Teaching Essential Employability Skills While Using the Flipped Classroom Model in the Group Dynamics Course
Essential employability skills are qualities that employers try to find in ideal job candidates. These qualities are in addition to academic qualifications and include soft skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal skills.
The model of a flipped classroom that is being used by the Group Dynamics course at Conestoga College teaches and reinforces these skills by offering opportunities to students to try out many roles and experiences that they will be exposed to in their future careers. Specifically, in their role as team leaders, students learn how to lead a team. This requires them to learn how to set agendas, chair meetings, and nudge the team to get their work done on time. In other words, this role teaches them to be effective leaders, communicators, and critical thinkers. It also provides opportunities to strengthen interpersonal and personal skills.
The Recorder’s role may seem like it involves just a regurgitation of the events and interactions that occurred in a team meeting, but this role also teaches and reinforces communication skills and information management.
Likewise, the Participant Analyst’s main job is to communicate clearly, concisely and correctly, in writing, the issues that arose in team meetings. They also evaluate how effectively each team member processes and presents information to help solve problems that the team encounters. Of course, this role also reinforces and teaches the student about how to handle interpersonal and personal interactions between team members.
The roles that each team undertakes during the course are to teach and reinforce specific employability skills. Members of the Executive team learn to critically assess and solve problems that arise before, during, and after each class. They are also the key players in information management before and during the class. Additionally, they must communicate concisely and clearly what their agenda is and how they are going to have the class stick to the schedule. Thus, they must learn strong time-management skills.
The role of the Teaching team is also valuable in teaching students important skills that are needed in the workforce. This team is responsible for teaching a chapter from the textbook in a creative, interactive manner that is not about straight lecturing. Therefore, they must learn critical thinking and problem-solving skills. They must learn to communicate effectively using spoken, written and visual cues. Additionally, this team must utilize appropriate technology and information systems to produce an experiential exercise that reinforces the lesson for the day. This requires them to do something original and unique each time. Finally, this role reinforces interpersonal and personal skills because it requires the team to show respect for diverse opinions, values and beliefs while also managing their own time and resources.
The Feedback team plays the most important role in this type of flipped classroom. Here, the goal is to help the entire class grow and make positive changes each week. The team is required to facilitate a class discussion using an original feedback tool each week to provide feedback to other teams on how well or otherwise they achieved their tasks and social roles. The Feedback team also provides ideas to other teams about how they can improve moving forward. Thus, the Feedback team must have strong communication and conflict management skills as well as flexible problem-solving skills. The Feedback team also builds an impressive roster of interpersonal skills by being aware of diversity, equity and inclusion.
This model of a flipped classroom gives students ample opportunity to try all the roles, both individually and within a team, thereby allowing the students to learn how to work effectively in a team. This will be important no matter what career path students choose because we live in a world today where everyone is in teams all the time.
