Employer Engagement

This morning found me in Toila Gymnasium speaking to 23 teachers from across kindergarden, primary, secondary and community education in Ida Viru on the aspect of engaging with employers. The presentation is found on my slideshare site and gives first of all an overview of the changes in the Scottish education system and why these have occurred and then a short summary of the benefits to pupil, teacher, school and employer of engaging with the education of young children.

The OECD Report Learning in the 21st Century Research, Innovation and Policy gave me the opportunity of introducing the group to research in this field of " learning sciences" which suggests that the way we deliver education should change as we are now in the knowledge economy.

What are your thoughts - do we need to change our pedagogy ?

The group engaged with the Learning and Teaching Scotland website and in particular the Partnerships with Employers section of the Enterprise in Education site looking at some of the online support resources.Several videos clips were shown to the group of how schools in Scotland were engaging with employers from kindergarden to secondary.

In the afternoon we discussed how they were engaging with employers and a comprehensive list was produced to offer each other in group some new ideas. It appeared that employer engagement was being approached at different levels of participation. Each teacher was then challenged to look at producing a mind map of how they could build capacity in gaining more employer contacts (based on the Google Wonder Wheel idea) starting with themselves first then leading out into teaching colleagues, pupils,local community and national organisations.

Anybody have new ideas that could assist the group in engaging with employers ?

"The greatest journey begins with a single step" and that is what I challenged them to do - start on mapping out contacts first and then in January begin to create an idea / team / plan around employer engagement which would commence in August with their new teaching programme.

Have any teachers some case study they would share with these teachers?

Some link sites for assistance.

Slide Presentation - Employer Engagement
Shift Happens - how the world is changing and a signpost for change in education
Eric's Blog site
Employer engagement videos
Caledonian Produce (Marks & Spencer Supplier)
The Muir Project - pupuls working with builder to deliver a teaching house
Rapid Response Engineering Challenge - working across Scotland to increase an understanding of Civil Engineering.
Cathkin Nursery School working with a film company to help them produce their own movie and find out about the jobs in a film company.