An Interest-Based Mediation: Audio-Visual Mediator-Training Series

Abstract

This mediator-training series includes three DVD films, a teacher’s manual and a student handbook designed to teach the progressive stages of the problem-solving, facilitative mediation process. The series is suitable for use in law school courses or in a training program for either novices or experienced mediators. The underlying mediation is an employment dispute regarding a discharge allegedly based on disability. Resolution hinges on successfully addressing both inter-personal issues and practical issues concerning job status and accommodations.The cornerstone of the series is a 92-minute, narrated mediator-training video. Using scenes from a longer mediation session, the scenes and accompanying narration demonstrate a variety of skilled interventions – techniques designed to make forward movement, restore relationships, break impasse, and help conflicted parties reach resolution. The film includes insightful pre- and post-mediation interviews in which the mediator and parties share their thoughts about the process. The film can be shown in one sitting or its chapters assigned individually as students study each stage of the mediation process.The Teacher’s Manual contains a transcript of both the mediation session and the narrator’s analysis of the mediator’s goals, objectives, and techniques in each stage. It includes classroom learning objectives, background about the range of mediator styles and approaches, and a caucus exercise in which students identify moments in the transcript at which the mediator used specific techniques for certain specified purposes. Explanatory notes in the Manual provide the professor with additional material for classroom discussion or test questions on topics such as how the process compares with shuttle negotiation, what are the parties’ underlying interests, and how the demonstrated mediator skills can be used by advocates in mediation and interest-based negotiation. The Student Handbook reinforces learning from the film by including the learning objectives, the background about mediator styles and approaches, the narrator’s explanations about the mediator’s goals and techniques, and the caucus exercise. The Teacher’s Manual also can be assigned to students as an alternative to the Student Handbook. The other two films in the series are Stop Action! a film designed to generate class discussion and debate through questions posed by the professor at certain critical decision-making junctures during the mediation, and the full 3-hour mediation session from which the other materials are drawn. Fuller descriptions of the items in the series are found at www.MediationTrainingResources.com, at which the series is available.