I am in the process of thinking about the last year and what worked, or didn’t work, in my classes. As part of that process, I thought I would share one new approach I took this year that I thought worked very well in my negotiation class.  This new approach is thanks to  Andrea Schneider’s Teaching a New Negotiation Skills Paradigm, 39 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 13 (2012) or on SSRN.

For those who haven’t yet read this article, Andrea recommends that when we teach negotiation we should move beyond the simple categorization of styles such as being “competitive” or an “avoider” and instead focus on five key negotiation skills: assertiveness, empathy, flexibility, social intuition, and ethicality.  The reason for this is the reality that negotiations are fluid and while one might be more competitive or cooperative, these labels rarely describe the whole process and in the context of teaching negotiation the focus on such labels can be at the expense of focusing on key skills.  Andrea also identifies three basic skill levels:  minimum practice, average practice, and best practice and gives clear examples of what would constitute a minimum, average or best practice level for each skill.

When I teach negotiation I use a fairly standard format.  First the students negotiate based on a role play and then we debrief the negotiation.  After the debrief in class, students write an analysis of the negotiation which should include self-critiquing.  My frustration has been that students often do a very surface level in-class debrief and written self-critique.  I have found it difficult to do a more in-depth analysis in class and therefore it is probably not a surprise that many students have a hard time with the written analysis.

Read original article


Tags: