This Instructor Manual is under continuous improvement as fellow teachers discover ways to enhance GCSC's effectiveness. It may also be downloaded as a printer-friendly PDF document. Teaching faculty will want to have a copy in-hand for preparation and use the classroom.
A password-controlled faculty area contains the Managing Differences Learning Test (MDLT), the MDLT scoring key, reproducible materials needed for instruction, a master list of instructor interventions, and other sensitive materials. Faculty who adopt GCSC for use in their classes are provided access to this restricted area.
Contents
- History of the GCSC classroom simulation
- Materials needed by each student
- About laboratory learning
- Assumptions about the instructor
- Assumptions about the students
- Syllabus format options
- Customization
- The instructor's roles during the simulation
- Instructor's intervention schedule
- Grades and grading
- Term papers and options
- About the author/developer
- Password-controlled faculty area containing printable instructor's manual for in-class use, a preparation checklist, a master list of instructor interventions, a guide for each processing period, and the MDLT scoring key. It also contains all needed reproducible items including the master sheet of American Rubles, sheet of memo slips from BOD to President of GCSC, sheet of memo slips from Customer to EVP of GCSC, case evaluation forms, and other items.
History of the GCSC classroom simulation
Upon accepting a faculty position at the University of Hartford in 1978, Dan Dana was offered an opportunity to develop a course in his area of specialty for the recently established Master of Science in Organizational Behavior program. Having already identified conflict management as his focus of academic and professional interest (he wrote his doctoral dissertation on workplace conflict in 1976-77), Dan eagerly accepted this opportunity.
The precursor of today's GCSC simulation was first presented in 1979 as part of that course, Managing Organizational Conflict. Since then, he has taught the course and used GCSC over one hundred times at the University of Hartford, Syracuse University's Summer Institute in Conflict Resolution, and other educational institutions. He has also used GCSC as a corporate training model.
Retired from academic teaching in 2007, Dan offers the GCSC simulation to other faculty with an interest in the experiential study of conflict and its management.
Materials needed by each student
Each student requires a copy of two volumes:
1) The sourcebook, Managing Differences
2) The GCSC Employee Handbook
These two volumes may be ordered by any campus bookstore. Examination copies of both volumes are available to faculty who consider adopting them for classroom use.
About laboratory learning
A "behavioral learning laboratory" is an exceptionally powerful learning model, well suited for developing practical skills and for integrating theory with practice. The defining characteristic of a learning lab is participants engage in an activity (the "content") that produces observable behavior (both verbal and nonverbal), cognitions (e.g., perceptions, assumptions, attributions), and emotions (feelings). These three kinds of experiences — behavior, cognition, and emotion — are collectively called the "process" and constitute the "data" that are produced by the laboratory. A facilitator then helps participants examine their shared here-and-now experience (the data) and identify learnings. This examination is called "processing the laboratory."
Many training and team-building programs use learning labs in which learners engage in facilitated discussion of their shared experience. The facilitator of this "processing" helps learners apply particular concepts that build cognitive understanding of their experience during the activity, and to apply that understanding "back home" in their work or personal lives.
The GCSC simulation is unusual in that both the content and the process of the laboratory pertain to conflict. That is, as employees of GCSC, students produce case studies based upon the source material found in the Managing Differences text. During the processing periods, the instructor facilitates application of those same source concepts to the experiential data (behaviors, cognitions, and emotions) that were generated during case production periods. Consequently, there is no "wasted time" in which learners are engaged in content-irrelevant activities such as constructing towers made of drinking straws or doing competitive artwork.
Adding elegance to the instructional design of the GCSC laboratory is a "case-with-a-case" intervention by the instructor that calls upon students to analyze their own conflict management process in real time, while it is actually happening. Details of this intervention are restricted to the faculty resource area since its impact on student learning would be diminished by premature disclosure.
Because students are often unfamiliar with behavioral laboratories, the instructor must help them understand this dual-faceted, two-dimensional learning model. This is one of the goals in the initial session. An orientation for students is also contained in Section 4 of the GCSC Employee Handbook titled Understanding the Laboratory, which they will have read prior to the opening class.
Assumptions about the instructor
Faculty who use only lecture and other didactic instructional methods should not attempt the GCSC simulation. A solid grounding in experiential or participative learning is assumed. The teacher should possess adequate facilitation skills to enable students to learn from their own experience, not simply tell them what they should have learned. Facilitation involves much more asking than telling.
We also assume the instructor values student-centered learning. That is, although there is an objective subject matter about conflict to be learned, including special terminology, emphasis is placed on drawing out the idiosyncratic learnings gained by each individual students. One of the features of laboratory learning is that "students learn what their own unique life experiences have prepared them to learn at this time — no more and no less." The facilitator's goal is to assist each student in learning what he or she is ready to learn at the time in their lives at which this class experience occurs.
Assumptions about the students
The GCSC simulation was developed mostly with early- to mid-career students returning to school to complete master's or bachelor's degrees after a few years in the world of work. Mature students have the background to gain most from the GCSC experience.
The GCSC simulation is largely untested as of the date of this writing with young, undergraduate students (18 to 21 years of age) who lack significant employment history. However, many classes have included a sub-population of young students, who seemed to gain meaningfully from the activity.
Many classes have included international students from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. When English-language skills have been adequate, all students have gained from the simulation, regardless of their cultural backgrounds.
Customization
The GCSC simulation may be included in a wide range of courses other than Conflict Resolution. Some examples: Organizational Behavior, Administrative Management, Nursing Administration, Engineering Management, Industrial Psychology, Family and Social Relations, Human Decision Processes, Labor Relations, Business Administration, and Human Resource Management. Regardless of its academic context, the simulation is destined to be students' favorite part of any course in which it is included.
The activity requires four to five weekly class sessions, or their equivalent. (See syllabus and format options.)
The instructor's roles during the simulation
The instructor performs two roles during the GCSC simulation:
1) Chair of the Board of Directors (BOD)
The BOD is the Chief Executive Officer of GCSC, and remains entirely uninvolved in operational issues of the company. Indeed, the BOD usually does not make an appearance at GCSC's "physical plant." Instead, communicating by written memos, the BOD limits his/her participation to:
A) Ensuring that the company conforms to GCSC's policies, particularly the merit-based compensation policy, and
B) Challenging the President (Chief Operating Officer) to ensure that GCSC successfully meets the customer's (MTI Publications) requirements, and gains maximum revenue (in American Rubles) from the current contract.
2) Customer's purchasing agent
The customer:
A) Evaluates the cases produced by GCSC according to the quality criteria contained in section 2 of the employee handbook promptly following their delivery at designated pay points.
B) Delivers payment in American Rubles to GCSC's Executive VP, who acts as the company's customer liaison.
C) Avoids being drawn into performing an internal quality management function.
Instructor's intervention schedule
A schedule is provided of the interventions by the instructor in his/her roles as Board of Directors and as Customer. This information should be kept confidential and not disclosed to students, and so is located in the password-controlled faculty area.
Grades and grading
As an employee of GCSC, each student receives performance-based compensation paid in American Rubles (this counterfeit-resistant currency is provided in the faculty area of this website). The amount each student receives is determined by a performance evaluation system designed by the GCSC management (i.e., students) that strictly adheres to a compensation policy contained in the GCSC Employee Handbook. At the conclusion of the simulation, students convert their American Rubles into another "currency" (a component of their course grade) according to a currency conversation table found in the handbook.
Consequently, the number of American Rubles earned is a fair and valid consideration in the determination of course grade. This element of the instructional design is critical to the effectiveness of GCSC as a learning laboratory. Students who register to simply "audit" the course, or who otherwise are not motivated to achieve a successful grade, should be assigned non-employee roles in GCSC (e.g., given particular observational tasks). The conversion table also includes converting American Rubles to "comp time" (paid time off work) for use when GCSC is conducted as an in-house training program.
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