I developed a variety of assignments that faculty can use to help students better understand mediation, advocacy in mediation, negotiation, or other regular procedures.

The assignments grow out of my article, Real Mediation Systems to Help Parties and Mediators Achieve Their Goals in the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.

You might assign students to read publications in this project and/or write papers.  This post includes templates of assignments that you can tailor to fit your educational goals.

Publications in this project are collected in this blog post.  You might particularly assign students to read “Ten Real Mediation Systems” (and one or more accounts in that post), “The Critical Importance of Pre-Session Preparation in Mediation,” or the Cardozo article.

Instead or in addition, you can assign students to write a paper:

• summarizing an interview of a practitioner about his or her practice system
• describing students’ actual system in simulated or real case(s) in your course
• describing students’ desired system after they graduate

Mediation systems are the combination of things that mediators think and do before, during, and after mediation sessions.  Practitioners develop systems for other repeated tasks such as advocacy in mediation, negotiation, or a wide range of other functions.   So you can think of practice systems that are not limited to mediation.

As with the Stone Soup assignments, these papers might be (a) required, (b) one of several options, or (c) for extra credit.  You can set the length of the paper and decide whether it would be graded.  This post collects a ton of Stone Soup resources including a complete set of model documents for assignments as well as exemplary student papers.

If you already are planning to use a Stone Soup assignment in your course, you might revise your assignment to focus on one of the above approaches.

I will conduct an assessment of how well these assignments worked and what might be improved.  This will be similar to faculty assessments of the Stone Soup assignments in their courses.  This post summarizes the insights from Stone Soup assessments.

Try it.  Faculty and students raved about the Stone Soup assignments, and I bet these assignments also would generate enthusiastic responses.