How cool would it be for your students to interview lawyers, mediators, arbitrators, or other practitioners about how they really think and act in their work?

Practitioners generally develop their own categories of routine and challenging situations in their work, and they develop regular practices and strategies for dealing with them.  In mediation, this involves procedures before, during, and after mediation sessions.  Practitioners’ procedures vary widely based on many factors such as their personal histories, values, goals, motivations, knowledge, and skills as well as the types of parties and the cases in their work.  I call this their “practice systems.”

Even though practitioners’ perceptions of their practice systems may not be fully accurate, it’s helpful understand their perceptions, which presumably affect their techniques.

Students would conduct Stone Soup interviews, which students and faculty have really loved.  This post includes templates for Stone Soup interviews for mediators, advocates in mediation, and negotiators.  If you already are planning to use a Stone Soup assignment in your course, you might revise your assignment to focus on individuals’ practice systems. This website includes a complete set of model documents for Stone Soup assignments generally as well as exemplary student papers.

Stone Soup 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.  Discussing students’ interviews in class can lead to rich insights, but obviously you don’t have to discuss them in class.

Other Assignments

These ideas grow out of my article, Real Mediation Systems to Help Parties and Mediators Achieve Their Goals, and you might use other writing assignments based on it.  For example, you might assign students to write accounts of the systems they used in actual or simulated cases in your course or the practice system they aspire to after graduation.  The post includes templates for these assignments that you could use or adapt.

Instead of or in addition to these writing assignments, you might assign students to read the full article or short blog posts collected in this post.  In particular, you might assign students to read Ten Real Mediation Systems, which summarizes the practice systems of ten thoughtful mediators.  It includes links to the detailed accounts of these mediators and you might assign students to read one or more of them.

If you might use one of these assignments, I would be happy to discuss this with you if you like.  And I would love to know if you use them so that I could ask how it worked in your course.