AbstractEducational experiments during 2003–2010 at the Swedish School of Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology, have developed conceptual models to support apprenticeship among planning students in the skills of negotiation and argumentation. The purpose has been to identify and test adequate degrees of heuristic simplification in conceptual models of professional practice.Results indicate that considerable heuristic simplification can be achieved and reliably tested within a specific educational context. Simplified conceptual models of negotiation and argumentation tasks which reflect professional practice facilitate learning. They do so by helping students to focus on important dimensions of a professional task, providing feedback on their efforts to practise complex skills and help to interpret teachers’ hints and corrections. A multi-criteria model of negotiation in planning has proved to be consistently effective in training professional skills. The simplicity of the negotiation model seems to ...