St Maarten and Antigua Primary Science Workshops, August 2024

From Thursday 22nd to Wednesday 28th of August, Macmillan Education Caribbean hosted Science Workshops for the Primary school teachers of St Maarten and Antigua and Barbuda. These were planned with the help of both Ministries of Education and delivered by Deborah Roberts, the author of our Mission: Science series of books.

The objective of these sessions was to train teachers on the benefits of using an Enquiry-Based teaching approach in their classrooms.

Enquiry-Based Teaching and Learning (EBTL) focusses on helping students to become effective learners in school and beyond.

The Mission: Science series has already been adopted by all of St Maarten’s public schools, so we hope that the sessions there will support teachers in using their resources effectively. While in Antigua, this session helped to familiarize teachers with the books and their methodology to make teachers confident to employ them in their schools in future.

Over 350 teachers from all grades of primary education took part in these workshops. The sessions were structured to give them both an overview of the EBTL methodology and provide some teaching ideas they could put into immediate practice in their classrooms.

They completed a number of hands-on science activities using cheap, store-bought materials to demonstrate that scientific investigation does not need to be confined to laboratories with all the latest equipment but can be done at school, outside or even at home.

The feedback received from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. While the focus on this occasion was Science, many noted that the techniques being taught would help them in their teaching right across the curriculum.

We had a great time running these sessions and we hope that teachers and students feel the benefit of them now that they’ve returned to their classrooms.

Eliot Abrahams, Education Consultant