60 teachers from Svobodny completed a series of intensive training courses

5 october 2023

60 teachers from Svobodny including schoolteachers, professors of vocational colleges and experts in further education have completed a series of intensive training courses taught by renowned instructors from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Khabarovsk. Their introduction to the latest teaching methods and practices was facilitated thanks to the support from SIBUR's social investment program, the Formula for Good Deeds.

At the lectures and hands-on training sessions held as part of the courses, the instructors not only provided a detailed overview of the latest methods of teaching hard science disciplines (such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry), but also examined the finer points of character development work that schools are involved in. Many of the teachers were inspired by a lecture given by Yuri Bobrinyov, a physics teacher and deputy principal of Moscow's Gymnasium No. 1514, dedicated to schooling of children within a classroom environment. After the classes, many of the attending educators felt it important to impart what they had learned not only to their peers, but also to the parents of their own students.

Valentina Menshova, physics teacher, School No. 6:
The lecture on character development gave us a lot of food for thought and a topic for our upcoming PTA meetings. We are very grateful to Yury Bobrinyov for such an insightful presentation. It helped us look at this subject from a broader perspective. We are also grateful to him for his master class on building a camera obscura. We had tried to stage similar experiments ourselves but had failed to achieve the desired effect. But this time it all worked out perfectly, and we will definitely try to replicate this experience at our future summer session.

In turn, Yuri Bobrinyov highlighted the fact that experience sharing as part of these intensive training classes was equally important both for the attendees and for the lecturers who are also learning to speak effectively in front of their peers and about how education programs are implemented in other regions.

Elena Goreva, Director of the IT-Cube Center of Digital Education for Children:
What do we get out of these intensive classes? Mainly, we get introduced to practical cases, such as how to organize science tournaments, as we did this time. It takes quite a lot of know-how to arrange one at your own organization! We do not just get general albeit relevant information, but are offered ready-made, "boxed" solutions that have already been tested by other educational organizations so that we can just take them and introduce them into our work processes.

This event has also proved to offer a lot of useful experience for the volunteers recruited from among high school students.

Kira Pasechnik and Darina Zainullina, students of Class 9A at Gymnasium No. 9:
Granted, we had had volunteering experience before, but that had happened to be at events of a different format where there were a lot of children around and generally a lot more participants. But as it turns out, this time we were helping adults to study, and of course, everything went much more smoothly with them. We were also offered to try our hand at solving some challenging math problems together with everyone else, and we enjoyed observing the physics experiments that were being put on.

This is the fourth year that the Educational Intensives project is being implemented as part of SIBUR's social investment program in the cities where the company has a presence. The program's goal is to introduce educators to the latest teaching methods and techniques, help improve their teaching skills and competencies, while also tailoring standard educational programs for schoolchildren to addressing the demands of the present-day labor market and embracing the rapidly evolving level of technological innovation.