Becoming an Advance HE fellowship mentor and reviewer

I recently completed a series of training sessions to become a mentor and assessor. This was part of my CPD plan set in my SFHEA application (read my reflections on my SFHEA application). Following the training, I have now been granted full access to the applications and also get to learn from long-time assessors.

Here is a summary of the list we covered during the training sessions with James Pearson-Jenkins:

• Fellowship types and their differences
• Mentoring and Reviewing written and dialogue routes
• Aligning practice to the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPF)
• Mentoring and developing a reflective learning and teaching portfolio
• Reviewing, mentoring, and recognition
• Future opportunities: exploring D4 PFHEA

I was already familiar with the submission process, so only needed to be guided through the reviewing process. The list above was a piece of cake, it was very much similar to all other reviewing processes I have done before. The interesting part of the training was going through a series of examples. James showed us examples of successful and unsuccessful applications. Some of the mistakes done by applicants range from not adding sufficient references and proofs, and not respecting the word limit, to completely being off-track in their teaching practices e.g. being judgemental, or non-inclusive.

This training was definitely valuable for my own CPD, not only because it was in my SFHEA CPD plan, but also because it is a step towards my PFHEA.