Enterprising Education in St Andrew's and St Bride's Secondary

Earlier today I visited St Andrew's and St Bride's Secondary in East Kilbride to discuss their enterprising methods of teaching.

It was very interesting and centred mainly on some excellent work undertaken by the Science department in the school. I was shown round by Mrs Agnew, a DHT.

Without giving too much away, as I don't want to steal their thunder, the basis for the work was to have pupil centred lessons whereby the S2 Science students were working towards a realistic design brief which was part of the course. A fictitious company called Besto Boilers was created to put all the learning into context.

Pupils worked in small teams and researched the design problems and over a period of time collated the information and presented it back to teachers and their peers in a presentation.

This obviously improved communication, team working and presentation skills, not to mention their research and analytical skills.

Pupils were encouraged to become independent learners and the principles of the tasks were planned with Curriculum for Excellence in mind.

A comparison of pupils learning in this enterprising way with the more traditional method is to be undertaken. The results will be interesting!

The hard work of the teaching staff has paid dividends by the feedback they have received so far. It certainly is much more interesting and enjoyable for pupils to learn in this way.

It has given me a few ideas and I will share what I saw with Mr Colin Stewart, our Headteacher and Mr Dyer, the Faculty Head of Science. Perhaps Mr Dyer and I can chat about this in Ghana!