Abstract:

The Conflict Management is a course of Secretariat and Administrative Work from a Portuguese Professional Education Program. The aim of the short training unit is to prepare the students to manage conflicts with customers and suppliers.

Before this experience, classes were lectured using a passive method. The teacher presented the contents of the syllabus according to the sequence proposed in the textbook, and, during the module, students took two tests to evaluate their knowledge.

The teacher had already tried active methods in other courses (for example, Mathematics, Bogas et al., 2018) and had already noticed that students were enthusiastic about participating in math classes in which the work they were asked to do was dynamic and involving.

In this text we report a study that consisted of adopting tasks using videos to involve students in active ways of solving tasks within the short training unit of conflict management (50 hours) from the level IV vocational education (equivalent to the Portuguese 12th year, the last year of Portuguese secondary school, ages 17-19). The participants of the study were 21 students from a Professional Education School in the Northern Portugal (13 students were female, 62% of the participants).

Here we present the structure and scheme of these classes giving emphasis to the active learning and we want to report whether the open-ended tasks using internet videos and materials had contributed to facilitate and to promote students’ performance in the context of learning vocational education. The video-active classes used tasks that allowed students to study and practice all the concepts related to the management of the conflicts with customers and suppliers. Using this video-active classes, students learned autonomously supported by the teacher during the classes, and were able to explore by their own the concepts meanings, definitions, applied examples. We present the structure and scheme of these classes giving emphasis to the active learning in this Conflict Management short training unit and a summary of the teachers notes collected during the classes is also presented. We have adopted a descriptive framework to present the gathered data since the main results (reports of the students and their performance) were not yet analyzed.

The teacher/researcher did enjoy students’ reply to this approach because she saw students’ progress along all this short training unit. Students were so involved in the daily tasks that they bought a network booster equipment to amplify the internet signal, since the school has no computers and they all used their own mobile phones.

Keywords:

Professional education, Conflict Management, Videos, Tasks, Active learning.