, I’ll post a link to it here when I’ve finished it.