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. The teacher had already tried active methods in other courses (for example, Bogas et al., 2020; Bogas et al., 2020) and had already noticed that students were enthusiastic about participating in 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 women, 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 in their own mobiles the concepts meanings, definitions, applied examples. The final work was a digital presentation that each group of students had to present in order to be discussed with the teacher and all the colleagues of the class.

We present the results analysis of the tasks in what concerns the Conflict Management contents of the short training unit the concepts developed, including the errors and the students’ difficulties. We also analyzed the power point that the students’ groups did and presented in class. We have adopted a descriptive framework to analyze the students’ reports and their group work conclusions presentations about the aims the nature and causes of conflicts in the workplace. In summary the digital presentations were good, the groups oral presentation part is always the most difficult for the students since they are not used to it and do not feel at ease.

Keywords:

Vocational Education, Conflict Management, videos, tasks, active learning.