To the extent that our teaching goals include skills development, how do we best teach the complex skill sets called for in negotiation? Should we take a micro-level approach, allowing for a fine-grain focus and practice on discrete skills? Should we take a more macro-level approach, asking students to practice integrated sets of skills in complex, realistic scenarios? What do theories of adult learning suggest about the implications of these and other approaches? 

On May 8, 2007, NP @ PON hosted its inaugural pedagogy workshop to tackle these questions. Held at Harvard Business School, the workshop featured presentations about innovative macro-level and micro-level approaches to teaching negotiation skills, followed by commentary from an educational perspective and round-table discussions. Approximately 30 negotiation instructors from the fields of law, business, education, and communication attended the event, which was co-chaired by NP @ PON founders Michael Wheeler, Larry Susskind, and Melissa Manwaring. 

Professor Stephen Weiss, a specialist in international business negotiation at York University's Schulich School of Business, kicked off the discussion with a presentation on his use of highly complex "mega-simulations." These massive role simulations, based on real-world negotiations such as Nissan's 1999 alliance talks with Renault, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford, include numerous issues and as many as a dozen parties, and can take weeks to prepare and days to negotiate face-to-face. According to Weiss, the scale of such mega-simulations allows students to practice preparation (which includes reviewing a hefty notebook of detailed background memos and reports), internal group decision making, team building, multi-track diplomacy, reputation and trust management, communication, and problem-solving skills in an ongoing situation. Mega-simulations, in his view, provide special kinds of learning opportunities beyond what simpler role plays offer. They require students, for instance, to coordinate multiple levels of negotiations, manage many more unknown factors (such as issues and relationships) that cannot be fully anticipated or controlled, and synthesize a range of different skills, such as process management, analysis, and communication. Moreover, for a course such as international business negotiation, mega-simulations provide a highly realistic context in which students can practice. 

The featured educational commentator, Professor Christopher Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, observed that the benefits of mega-simulations are grounded in theories of situated learning, in which knowledge is acquired collaboratively through social interaction in an authentic context. A classic example of situated learning is a medical residency-an authentic, collaborative environment for applying knowledge that is quite different from the more abstract classroom learning environment. Situated learning, said Dede, is a type of learning that is particularly likely to be transferable from the classroom to the real world. Moreover, it allows students to develop skills in problem finding in addition to problem solving. Simpler, more "canned" exercises specify the problems, while mega-simulations provide a complex environment in which students must identify the negotiation problems before attempting to solve them. 

Another feature of situated learning approaches is that their complexity creates a wide array of learning possibilities. Dede noted that human activities range from the simple (such as sleeping, for which most people have similar and stable environmental preferences) to the complex (such as eating, for which people have different preferences and for which even the same person tends to enjoy variety over time) to the even more complex (such as bonding, for which people tend to have very different preferences: they might bond to a baseball team or to their pets or to other people in very different ways). According to Dede, educators tend to treat learning as though it's a simple activity like sleeping, when in fact it is much more like bonding in terms of its complexity and the variety of learning styles, strengths, and preferences. "We're not going to reach nontraditional learners by expecting them to adapt to how we teach," said Dede. "We're going to reach those people by providing a kind of an umbrella that has many different kinds of learning possible underneath it, and they can gravitate to the part that makes sense for them. The mega-simulations and other forms of situated learning potentially offer that kind of power instructionally."

The second featured presenter, Brigham Young University Law Professor Gerald Williams,described his efforts to focus on discrete negotiation skills through the use of specialized video annotation software known as MediaNotes. Inspired by a pedagogical approach called "deliberate practice"-used largely in skills-based areas such as athletics and the performing arts-Williams teaches negotiation by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable chunks, or "micro-skills."  Students then rehearse these skills to attain proficiency, correcting errors based on feedback. Williams' students digitally record their negotiation exercises using simple web cameras attached to laptop computers and then use specialized video annotation software to pinpoint and comment on specific micro-skills, such as distinguishing interests from positions. These comments are collected on a jointly accessible web page and give both students and faculty a chance to offer and respond to feedback on specific statements, tactics, and nonverbal cues that appear in the videotaped simulation. Williams compared his use of the MediaNotes annotation software to a coach's use of playback videos to review athletes' performances. This approach, Williams explained, has created measurable improvements in students' negotiation skills.

Dede observed that Williams' approach goes even beyond deliberate practice-which works well for psychomotor activities such as golf swings-and fits well within cognitivist learning theories. Learners employing a cognitivist approach break down complex performances into simpler building blocks, just as they do with deliberate practice, but within the cognitivist approach learners also distinguish situation-independent skills from situation-dependent skills. This ensures that learners not only possess a repertoire of skills, but also understand when to use them. Ideally, said Dede, cognitivist approaches lead to "robust learning," in which students retain their skills for a long time, develop a strong ability to transfer the skills from one situation to another, and accelerate their ability to learn future skills. At that point, cognitivist theorists claim, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts in the sense that when something new comes along, even though it's an independent subskill, you can draw on related parts of prior subskills you learned to help you learn that future skill faster."

After general discussion of both Weiss's and Williams' presentations, the participants worked in small groups to generate advice on several topics that emerged from the discussions: how to help negotiation students "unlearn" undesirable negotiation behaviors, how to approach teaching negotiation in teams and in organizations, how to sequence teaching and learning strategies across a curriculum, and how to model negotiation excellence in the course of teaching negotiation.

Reflecting on the daylong meeting, NP @ PON cofounder Susskind said that the workshop had exceeded his already-high expectations. "The presenters and commentators put a lot of effort into what they offered, and there was a very positive response from those who attended as well as from those who were unable to attend but feel strongly that more time and energy at PON should be focused on improving the way we teach negotiation," he said. "I thought the session was terrific, and I learned a lot."

Professor Andrea Kupfer Schneider,who teaches negotiation at Marquette University Law School, said that the workshop "was a fabulous opportunity, which we don't usually have, to carve out space and time to think about our teaching. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit around the table with some of the best teachers in the business and think about how we can do this better."  Another participant, Professor Michael Moffitt of the University of Oregon School of Law, commented that "the conversation was great, the topic was great, and the collection of experiences and perspectives around that table was outstanding." In his view, the presenters' topics were far from exhausted. "I almost ached for more time to hear discussion of each," he said. 

Melissa Manwaring (mmanwar@law.harvard.edu) is the Director of Curriculum Development at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and associate director of NP@PON. Catherine Teal Pennebaker (catherine_teal_pennebaker@ksg08.harvard.edu) is a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a research associate with NP@PON.