Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
The Institute for Learning (IfL)
The Institute for Learning (IfL) is the professional body for teachers, trainers, tutors and student teachers in the Learning and Skills sector. It provides the mechanism by which teachers register and progress through to Licensed Practitioner.
Under the 2007 regulations, all teachers are required to provide evidence of their CPD in order to maintain licensed status. The IfL promotes a model of CPD based on reflective practice and defines Continuous Professional Development as any activity which has an impact on teaching. All forms of professional development, accredited and non-accredited, will be valued and recognised within a minimum annual tariff of 30 hours. It should not be limited to attendance at structured courses but should instead include a range of professional development activities which reflect all of a teacher's commitments.
The IfL expects teachers to focus on what they term a teacher's dual rofessionalism, their subject specialism and their expertise in teaching. The actual amount of CPD time which a teacher has to engage in is based upon their average teaching contract. Teachers working part-time will have their commitment to CPD pro-rated accordingly and everyone must do a minimum of 6 hours of CPD per year. Pro-rating should be based on a percentage of the full-time equivalent for each individual organisation.
For more information, please see the IfL website.
How attendance at our discussion meetings can contribute to your CPD
Your attendance at a Dialogue North West discussion meeting can contribute to your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) profile. Simply complete a critical reflection, as detailed below, linking your seminar experience with your own professional practice.
Guidelines
Your critical reflection only needs to be a short piece of writing. Here are some questions which you may find useful to address in your reflection:
- What did I get from the seminar?
- Was this new information, did anything surprise or challenge you?
- What impact will this have on my practice?
- Have I shared or discussed this with anyone else, what was the response?
- What changes might I plan in response to what I learned?
- Are there other issues that it has raised?
A critical reflection does not have to be an academic piece of writing. Think of it as a place to reflect on your own practice and think about how issues raised in the seminar relate to your professional context. You may also want to include things which show your reflection, for example from journals or websites that you have looked at.
Examples
Here are some critical reflections, written by people following their attendance at previous Dialogue NW events and kindly offered as examples for this website. We hope you find them useful.
Progression - What are the issues? A Critical Reflection
A Critical Reflection of the Progression Seminar
Forthcoming Events
NIACE Functional Skills - Effective Practice
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(MS Word doc, May 2011)
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