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Group Work

22 April 2010 by shartley   

I’m often reluctant to use group work in the classroom since I hated it as a student.  I was too much of a perfectionist so I did all the work myself and the others in my group would have a bludge.

In my Year 11 Business Studies class I have 16 students and we often start the class as a boardroom meeting, changing chairpersons each lesson.  I provide the agenda and act as a consultant but the class then organises themselves into how they will learn the work (with guidance from the consultant).

Today I was covering the first three points of the syllabus requirement:

* the human resource cycle
–        acquisition – identifying staff needs, recruitment, selection
–        development – training, development and maintenance of database
–        maintenance – monetary/non-monetary benefits
–        separation – voluntary/involuntary

I organised the tables into four groups and gave out the task:

Food, Flicks and Fiction is a cafe by day and a restaurant by night and has an adjoining book store and twin-cinema.  The owner of Food, Flicks and Fiction is looking to employ an Employment Relations team.  You are to complete the following as a submission to be that team.
1.    Identify the staffing needs including roles,  qualifications required, casual/full-time/part-time
2.    Plan the recruitment and selection process
3.    Plan the training required for new employees
4.    Plan the remuneration to be offered to the employees and any rewards to be offered to good workers
5.    Present your plan to the manager
(Mrs Hartley) in an oral and visual format

They had 40 minutes to complete the task and 5 minutes for each group to present.

Now, my class is basically the rugby team, three girls and a few boys who are the shy and retiring types, yet they embraced this task and enjoyed it.  One group included a map of the Food, Flicks and Fiction site in their presentation.  All groups covered all elements well but particularly training requirements.  The presentations were a little hazy though with some students using “would probably” and other such indefinite statements.

Overall, I’d call it a great success.  This was the first lesson for the term so it’s a nice way to start.

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1 Comment »

  1. […] Early in the course I introduced a concept of the boardroom discussion (briefly mentioned in an earlier post).  I would break the syllabus points to be addressed into the form of a meeting agenda.  A […]

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