Will I get good value for money?
HOW2s provide personalised CPD support to a very large number of faculty — including adjunct, part-time and sessionals who can sometimes miss out and feel isolated.
Essentially the HOW2 web app provides an instant online professional learning community. It gives
• all your faculty access to the expertise of an instructional coach and the means to ask for and offer support from and to each other
• coaches, faculty developers and anyone else in a supporting role the resources and social learning tools to support more faculty, better, quicker.
• leaders the data they need to evidence the impact of their investment.
So, like Becky and Gordon, quoted above, you should absolutely expect to provide better quality support to your faculty, more efficiently for less money.
Sally Dicketts, CBE, is the President of the English Association of Colleges.
Sally is a thought leader in post-16 education. Here’s Sally’s advice on what you need to think about when considering whether or not to subscribe to HOW2s. Sally is also CEO at Activate Learning Group of Colleges in England.
Locking in savings for three more years
Some things to think about before we speak.
With regards to coaching.
How much capital do you currently invest in coaching support? Are you happy with the impact on student performance and outcomes? Is the coaching model you use designed for use in an educational setting? Would you be interested in finding out more about Instructional Coaching? Do you want to increase the number of faculty you support?
With regards to the creation of support materials.
How much do you currently invest in the creation, hosting and updating of pedagogical support materials? How do they compare to HOW2s? By switching to HOW2s some organisations save hundreds of thousands of £s or $s.
With regards to your current expenditure per faculty member?
What is it costing? Is it working? Is it having the impact you need?
With regards to improvement cycles.
How long is your improvement cycle? How many professionals invest time in this? Would you be interested in reducing this cycle from a typical 4 – 6 weeks to a few days?
With regards to training days and workshops?
What is the personnel and time allocation to setting up and running these events? Are all your faculty able to attend all the time or do adjunct and sessionals sometimes miss out? Do the teachers who would most benefit from the training always show up? How personalised is it?