Are you putting the finishing touches on your syllabi for the fall? If you’re teaching mediation, interviewing, counseling, and negotiation, an ADR survey course, or a related subject, you might consider including a fun new teaching resource in your course.
What Happened? A Mediation Story Featuring RPS Coach is a plausible story that students can read in about an hour. As a software implementation goes seriously awry, two companies, their executives, their lawyers, and a mediator navigate legal uncertainty, business realities, organizational pressures, and strained relationships while trying to resolve a commercial dispute in 2025. Students meet the principal characters before the conflict develops, watch the dispute unfold, observe their preparation and decision-making, experience the mediation session with them, and see what happens after the agreement is reached.
The story helps students understand how thoughtful professionals make decisions throughout the life of a dispute – not just during the mediation session but also before and afterward.
Because it is a story, students become engaged with the characters as well as the dispute. The story gives your class a common experience that you can revisit throughout the semester. For example, you can refer to relevant episodes in the story when you discuss counseling, negotiation, mediator selection, preparation, mediation strategy, mediation sessions, settlement agreements, professional judgment, ethics, technology, or reflection. You can adapt the materials for anything from a single class to an entire semester.
The Teacher’s Manual includes chapter summaries, teaching suggestions, discussion questions, and classroom exercises, and suggestions for incorporating the materials into courses. If you want your students to explore particular issues in greater depth, you can assign optional scenes of dialogue, mediation memos, and a memorandum of understanding.
A few weeks ago, I circulated a draft so you could begin considering whether to use it. The responses have been encouraging, and the materials are essentially the same with only minor changes.
If you’re still making decisions about your syllabus, take a look and see whether this story might provide an engaging way to enrich your students’ learning this fall.
