Group management in a wass’ classroom

Taken from http://www.preppath.com/blog/three-biggest-challenges-for-adult-college-students

Group Management in a WASs’ Classroom

By Prof. Jonathan AcuĂąa-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Monday, January 9, 2017 Post 309

Some time ago, while taking a certificate with Laureate Faculty Development on Working Adult Students (WASs), I was triggered with two burning questions that gave me some good time to think and consider ways to deal with group management and this implies: o What would you call group management strategy?, and o What are your thoughts on the students' motivation?

With the following blog entry, I have tried to summarize my own thoughts regarding group management either in a face-to-face environment or in a virtual scenario. And I just hope that this can provoke more thinking on the potential reader of these ideas of mine.

Based on my expertise with WASs, group management strategies can be defined as basic principles that need to be followed in other to have or exercise control

over a group or team of individuals. Group management implies the use of leadership

techniques that allows any instructor to deal with disruptive behaviors but also to minimize the off-task, non-disruptive behaviors we can have in F2F classrooms or VLEs. Learners, whether they are the traditional kind or the WASs, need to be “controlled” though they may find certain sections of a lesson rather slow or boring because of their empirical expertise they could have gained at work. Understanding the cognitive load students have (their capacity to process and retain information for later tasks) can be of great use to have them focus their attention on the instructor’s explanations while one is lecturing, while watching a video tutorial and applying what is being demonstrated, and so on.

Monitoring what individual learners or groups of students is another way to exercise one’s group management as instructors. If the learners are or not in class, this can be done beyond any doubt; in a F2F classroom this is done by means of scaffolding, but in a VLE this is done by collaborating on Google Drive, exempli gratia, with a group and see what they are achieving and/or not completing yet. No matter what kind of management control is needed, it must be wisely combined with a good use of leadership techniques and strategies. Making learners aware of their responsibility towards their own learning is part of the leadership needed to help them collaborate or to assist an instructor to scaffold students.

Leadership and group management are not the full extent of the equation needed to have successful learners; motivation is part of this formula. Comprehending that there are various types of motivation is crucial; the Andragogical instructor must bear this in mind at all times. There are intrinsic learners, who do not need to get motivated much, since they come to class with a strong desire to learn and continue building their knowledge and then be more functional at work. We also have students who are extrinsically-motivated. Extrinsic motivation is connected with the goals that must be achieved by learners to have access to certain perks or positions at work;

lacking the proper education in a given area is something counterproductive for this kind of WASs. More traditional students are extrinsically motivated with grades or other kind of academic rewards. And still there is another type of student who is at the university because of some kind of instrumental motivation: the chance to have access to certain benefits or perks that can only be attained if certain educational qualifications have been accomplished.

No matter what kind of motivation is driving learners’ interests, it is important to notice when this is absent from one’s students. Lacking motivation means that an individual is not really interested in course content and in the development of skills and competencies needed at work. This kind of off-task behavior is counterproductive for both teachers and students. The learning process is then affected and it does not take place as a consequence. The leader teacher needs to exercise his/her motivating power to re-focus learners and help them go back on track and on task to keep developing themselves as students, as workers, and as individuals.

To sum up, to achieve group management needs some very basic and essential ingredients: o Understanding the scope of student cognitive load to process and retain information, o Student progress monitoring via collaboration or scaffolding (depending on the teaching scenario the instructor is involved), and o The type of motivation driving force that is pushing students to learn.

I have no doubt that this shallow list can be greatly expanded, but it can be used as a starting point for anyone interested in managing groups of working adult students.