Teaching Law Students to Design Dispute Resolution Systems

The Idea 

Since 2004, I have focused much of my energy on developing an approach to teaching law students to function as dispute process architects - as creative innovators of institutional and organizational systems for managing and resolving conflicts from a problem-solving orientation.  My interest in what William Ury, Jeanne Brett, and Stephen Goldberg coined "dispute systems design" (DSD) (Ury et al. 1993) stems from a deep-seated belief that lawyers, by dint of the special role they play for clients, have a unique opportunity to shape the ways many institutions (schools, companies, nations, non-profits) manage and resolve their disputes. 

Implicitly or explicitly, every institution and organization has a system for managing disputes. In some cases, the system may be formal, with administrative hearings, courts, tribunals, and complex appeal and review processes. In other cases, organizations may have few if any formal means for managing conflict. In these instances, conflicts may be managed through informal negotiation and mediation or by simply "lumping it." As institutions and organizations become more aware of the ever-rising cost of conflict, many are seeking to design and implement systems to manage disputes with greater effectiveness and efficiency. Though lawyers have traditionally seen themselves primarily as advocates who resolve already-ripened disputes through litigation and negotiation, this explosion of interest in more efficient and tailored approaches to conflict management has led to an increasing interest in lawyers serving as dispute management system designers.

At the same time, law schools have often failed to innovate their curricula in ways that keep pace with the skills and knowledge lawyers need for the roles that they are often called upon to assume. Practically speaking, then, many lawyers end up improvising as they work to set up complex mass tort claims facilities, re-structure the human resource practices for large companies, or build governance structures in post-conflict states.  It seemed to me that those of us in the academy could do a better job of exposing our students to some of the guiding principles for the successful design, implementation, and evaluation of these dispute management systems and thereby graduate lawyers who are better prepared for the challenges they will face in their professional practice.

The Launch

My first foray into developing a DSD teaching program began as a collaboration with the legendary scholar and mediator Frank Sander, who helped launch the U.S. ADR movement with his call for a "multi-door courthouse" at the 1976 Pound Conference.  One could not have asked for a better person with whom to initiate this project.  In the first few iterations of teaching DSD at Harvard Law School, Professor Sander and I offered the course as a one-credit reading group.  Reading groups at Harvard Law School are designed to be more informal and less structured than seminars and large lecture courses. Because of their small size and informality, reading groups make it easier for a teacher to experiment with new material without the risk of failure in front of a large lecture hall. Students in a reading group sign up precisely because they want to be part of an entrepreneurial, joint-learning experience. We selected some basic readings - Ury, Brett, and Goldberg's Getting Disputes Resolved, for example - followed by case studies.  We also used a Supreme Court Case, Tasini v. New York Times, as the basis for an in-class DSD challenge. After reading the case, students were charged with designing a dispute resolution process for effectuating an out-of-court settlement to dispose of the case, which was remanded to a lower Federal District Court. 

Our two reading groups met with initial success.  From what we could perceive, students' ability to apply principles of DSD to real-life contexts increased as the semester progressed.  Moreover, in course evaluations students expressed an increased interest in the reading and a desire for a more expanded program. Consequently, in the fall of 2006 I offered my first full 2-credit DSD seminar. The course had ambitious goals. I wanted to place DSD in context historically as the latest "evolution" of an ADR movement that had started in the U.S. context 30 years earlier. I also wanted to expose students to various theoretical approaches to DSD.  Lastly, I endeavored to connect this body of theory to the world of practice by introducing students to a range of contexts in which DSD was used or ought to have been used.  For this part of the course, I selected various contexts -- ranging from the 9/11 Compensation Fund, to the dispute resolution systems in place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to the design of the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) -- on which to focus individual classes. 

In choosing contexts, I wanted to ensure that I had examples of what I term "transactional" DSD and "organizational" DSD.  The former relates to a "one-off" event that results in a stream of disputes that will eventually all be resolved.  Mass tort claims such as asbestos or breast implant litigation fall into this category, as did the 9/11 Compensation Fund. Organizational DSD involves the design of institutional systems to manage an ongoing stream of conflicts within an organization. An example of an organizational DSD might include the design of a voluntary mediation program to resolve disputes between employees and supervisors in a large company.  For each of these contexts, I invited a high-profile guest who had been responsible for or at least instrumental in the design of the dispute resolution system. To ensure that these sessions did not devolve into mere storytelling (a risk whenever visitors are invited to talk about their experience in a classroom setting), I asked each guest to focus her/his remarks and the ensuing class conversation on a particular theme. For example, one guest might focus on ethical questions that arose in the course of her work.  Another might focus on the challenges of conducting the conflict assessment part of the work.  Still another might focus on managing principal-agent tensions inherent in DSD.  I repeated a similar version of this course in the fall of 2007, inviting a somewhat different group of guests and making a number of structural and topical changes.  For example, responding to feedback from the 2006 iteration of the course, in 2007 I included a session critiquing the theory of DSD and another that looked at a failed attempt at DSD.  

Contemporaneously with the launch of this new class, in the fall of 2006 I laid the groundwork for what has become the United States' first and only law school clinic that focuses on DSD. Students may enroll in the classroom component of the DSD course with or without the additional clinical component, the goals of which are to provide students with an opportunity to apply some of the theory to the real world of practice and to use what we learn working with clients to build new, more refined theory for the future. Currently staffed by two clinical fellows, a half-time program coordinator, and myself, the clinic identifies client projects for students in which they work intensively (10 to 15 hours per week in teams of 2 or 3 students) during the course of a semester to conduct a conflict assessment, a dispute system evaluation, or a preliminary process design. 

One particular challenge for students in our DSD clinic is the substantial ramp-up time to become conversant in the issues an organization is facing and its institutional structure.  Simply being familiar with negotiation and dispute resolution theories is inadequate for many of our clinical projects, which function more like conflict management consulting projects than as law cases with a focused subject matter expertise such as housing or immigration.  The time and energy involved in taking on even a limited-scope DSD clinical project requires considerable dedication from the students, the supervising faculty, and often the clients as well.

The Work Ahead

Despite some successes so far in developing a pedagogical approach that seems to be working both in and outside the classroom, we see many challenges ahead. 

First, there is room aplenty for innovation and improvement.  For example, our current DSD course relies to a great extent on outside visitors.  The visitors - leading professionals and academics such as Ken Feinberg (Special Master of the 9/11 Compensation Fund), Cathy Costantino (DSD practitioner, adjunct faculty member, and co-author of Designing Conflict Management Systems, and Larry Susskind, founder of CBI and Professor of Urban Studies at MIT) --- enrich and enliven our course enormously. At the same time, recruiting visitors to the course every year is time-consuming and costly.  Moreover, given my interest in creating a model DSD program that can be replicated at schools where the logistics of getting visitors (either because of physical distance, fiscal constraints, or both) might be more complicated, I recognize the need to develop materials so that the course can stand on its own, without visitors.

In addition, while we have developed manuals both for our clinical clients and our clinical students during the past year, there remain large gaps in the resources that we would like to make available to our students.  For example, we currently have only one sophisticated dispute systems design simulation to use in our course.  To supplement this, we would like to develop an interactive case that could be used as a discussion and skills-building vehicle throughout the semester.  Such a case would have sequenced exercises that would invite students to work through the challenges that arise during the life of a typical clinical project. 

This summer, we are developing a resource guide to help law students conduct field-based research.  Most law students have little if any experience or knowledge on how to conduct high-quality quantitative and qualitative field research. While we cannot expect law students to become experts in conducting such research during the course of a semester, they do need to become familiar with basics of survey design, field interviews, and analysis in order to provide the highest quality work product for our clients.

The most successful law school clinics build in feedback loops so as to generate new theory from practice.  Because DSD is an emerging field, we are particularly keen to learn from our successes and mistakes. To that end, we have developed mechanisms for capturing feedback from our students and our clients and, as a clinic, we have committed ourselves to systematic reflection and review through scheduled check-ins and an annual staff retreat.

The Vision

The vision that I have for training lawyers to be dispute process architects is, admittedly, an ambitious one.  I see enormous opportunity and potential for lawyers to reclaim their role in society as wise counselors and enlightened problem solvers.  To do this, lawyers must learn how to diagnose disputes and prescribe processes for managing them that go beyond traditional litigation.

My hope is that in 25 years, most law schools will offer their students a clinical experience in some kind of dispute systems design, thereby helping to redefine the roles and goals of the next generation of lawyers. Ideally, Harvard Law School's educational program on dispute systems design will serve not only as a resource for Harvard Law students but also as an example and perhaps an inspiration for other legal educators interested in developing DSD courses or clinics.  As I work to expand and improve our DSD educational program, I will need the support, advice, and coaching of colleagues and professionals. If you've been doing work in dispute systems design - as teacher, researcher, or practitioner - and have ideas, experiences, and thoughts to contribute on this topic, I'd love to hear from you.  If I receive enough interest in this topic, I'll set up an online forum for continued dialogue, brainstorming, and discussion as well.  To read more about our new clinic and the work we've done, I'd encourage you to visit our website at www.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp.

Robert C. Bordone is the Thaddeus R. Beal Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. He can be reached at rbordone@law.harvard.edu.

Thin-Slicing Talk:  An Exercise in Analyzing Negotiation

by Phillip Glenn

Negotiation books and articles are rich with practical wisdom about strategizing, getting to yes, closing a deal, and more.   Often underrepresented in our teaching materials, however, is consideration of the actual interaction that makes up the give-and-take of negotiation. 

Such lack of attention is understandable.  Recording negotiations presents challenges, memory and self report are not too reliable, and much of what happens in talk we scarcely notice.  Most importantly, one needs analytic tools that open up how talk works.

I study negotiation through a research method known as conversation analysis (CA).  In brief, CA involves transcribing and analyzing recordings of naturally-occurring interactions.  It's a basic research enterprise devoted to characterizing how people organize everyday social actions such as greeting, ending a phone call, flirting, arguing, storytelling, or negotiating.  A couple of features of CA research make it valuable for studying what happens in negotiating.  First, we insist on carefully describing what is going on rather than speculating about peoples' motives, goals, feelings, or personalities.  This disciplined analysis leads to amazing insights about how talk works and how people do what they do.  Second, we locate our claims in the moment, asking continually, "Why that now?"  Talk is always contextual:  produced at this moment, by this speaker, to someone else, following some specific action, and setting up some specific next one.  Its meaning--the action it is doing--can only be interpreted by coming to grips with its sequential placement.  Understanding that makes one a better student of communication and a better negotiator. 

Conversation analytic research requires years of training, but some of the methods of CA work quite well as a learning activity for beginning negotiators.  Here are two variations of an exercise I use with undergraduate and master's students in classes on conflict and negotiation.

I select a video recording of a conflict or negotiation.  Almost any interaction will give you something interesting to study, but I prefer naturalistic (rather than role-played or fictional), two-party (rather than multi-party) interactions.  I select a one- to two- minute interesting portion and create a detailed transcript that shows words spoken as well as timing, pauses, overlaps, laughs, and other nonverbal features.  I ask students to study the video and transcript repeatedly and analyze conflict patterns.  They describe the actions getting done and how individual actions fit into larger patterns.  Based on this analysis, students examine how the people in the conflict are displaying their identities and relationships. 

Consider, for example, the following interchange between a wife and husband, who are arguing over how to make their money stretch.

Husband:    I'm gonna give you eighty dollars a week I want the car

            covered.

Wife:       Not for trips

The husband's turn at talk contains an offer for a fixed amount of money he will give her with the condition that it cover her auto expenses.  By his pronoun usage ("I"), the absence of explanations, and the lack of any softening features (hesitations, uncertainty markers) he makes a strong positional statement:  he is presenting her the terms and conditions he is willing to give.  His nonverbals (you can't see or hear them, but take my word for it) reinforce this interpretation:  he stares at her, unblinking, unsmiling, and speaks firmly.  Her quick reply-and it is a reply, evident by its syntax-does not challenge the $80 per week, or that she must cover the car from that--only that "trips" are an exception.  [Note that the underlined "i" in "trips" indicates that wife emphasizes this vowel.]  Thus, the wife accepts the general framework of his offer while quibbling with one component of it. 

This is just one moment, and in this article I can provide only a glimpse of what one might discover through close listening and analysis.  Consider, for example, if one sees an extended pattern of one party making strong positional statements and another offering only minor challenges.  Consider how one might create and sustain an identity as forceful or passive aggressive.  Consider how talk might reflect (and constitute) a relationship characterized by dominance and submission.  Consider how teaching might help people envision alternatives: what are other ways the husband might express his interests, and what responses might they open up? What other options might the wife have for responding?  How could they come to see their conflict in a different way? 

A variation on this exercise is to have students videotape themselves in a role-played negotiation.  They view the video and select a brief segment (less than two minutes) for microanalysis.  Viewing themselves has the obvious advantage that they can reflect on their own behaviors and decide what's working well and what they might try to change.  But CA challenges the student analysts to avoid hypercriticizing, to remain nonjudgmental, and to stick to what they can see and hear. 

Here is an example.  Students in my graduate class role played a negotiation between a teachers' union and a school board.  The teachers requested a ten percent raise, and the board representatives offered three.  The two parties reconvened after caucusing, and a few moments later the following interchange occurred: 

Union rep:     I think at this point in our negotiation and in

               an effort to come to a solution that works for both of

               us all of us we um we would like to make an equal

               concession and come to eight.

   (2.0)

Board member:  Now. (0.7) Eight. um

Union rep:     Which we feel is equally as generous.       

Board member:  I- (1.2) I wouldn't be opposed? to increasing eight

               percent over the course of two or three years?

[Note that the timed pauses are noted in parentheses (2.0), all sounds (including "um") are included, and underlining represents emphasis.]  The teachers' union representative proposes an eight percent raise, but before she names the figure she locates it "at this point" in the process, justifies it as motivated by an attempt to reach agreement, and terms it an "equal concession."  Through these prefacing moves she frames the offer as reasonable and responsive to contingencies of the process.  The pause that follows we can hear as the board's pause, because a response is relevant and expected following an offer.  During this pause, the three members of the board negotiating team exchange glances.  One begins to answer, and his hesitation displays some difficulty with the proposal.  Before he continues, the teacher speaks again, defending the offer as "equally as generous."  Combined with the earlier description of it as an "equal concession," this further shows the teachers to be engaging in distributive bargaining, rooted in compromise and standards of fairness.  The board member's unfolding response (only the beginning is shown here) rejects the offer, but rather than doing so as a flat refusal it begins to recast the offer to being possible over several years. 

From this brief description of a small moment one can consider a number of issues related to offers and responses.  When should a negotiating party make an offer, and in what form?  How are offers packaged, explained, and justified?  How should a negotiating party respond to an offer?  How might one try to reframe a distributive bargaining move towards integrative negotiating?   

Closely analyzing actual negotiation talk serves as a powerful exercise in careful listening, attending to nonverbal as well as verbal signals, understanding how negotiation happens, and recognizing how small moments can trigger big changes in interaction.  Students with minimal training do well in such assignments, and they tell me that talk is never quite the same again for them:  that pauses, questions, disagreements, and a thousand other actions become objects of curiosity and reflection.  Awareness of how talk works makes one a better negotiator and at its best can enrich the human experience.   

If you would like to correspond more about these instances, your own materials, or related matters, please get in touch with me at Phillip_Glenn@Emerson.edu or www.PhillipGlenn.info.

For more information about conversation analysis, see: 

Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (Eds). (1984).  Structures of social action; Studies in conversation analysis.  Cambridge University Press.

Glenn, P. (2003).  Laughter in Interaction.  Cambridge University Press.

Psathas, G. (1995).  Conversation analysis:  The study of talk-in-interaction.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.

ten Have, P. (1999).  Doing conversation analysis; A practical guide.  London: Sage.

Phillip Glenn is Professor of Communication at Emerson College and a visiting scholar at PON.

Maximizing the Value of Experiential Exercises through Observational and Analogical Learning

by Christina Rosan

Most negotiation instructors use experiential exercises such as role simulations, yet empirical research indicates that such exercises alone do little to promote student learning. Experiential exercises are far more powerful when combined with observational learning (such as live or recorded demonstrations) and/or with analogical learning (in which students learn to recognize and compare concepts across contexts). 

In a 2003 Management Science article, Janice Nadler, Leigh Thompson, and Leaf Van Boven compare four different methods for teaching negotiation: principle-based or didactic learning (in which students are given information or advice about abstract principles), learning via information revelation (in which students are given additional information about the other party after a negotiation exercise), analogical learning (in which students compare and contrast negotiation scenarios), and observational learning (in which students observe a model negotiation).

To test the effectiveness of different teaching strategies, students were asked to perform an initial negotiation simulation without any training. Some students then were placed in a control group that received no additional training, while others were exposed to one of the four teaching strategies.  Participants in the principle-based or didactic condition studied a one-page synopsis of abstract value-creation principles. Those in the information revelation condition studied a handout that revealed all of their counterpart's priorities and preferences in the first negotiation (thus indirectly revealing value-creating opportunities).  In the analogical condition, participants read and compared two short cases describing superficially different negotiations in which the parties recognized opportunities for trade-offs (though the word "trade-off" was not used).  Participants in the observational condition viewed a videotaped version of actors negotiating the scenario they had just completed, in which the actors created value and reached an integrative agreement.  Each of the four experimental student groups and the control group then performed a second negotiation with integrative opportunities, after which both their negotiation performance and their level of conceptual understanding was evaluated. 

Nadler, Thompson, and van Boven found that experience alone - that is, simply participating in another role play without additional training, as in the control group condition - was largely ineffective at improving performance in the second negotiation. Neither didactic training nor information revelation significantly improved performance either.

On the other hand, participants who were exposed to either observational training or analogical training improved their performance measurably.  Participants in both groups were more likely than those in the other groups to create value in the second negotiation by constructing mutually beneficial trade-offs among issues.  Interestingly, participants who were exposed to observational learning exhibited the best performance in the second negotiation, yet were least able to explain what they did or why it worked.  The authors suggest that these participants may have acquired tacit knowledge, which they exhibit in their behavior but which they are unable to articulate. Participants in the analogical group also improved their negotiation outcomes markedly -- nearly (but not quite) as well as those in the observational group.  However, the participants in the analogical group were much better able to articulate the principles underlying their value-creation efforts, which they presumably extracted through their comparison of the cases.

More recently, in a 2008 Negotiation and Conflict Management Research article, Simone Moran, Yoella Bereby-Meyer, and Max Bazerman explore the promise of analogical negotiation training more deeply.  They compare the effects of "specific analogical training," in which students studied the use of a specific value-creation technique across multiple contexts, with that of "diverse analogical training," in which students studied different value-creation techniques. The authors conclude that, while specific analogical training facilitates the learning and application of that particular technique, diverse analogical training appears to be more effective for teaching students broader value-creation principles and for improving their overall value-creation skills.

Previous research on analogical training had focused on teaching students to recognize commonalities across situations.  In other words, the factual contexts, not the negotiation techniques, constituted the analogies.  Moran, Bereby-Meyer, and Bazerman hypothesized that students would be more likely to transfer value-creation skills when the negotiation techniques constitute the analogies: that is, when the students are taught different strategies for value creation and thus exposed to more general value-creation principles.

To test this hypothesis, student participants were divided into three groups.  One group was a control group that received no training.  The other two received either (a) specific analogical training by reading two different case studies in which a contingent contract was used to create value; or (b) diverse analogical training by reading one case study creating value with a contingent contract and another case study creating value through logrolling (i.e., trading concessions on low-priority issues in exchange for concessions on high-priority issues).  After the training, the students in all three groups participated in a complex, integrative negotiation. The effectiveness of the different training strategies was measured by the outcome of the negotiation as well as an assessment of the individual's understanding of value-creation principles.

The authors found that negotiators with diverse analogical training - that is, those who were taught different methods for creating value - achieved higher total joint gains than either the untrained group or the group with specific analogical training.  Those with diverse analogical training were also able to apply both skills (logrolling and contingency contracts) at once and they were better able to use value-creation techniques that had not been previously taught, such as trading on differences in time preference and adding issues.  Diversely trained negotiators seemed to have a more "advanced understanding of the broad concept of creating value." The authors suggest that, rather than focusing on specific value-creation strategies (such as contingent contracts) in different factual contexts, "learning more general negotiation principles (such as 'value can be created' or 'the pie is not always fixed') facilitates successful transfer to a broader range of new negotiation situations and thus enhances the ability to implement diverse value-creating strategies, including ones never previously encountered" (p. 120).

These two research studies suggest that the way in which participants are introduced to negotiation concepts matters.  Observational learning and practice seems to promote tacit knowledge - an ability to execute certain skills, but with limited ability to articulate the concepts or theories underlying these skills.  Analogical training - particularly diverse analogical training, in which students learn about multiple manifestations of a broad concept such as value creation - seems to promote deeper conceptual understanding and an ability to extrapolate across contexts. 

Articles:

Nadler, Janice, Leigh Thompson, and Leaf Van Boven. April 2003. Learning Negotiation Skills: Four Models of Knowledge Creation and Transfer. Management Science 49(4): 529-540.

NP Annotated Bibliography Now Available Online

NP @ PON is pleased to announce the creation of the Negotiation Pedagogy Annotated Bibliography, available online and free of charge.

With nearly 300 entries, the annotated bibliography compiles book chapters, journal articles, newsletter articles, and other publications on teaching negotiation, mediation, and related subjects.  It represents the product of several months of research by post-doctoral researcher Alexandra Crampton.  In order to remain focused and manageable, the bibliography includes only publications that explicitly address negotiation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR), and conflict management education, and not those that focus on either negotiation or education more generally.

Crampton created the bibliography in the RefWorks® database manager, which allows users to enter their own search terms as well as to browse by descriptor (keyword), title, author, date, and periodical (see the drop-down list under the "Search" button in the upper left corner).  The browsing feature highlights interesting patterns -- for instance, the most-cited periodicals in the bibliography are Negotiation Journal (56), Conflict Resolution Quarterly (20), International Negotiation (14), Business Communication Quarterly (7), Group Decision and Negotiation (7), Journal of Legal Education (6), and Journal of Management Education (6). 

The items in the bibliography address various aspects of negotiation pedagogy, from general curriculum design, to particular teaching tools and approaches, to considerations in teaching particular audiences.  The majority appear to be based on field research, literature-based research, and/or anecdotal personal experience, though a few draw on experimental research as well.  While most pieces discuss teaching negotiation, ADR, conflict management, or related subjects as distinct fields, some address negotiation as a vehicle for teaching a larger topic such as communication skills or critical thinking.  A few take an entirely different perspective, treating negotiation as pedagogy - that is, drawing from negotiation theory and skills to improve teaching.  Interestingly, says Crampton, "most of the literature that discussed negotiation as pedagogy is in the context of K-12 teacher education, rather than in the adult education context."

Spending several months compiling a negotiation pedagogy literature review led to some surprising insights, notes Crampton.  "It was fascinating to learn about the various specialized contexts in which people are offering and seeking negotiation training, such as medical programs that train residents to negotiate with patients and other medical professionals, engineering programs that train their engineers to negotiate with startups, vocational training programs, and crisis negotiation training programs."  Crampton's research also uncovered different trends in different but related fields.  "Most of the negotiation pedagogy literature appears to focus on teaching students to improve individual performance," says Crampton.  "On the other hand, the conflict resolution education and peace studies education literature tends to focus more on teaching students to change the conflict or the context of the conflict.  It has a much less individualistic orientation."

The literature review process also revealed the extent to which the concept of negotiation has permeated other fields.  "I didn't realize how widely negotiation is used as a lens throughout the social sciences literature as a way of thinking about political, economic, social, and personal relationships," muses Crampton. "Perhaps in our increasingly inter-connected, multi-polar world, in which power is more diffuse and ambiguous than ever before, people are reframing how they make sense of the world.  They don't seem to be asking 'How is the world structured?' so much as they are asking 'How is the world negotiated?'"

Despite the diversity of contexts in which negotiation is being taught and applied, the bibliography does reflect a certain degree of homogeneity in the pedagogy literature.  Faculty affiliated with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and articles in Negotiation Journal (published by PON in cooperation with Wiley Blackwell) account for about one-third of the bibliography's contents, says Crampton, despite her concerted efforts to seek out publications unaffiliated with PON.  Moreover, she says, there appears to be a "classic negotiation training model" described repeatedly in the literature.  This "classic model" tends to begin with a rational analysis of single-issue negotiations between two autonomous agents, then adds complexity (such as additional parties or issues) and some additional theory, with a huge focus on the task of transforming students / participants from distributive to integrative negotiators and a heavy reliance on role plays.  Much of the literature "riffs directly off of the classic model," says Crampton.  It may discuss teaching or training in a new context, with new constraints or opportunities, or with new teaching tools, but seems to accept the basic theoretical, pedagogical, and philosophical premises of the classic model.  "The literature reflects an implicit confidence in this model," comments Crampton.  Few pieces appear to question or confirm the effectiveness of the classic model, though the bibliography includes some interesting exceptions, such as a course modeled on field-based clinical work and empirical research questioning the effectiveness of experiential learning alone (see "Maximizing the Value of Experiential Exercises through Observational and Analogical Learning" elsewhere in this newsletter). 

Crampton's research also exposed some apparent gaps in the negotiation pedagogy literature.  "Perhaps the most striking gap is the dearth of empirical research on the long-term impact of negotiation training," she said.  "There's not all that much on what people learn even in the short-term context of a course or a lab experiment, but there's even less on what they retain over time, and what they're able to apply to new, real-world contexts."  In addition, little attention appears to have been paid to how people learn to negotiate outside of formal training contexts.  "While there's plenty of material on what expert negotiators do, there's very little on how they learn to negotiate - how they became expert.  Experts seem to have a great deal of tacit knowledge and I haven't seen much that helps explain why certain people become truly expert negotiators while others with similar types and levels of experience do not." 

Bibliography users, however, will likely be far more interested in what is included than what is not.  A browse of the extensive descriptor list (which includes both author-supplied keywords in the original abstracts and additional descriptors developed by Crampton for internal consistency) offers some inkling of the range of content: it includes descriptors relating to, among others:

• particular educational approaches and theories (e.g. "action research," "analogical reasoning and training," "constructive-developmental theory," "double loop learning")
• particular teaching skills ("debriefing", "facilitation", "feedback", "evaluation")
• particular teaching concepts and content ("culture", "principal-agent relationship", "prisoner's dilemma", "trust")
• specific teaching and learning contexts ("law school context", "China", "executive training", "hostage negotiations", "e-learning")
• insights from various disciplines ("systems theory", "feminist theory", "game theory")
• various teaching tools ("simulations" and role plays, "Ugli Orange exercise", "case study training", "clinical training", "ladder of inference")

"Alexandra has created a resource that will be invaluable for negotiation teachers and scholars around the world," says NP @ PON Co-Director Michael Wheeler.  "By capturing current best practices and stimulating ideas, her bibliography will surely spark further innovation."  Such innovation is welcome, as the NP Annoted Bibliography is intended to be - in the words of NP @ PON Co-Director Larry Susskind - "a starting point - a way to sort through the growing number of studies and articles on various aspects of negotiation pedagogy."  He adds that the bibliography will also help highlight - and perhaps inspire scholars to address - gaps in negotiation pedagogy research.

Free use and sharing of the NP annotated bibliography is encouraged.  While the bibliography is being published in read-only format to preserve its integrity and format, suggestions for additions, corrections, and/or alternate ways of tagging or classifying materials are welcome, as the bibliography will be updated on an ongoing basis.  Please contact np@pon.harvard.edu with any comments, questions, or suggestions. 

New Workable Peace Curriculum Series Now Available

The Consensus Building Institute and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School are pleased to announce the release of the Workable Peace Curriculum Series, a set of seven comprehensive curriculum guides published by PON Books for secondary schools and youth programs. 

The Workable Peace program was designed to respond to the growing need for young people to understand violence and conflict, to develop tolerance, to appreciate alternative perspectives, to understand and meet their underlying needs, and to constructively respond to conflict in their lives.  Developed by practitioners and educators at the Consensus Building Institute, the Workable Peace Curriculum Series is an innovative conflict resolution curriculum for secondary school classrooms, integrating the study of conflict with core social studies and humanities subjects, making it an effective resource for rigorous learning with clear academic and social relevance.

The Workable Peace curriculum has been successfully used by middle and high schools across the United States and internationally, as well as by post-secondary institutions ranging from community colleges to the graduate level.

The newly revised and expanded Workable Peace Curriculum Series consists of seven units, each focused on a historical or recent conflict:

• Ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War

• Managing Conflict in the Middle East

• Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Latin America

• Religion and Nationalism in Northern Ireland 

• Ethnic Conflict and Genocide in Post-Colonial Africa

• The Rise of Organized Labor in the United States

• Civil Rights and School Integration in the United States

Each curriculum unit contains five sections (each with a detailed Teacher's Guide):

1)   an analytical framework that teaches the sources of intergroup conflict and conflict management strategies;

2)   introductory activities to teach conflict analysis, using historical events and primary source documents;

3)   an in-depth role play that challenges participants to voice their group's needs, understand the needs of others, and seek ways to meet their goals through negotiation with representatives of other groups;

4)   additional resources, including an annotated bibliography of additional information on the issues in the role play, as well as civic learning activities that apply the conflict resolution skills to parallel issues in students' lives; and

5)   additional negotiation and mediation skill-building activities.

The Workable Peace curriculum units are available for purchase individually or as a set through the Program on Negotiation Clearinghouse online at www.pon.org or by telephone at 800-258-4406.  Single-use digital versions of the role simulations will be available soon.  

For more information about the Workable Peace Curriculum Series, please contact Stacie Nicole Smith, Director of Workable Peace and Senior Associate at the Consensus Building Institute, at stacie@cbuilding.org.