Negotiating Classroom Process: Lessons from Adult Learning

Adults who study negotiation at the graduate, postgraduate, or continuing education level typically do so for practical reasons: they have aprofessional and/or personal need to improve their negotiation skills. Like other adult learners, these students' interest in the subject develops from the tasks and problems they encounter in everyday life. They often bring rich experience to bear on the new material presented, and they are motivated to learn things they can use outside the classroom (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson 2005).

A top-down, hierarchical approach to teaching — the traditional university model of the teacher as repository and conveyor of knowledge — is unlikely to appeal to such students because it encourages passivity, dependence, and, ultimately, withdrawal on the part of would-be learners.¹ In addition, in its undiluted form, it presumes certainty about what it is that needs to be taught. As Brazilian educational theorist Paolo Freire argued, “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (Freire 2007: 72). Adult learners, by contrast, respond to an environment in which they are active participants in structuring their own learning, in terms of subject matter, pacing, and goals (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson 2005).

What are the features of an environment conducive to adult learning? To help put learners in the driver's seat, some teachers use such devices as learning contracts, in which students set their own goals and terms of engagement in a class, midcourse evaluations that consider how well those commitments have been fulfilled and whether they remain appropriate, and self-appraisals that help assess progress in a graded class (Schneider and Macfarlane 2003). In addition, most North American teachers of negotiation use role plays, games, reflective and analytical writing, minilectures, oral presentations, and/or demonstrations to engage students with varied learning styles and to keep them actively involved in the process (Bordone and Mnookin 2000). Indeed, much of the negotiation teaching that has been developed in law, business, and other graduate and executive training programs over the last thirty years incorporates important aspects of contemporary adult learning theory.²

Going forward, how might we expand our understanding of adult learning in general to expand the repertoire of current negotiation teaching techniques and devices noted above? In particular, how might we leverage the educational power of classroom process to maximize student learning about negotiation?

As a starting point, adult learning theorists have suggested that a student-centered focus on learning should replace the traditional instructor-centered focus on teaching. This change is significant because it requires recognizing that “process and classroom climate” are as important to learning as the subject matter and content of a course (Garvin 1991: 8). Authority cannot reside in the teacher alone: the goal is to encourage curiosity and interest among the students — who will learn from each other as well as from the teacher — rather than to deliver “truths” to be digested. The brain is “designed to perceive and generate patterns [and] . . . resists having meaningless patterns imposed on it . . . isolated pieces of information that are unrelated to what makes sense to a particular student” (Caine and Caine 1990: 67). Before a teacher can know what she needs to teach, she has to know the people she is teaching. Students, and especially adult students, are not blank slates. If she fails to figure out what beliefs and (mis)understandings students bring to the task of learning, what the teacher offers may be only of superficial and fleeting value:

The writers for the television comedy show Saturday Night Live grasped the National Research Council's point that people do not retain what they learn unless it builds on what they already know. As Laurel Oates has recounted, the Saturday Night Live character Father Guido Sarducci once “proposed a new type of university: The Five-Minute University. Because most students forget most of what they are taught, the Five-Minute University would teach only those things that the typical student remembers” after five years, such as the phrase “supply and demand” in a five-minute economics course (or, similarly, the phrase “win–win solution” in a five-minute negotiation course) (Oates 2008: 677–678). If a teacher seeks to accomplish more than that, even in a short executive education course, she must tailor the material to the particular individuals involved.

Every book on negotiation says something to the effect that we all negotiate all the time in our daily lives. Unlike teaching histology or Mandarin, then, teaching negotiation inevitably involves encountering many preexisting beliefs and practices. This rich foundation makes it all the more important for instructors to bring students' implicit understandings to the surface, discover their preconceptions, link their everyday knowledge to our theoretical concepts, and improve the possibilities for new learning. Without a sense of what students already believe about negotiation, it would be hard to know what they need to learn (or unlearn) in the time available.

The cultural practices that students bring to the study of negotiation are an important aspect of their preconceptions about the subject. By ignoring such practices, teachers of negotiation working in foreign countries risk having what they teach quickly forgotten after the course ends and the students return to a more familiar environment. In addition, students' professional cultures have a powerful effect on their assumptions about negotiation. North American law students, for example, usually take their first formal negotiation course after one or two years of courses focused on the adversary legal system and the study of litigated cases. Many of them are thus skeptical about the possibilities of integrative bargaining. Unless their professional cultural assumptions (for instance, the privileging of individualistic, rights-based, and distributive approaches to conflict) are identified and built upon, such students are unlikely to pay more than lip service to the potential for adding value through integrative bargaining.

To take Freire at his word, then, rather than “mak[ing] deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire 2007: 72), the teacher must bring to the surface the learners' questions, so that the information he presents will be meaningful to the particular group of people in the room. For example, he might start a law school negotiation class by asking, “What are your concerns about yourself as a negotiator?” and “What are your questions about negotiating as a lawyer?” More generally, he might ask, “What images or metaphors come to mind when you hear the word ‘negotiation’?” or “Think of someone whom you consider a good negotiator. What characteristics make him or her good at it?” Such an approach signals that the students are active participants in their own learning and need to take responsibility for it. It also acknowledges that they do not come to the subject as complete novices and thus begins the process of surfacing their preexisting beliefs and understandings about negotiation.

The teacher could further foster active learning by asking the students to share their answers to the above questions in small groups after writing them down. Small-group discussions help students get acquainted and start participating early on. Students can see where their responses overlap, and listing the most common responses on a board or flip chart can give everyone, including the teacher, a road map of where the class needs to go. In one group, the questions may reveal that students find it difficult to behave assertively in negotiation, and for these students, a focus on distributive techniques might make sense. (See Ebner and Efron 2009 on teaching positional bargaining.) In another, students' answers may reveal a hypercompetitive zeal that calls for carefully working to develop a capacity for collaboration. Individual concerns can also guide one-on-one feedback or personalized reading/writing assignments as the class progresses. Such a student-centered approach can wreak havoc with a tightly organized and planned syllabus, but it has the distinct advantage of increasing the likelihood that the students will actually be able to use what the teacher offers.

Simply plunging in and teaching what students “need to know,” based on the teacher's understanding of the subject, runs the risk that much of what she says will go in one ear and out the other — either because it challenges what students believe, without engaging those underlying beliefs, or because the teacher is talking about oranges (and juice and peels) when students are more interested in apples.³ This is not to say that teachers should avoid drawing upon their experience and expertise in deciding what aspects of negotiation theory and practice to incorporate in a course and in what order to present them. Learning that “sticks,” however, must build on what students already know in order to have meaning and relevance for them: “The more information and skills are separated from prior knowledge and actual experience, the more we depend on rote memory and repetition. . . . [C]oncentrating too heavily on the storage and recall of unconnected facts is a very inefficient use of the brain” (Caine and Caine 1990: 68).

To incorporate what learning theorists have to say about the process by which people learn, a teacher needs to start from students' existing knowledge about negotiation and use her expertise to build from there to an organized understanding of important concepts in the field. A learning environment is not something that she can simply decree: it is cocreated by the students and the teacher. It does not emanate from the teacher, as in the traditional model, but is the product of a relationship. The emotional message that is sent by the teacher is as important as the intellectual message, and it often determines whether the latter is received at all: “What we learn is influenced and organized by emotions. . . . Thus, emotions and cognition cannot be separated. Emotions are also crucial to memory because they facilitate the storage and recall of information” (Caine and Caine 1990: 67).

First impressions count (Leary and Wheeler 2003), and much of the information that students gather about a teacher is not based on what the teacher says but on what she does that sets a tone for the classroom exchange. Is the teacher open to the needs and interests of the students, or does she have a set agenda? Is it safe to take risks, or is there a “right” way to do things? Does she give the students opportunities to engage with each other, or is the teacher supposed to be the center of attention and the focus of student comments? The norms and values that will prevail in the classroom begin to be set in the first class, and the implicit contracts a teacher establishes with students through her conduct of the class will have equal if not greater force than any explicit ones she enters into with them.

Much university teaching is conducted in the traditional top-down lecture format, and, at least in law schools, much nonskills teaching is still largely influenced by that traditional model. To develop and maintain a commitment to an active learning process requires considerable thought and effort, and both more flexibility from teachers and more participation from students. The teacher is responsible for both process and content, responsibilities best fulfilled by creating a climate in which the students do most of the talking and make most of the important points in a discussion.

Management scholar David Garvin has written that to promote active learning educators must make three “shifts”: from an “autocratic classroom . . . to a more democratic environment,” from “a concern for the material alone to an equal focus on content, classroom process, and the learning climate,” and from “declarative explanations, rooted in analytical understanding and knowledge of subject matter, to questioning, listening, and responding” (Garvin 1991: 10). The shift from explanation to “questioning, listening, and responding” to which Garvin referred is central to the active learning process that he and his colleagues described in their book Education for Judgment (Christensen, Garvin, and Sweet 1991). This shift is also key to accomplishing the other pedagogical shifts Garvin emphasized because these techniques put the focus on the students and how they are learning as well as on what they are learning. For teachers of negotiation, questioning, listening, and responding have the significant added value of embodying important negotiation principles.

Some of the ideas discussed in Education for Judgment (Christensen, Garvin, and Sweet 1991) will be familiar to teachers of negotiation and mediation who rely largely on experiential learning in their classes. For example, many negotiation teachers spend time helping students practice different ways of asking questions — open-ended, closed, and so on — as a means of gathering information and promoting a productive interchange in a negotiation. In the classroom, equal attention to the kinds of questions he uses, as well as the sequence and pacing of questions, allow a teacher to model the questioning skills he is teaching, while balancing coverage of content with respect for the particular interests of the class.⁴ An open-ended question, for example, “What aspect of this negotiation was most challenging for you?” invites reflection and helps the teacher tailor feedback to the students' perceived needs, while an information-seeking question such as “What were the parties' reservation points?” provides a factual basis for further discussion of the bargaining surplus. Similarly, in a prisoners' dilemma problem, a question of extension might be, “What are theimplications for the parties' future relations of reneging on an agreement to collude?” And a question such as “Can anyone think of an earlier negotiation that also involved trade-offs?” can help students learn to see the underlying similarities of negotiations involving different factual situations (see McAdoo and Manwaring 2009).

This approach to questioning differs from the Socratic one-on-one method of law school because its aim is to engage the whole group in a discussion as it develops. Questions open up the field in a way that answers cannot, and careful attention to questioning can set the tone for the class, raise or lower the abstraction level of the discussion, allow one student to demonstrate experience or another to overcome shyness — all the while modeling both a search for understanding and respect for the other minds in the room.

When it comes to listening, a focus on group process means that the teacher must listen to individual answers not only for what they reveal about a given student's grasp of the material but also to see how they contribute to the group's understanding and the discussion as a whole. The listening skills emphasized in negotiation teaching are critical for promoting active learning as well. Through careful listening, teachers learn how well the students understand the material, how able they are to listen and respond to each other, how open they are to other points of view, and whether they are deeply engaged in the topic at hand or ready to move on to something else. As with questioning, the quality of a teacher's listening in the classroom models one of the skills he aims to teach negotiation students and thus pays double dividends: it enriches the immediate group process and also pervasively conveys a core aspect of the curriculum.

Like the students, the teacher should improve his listening skills by reflecting outside of class on what he has heard so that he can increase his understanding of the class as a whole and its individual members as he goes along. Careful listening will enable course corrections that a teacher might otherwise overlook because of the tyranny of the syllabus: Are there important foundational points that only a few students have grasped? Does he need to double back and try another approach to bring the rest of the group along before moving ahead? Is the group dynamic getting in the way of some students' full participation, and how can he address it? If a teacher is truly concerned about learning and not just maximum information delivery, he needs to be mindful of the tendency to hear what he wants to hear and to fall prey to the confirmation bias in the classroom. Business educator C. Roland Christensen wrote, “I try, while listening to others, to listen to my own listening. Where are my barriers? Where do my own firmly held convictions interfere with my understanding? . . . Typically, we succeed in bringing to the forefront the material we strongly want the students to consider — but our success can block our own ability to hear what the students are trying to communicate to us” (Christensen 1991: 165).

Responding to students, another aspect of the active learning environment discussed in Education for Judgment (Christensen, Garvin, and Sweet 1991), puts the teacher in the position of any negotiator after the first moves have been made. She must think ahead about what questions to ask to bring out the important lessons of the day and to engage the students' critical thinking. She must listen carefully and at many levels to what they say and how they say it. She must also decide, on the spur of the moment, which response — a further question to the same or a different student, an invitation to another student to respond to the first comment, a summary or analysis by the teacher — will best further her overall goals. Flexibility is key, and improvisation — based on a deep understanding of the subject matter, the dynamics of the particular group, and the constraints imposed by time — is essential.

Lakshmi Balachandra and her colleagues (2005) suggested that negotiation instructors teach students the improvisational skills of formulating and adapting a strategy, managing the process in the moment, and developing creative solutions. Teachers need to apply these same improvisational skills in the classroom — teaching them implicitly through modeling — whether or not they teach them explicitly as well. Through her responses, the teacher negotiates each class session and the potentially contradictory needs of teacher, class, and individual student. Christensen noted the following benchmarks in considering what responses to make:

Depending on how the teacher responds (e.g., acknowledging a tangential remark without allowing it to derail discussion versus ignoring emotional comments rather than addressing the feelings behind them), the group is either supported as a “work group” that can move forward and build on what has developed in discussion, or it may revert to a “dependency group” (Bion 1994), looking to the teacher for answers. The quality of the teacher's response, which depends in the first instance on the quality of questioning and listening that preceded it, is also aided by the depth of his understanding of the individuals in the group and of the patterns they have developed as a group. Do they move quickly toward consensus as a way of masking differences of opinion? Do they instead tend to polarize on many topics? How does the teacher bring up the quiet voices in the room and temper the strident ones, without silencing them altogether? These and other questions have to be answered in an instant, over and over again in every class session, as they shape the teacher's responses.⁵

The focus of the teacher's attention can never simply be the subject matter of the day: the process in the room and the emotional tone of the group also determine whether learning occurs. Without an atmosphere of emotional safety, the change that learning entails is too risky: “. . . emotional processing takes place in the cognitive unconscious beyond our direct access. As a result, we have no thought without emotion. It is impossible to balance our checkbooks, drive to the store, or deal with our co-workers without an emotional component. We cannot move through our world or conjure up thoughts of past events absent accompanying emotions” (Jones and Hughes 2003: 490). As in many negotiations, sensitivity to the mood in the room often determines the success or failure of any day's effort in class. It is only in reflecting back on the flow of the discussion that a teacher can see where her responses helped the dialogue take off or fall flat.

A teaching approach that emphasizes questioning, listening, and responding is unfamiliar to many North American students trained in the traditional university system. In a cross-cultural setting, the social distance between teacher and student may be even more marked than it is in North America, and the method itself may need to be adapted to bridge a cultural presumption of unquestioned teacher authority. Of course, teaching negotiation abroad requires testing one's own cultural assumptions about the relevance of certain content to different groups of students. To further their understanding of negotiation on a global scale, for example, North American teachers must be prepared to question some of their dearly held beliefs about how negotiation works, a point that cultural scholars have been making for some time. Kevin Avruch wrote that the theory Roger Fisher and William Ury (1981) advanced in their book, Getting to Yes, “corresponds deeply to the idealized Anglo middle-class model of what negotiation looks like. . . . The theory derives ultimately from a folk model — the privileged folks, in this case. . . . In the end, by ignoring any consideration of the model's ethnic and class provenance, its promotion from folk model to expert's ‘theory’ occurred totally unselfconsciously” (Avruch 1998: 79).

In other parts of the world, and even in many subcultures in North America, the prevailing cultural model is not that of the negotiator as an independent, individual “rational actor.” Rather, “interdependent views of personhood . . . assume that what is obvious and ‘natural’ is that the self is a relational entity. The self . . . is understood as fundamentally interdependent with others. . . . These cultural models of the person place greater stress than individualist models on social and relational concepts such as empathy, reciprocity, belongingness, kinship, hierarchy, loyalty, honor, respect, politeness, and social obligation” (Markus and Lin 1999: 308–309).

The advice in Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury 1981; Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), to “separate the people from the problem,” for example, does not make sense in a cultural setting in which individuals are rarely viewed as separate entities: “Fisher and his colleagues assume that the content of conflict may be extracted from the relationship between the participants. . . . Moreover, they assume that this separation facilitates the reconciliation of problematic issues that are inherently extra-relational” (Markus and Lin 1999: 314).

Michelle LeBaron and Zena Zumeta made a similar point about the professional cultural assumptions of lawyer-mediators:

In taking their understanding of negotiation and negotiators abroad, then, North American teachers must approach the task of teaching cross-culturally with a recognition that they may have as much to learn from their students as they have to teach them. And what they learn, among other things, may be the extent to which their own understanding of negotiation is itself culture-bound and thus open to challenge in other settings.

How can a teacher make use of the educational power of process responsibility in teaching negotiation? As Andrea Schneider and Julie Macfarlane (2003) noted, a negotiation class is a multiparty negotiation. The more the way in which one teaches models what one teaches, the more deeply the lessons will be learned. Students will learn what it means to listen closely, to take the other parties' interests into account, to care about their perspectives on the situation, to seek joint gain, and to adapt strategy flexibly if that is what the teacher models in the classroom in the way he structures discussion and attends to students' comments and questions. If teachers only pay lip service to those concepts — in terms of who controls the conversation, who has the last word, who has the “right” answers — rather than entering into a real collaboration, students will learn only thin versions of integrative bargaining, active listening, and the like.⁶ What a teacher tells them will not survive in the world of practice or will serve only to provide them with sophisticated tools of manipulation. What they experience in the classroom is far more likely to stay with them and affect their work as negotiators.

Experiential learning is not just about going through role plays; it is also about the process of being a learner in a particular classroom environment. Negotiation teachers ask students to take the risk of “learning by doing,” and teachers should take risks as well. Like negotiation, “[t]eaching is a messy, indeterminate, inscrutable, often intimidating, and highly uncertain task” (Elmore 1991: ix). Teachers emphasize the importance of thorough negotiation preparation, in part because a negotiator must be able to meet unanticipated challenges with flexibility. Similarly, if a teacher's goal is not the delivery of a preformed “package” of information but of lessons that are right for this group now, she must be prepared, practiced, and skilled in the classroom so that she can be flexible in the moment. She can teach students what to do first in a negotiation, but from there on they must improvise as the negotiation develops. The same is true for the negotiation teacher.

The best negotiation plan is useless unless the negotiator can make it work with these parties in this situation at this time. Similarly, gathering information about the members of a class and meeting with students to get to know them individually are as important as learning all you can about people you expect to negotiate with professionally: it is the only way to tailor your message to the particular audience in the room. Students may come to class, but they will fail to engage unless the teacher brings something of value to them. All learners build from what they already know, and a teacher can only teach them to the extent that she figures out what their implicit knowledge is.

It can be difficult to get to know students in a short course, which makes it all the more important to involve participants in the process — to get feedback from them about what they want to learn and how they need to learn it — because there will be little time to compensate for mistakes. In a cross-cultural setting, teacher missteps (often based on unfounded assumptions) are a greater risk, which makes involving the participants early and often even more necessary. In addition, cross-cultural teaching calls for humility in the face of the tendency to present our received wisdom as the “truth” about negotiation, rather than to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the dominant North American model, with its emphasis on reason over emotion and the individual over the collective good. If negotiation teachers aim to do more than speak English louder and louder to get people to understand, they need to learn to adapt this model to cultural settings in which both implicit and explicit preconceptions about negotiation may be different.⁷

Effective teaching, like effective negotiating, calls for a balance between thoughtful preparation and flexible process. Just as good negotiators adapt and adjust even the most carefully prepared strategy in response to emerging negotiation dynamics, negotiation teachers must be prepared to adapt their curricula in response to emerging classroom dynamics. By taking the time to learn about students — what they already know, think they know, do not know, believe, wonder about — and inviting them to cocreate the curriculum as well as to co-construct their understanding of negotiation, teachers can not only harness the power of collaborative and constructivist learning but also model and pervasively teach some of the very negotiation practices they encourage students to learn.