More than forty Tobolsk’s school students are to take part in the Gifted Children project
20 april 2021
SIBUR's Corporate University will be joining hands with Education Center, an autonomous non-profit organization, and the Department of Education of Tobolsk’s City Administration to implement a unique educational project for Tobolsk schoolchildren entitled "Gifted Children", carried out as part of the Formula for Good Deeds, SIBUR's social investment program. The project’s aim is to create an enabling environment for creating teams of school students who will be participating in various intellectual engineering competitions and Olympiads, including the All-Russian School Students’ Olympiad. The project has been dovetailed with "Tyumen – 500", a training session held by "New Generation" (affiliated with the "SIRIUS" Educational Center), a regional center with a mission to identify and support gifted children, scheduled to take place between April 19 to 24, 2021 at Olympic Child, an autonomous non-profit organization.
Tobolsk students will be attended to by teachers representing JSC Academy Prosveshcheniye (part of the Prosveshcheniye Group). Exciting and engaging physics, chemistry, and mathematics classes are designed to help the students to not only better understand the subtleties of a subject’s content, but to also improve their functional literacy which will determine the degree of success and effectiveness of applying the subject-matter knowledge to practice. The project caters to 45 eighth- and ninth-grade students from six schools in Tobolsk that are SIBUR's partners. They had been selected from 800 applicants following a two-stage testing process organized jointly with the Department of Education of Tobolsk’s City Administration. Projects like this provide school leavers with additional benefits when taking their Unified State Exams and enrolling in universities. To Russia's top employers, they provide an opportunity to identify talented school students and start playing an active role in developing the optimal development path for their professional growth. In addition to offering intensive training sessions for the students to be held throughout 2021, the Gifted Children project will also feature professional development programs for teachers.
SIBUR has been paying a great deal of attention to the development of future professionals at all stages of their training – starting at the school level and going all the way to offering internships at our production facilities. For example, our company has, for several years, been implementing a unique SIBUR’s Classes training program for high school students in Tobolsk using two local schools as its base. The thrust of the program is to develop school students’ engineering competencies that are sought after today and will still be in demand in the future. We can already see the results of this program today. There are several dozens of the program’s graduates who are successfully enrolled in various programs at our partner universities spanning key subject matter areas that are viewed by SIBUR as a priority. This year, as part of the Gifted Children project, we have gone even further and offered our 8th and 9th graders, in addition to the high-school seniors, an opportunity to obtain the knowledge and skills that are necessary for developing engineer competencies. This is a great chance for the kids to not only improve their knowledge in such fields as science, physics, chemistry, mathematics and in other areas, but to also start thinking about their future career path while they are still at school, commented Marina Derevleva, Head of SIBUR's Corporate University.
The Gifted Children project is the first such experience of the Prosveshcheniye Group and SIBUR in engaging in joint implementation of projects designed to help develop talented schoolchildren and young people. But I am sure it will not be our last. Today, Russia's leading employers are increasingly putting in place their own systems for training future personnel for their high-tech facilities, starting as early as school. In order to produce talented, effective, and engaged specialists who are expected to become very loyal to their company in the future, one has to get involved in their development very early on. SIBUR’s Classes and other similar unique training sessions for talented school students are great examples of such engagement. It is important to make sure that the students do not only acquire new knowledge, but also become immersed in an environment where they can better interact and develop. It is events like these that help create such an environment. At this juncture, acting within the framework of the Gifted Children program, we will be working with students by applying unique educational and developmental techniques. The knowledge that they thus acquire will help them not only to pass their Unified State Exams, or to take part in various intellectual competitions, but will also pave the way for their enrollment in the best universities in Russia and around the world. In the future, we intend to run similar programs for children and teachers in other regions of the country in order to achieve greater synergy and convergence of the best ideas and educational practices, says Evgenia Abakumova, curator of the Gifted Children project at JSC Prosveshchenie Academy.