All About Mediation Training

Title: Conflict Resolution in the Schools: A Manual for Educators
by Kathryn Girard and Susan J. Koch
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787902357

From the Publisher

Based on material developed by the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (NIDR) and the former National Association for Mediation in Education, this practical resource guide shows educators how to diagnose conflicts, handle difficult confrontations, and implement appropriate mediation and problem-solving strategies.

Contents

Module 1: The Nature of Conflict
Module 2: The Concepts and Skills of Conflict Resolution
Module 3: Alternative Dispute Resolution Processes
Module 4: Applications for Conflict Resolution in Education

Title: Listening Skills Training
by Lisa Downs
Publisher: ASTD Press; ISBN: 1562865021

From the Publisher

Most adults have poor listening skills. In fact, with attention spans of less than eight minutes is it any wonder business and personal communications are rife with misunderstanding and needless conflict?

Listening Skills Training is a complete resource designed to develop vital listening skills and includes a step-by-step training guide, sample half-, full-, and two-day agendas, classroom handouts, tools, assessments, and ready-to-use PowerPoint(TM) slides. A CD-ROM is included.

Title: Conflict Mediation Across Cultures: Pathways and Patterns
by David W. Augsberger
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press; ISBN: 0664256090

From the Publisher

Believing not only that conflict is inevitable in human life but that it is essential and can be quite constructive, Augsburger proposes a shift to an “international” approach in resolving conflict. Augsburger focuses on interpersonal and group conflicts and provides a comparison of conflict patterns within and among various cultures.

Contents

Chapter 1 - Conflict: A universal, cultural, and individual process
Chapter 2 - Conflict: Creative or destructive dynamics?
Chapter 3 - Conflict: The power of honor, dignity, and face
Chapter 4 - Conflict: Anger, anxiety, and aggression
Chapter 5 - Conflict: Triangular in origin and resolution
Chapter 6 - Conflict: Gender differences and conflict styles
Chapter 7 - Mediation: The necessity of a go-between
Chapter 8 - Conflict: Cycles, pathways, and patterns
Chapter 9 - Reconciliation: The many faces of forgiveness

Title: Building Peace: Practical Reflections From the Field
Edited by Craig Zelizer and Robert A. Rubinstein
Publisher: Kumarian Press; ISBN: 1565492897

From the Publisher

Even though international peacebuilding has rapidly expanded in the last two decades to respond to more multi-faceted and complex conflicts, the field has lagged behind in documenting the impact and success of projects. To help address this gap, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, one of the leading networks in the field, has brought together 13 stories of innovative peacebuilding practices from around the world in Building Peace.

While the projects covered are diverse in nature, together they demonstrate the significant impact of peacebuilding work. Contributors created new institutions to prevent and manage conflicts at the local or national levels, helped restore relationships in conflict-affected communities, and empowered citizens to work for positive change in their societies across ethnic, religious, and political divides.

It’s clear that there is no quick fix for violence but this volume will go a long way in providing inspiration and practical tools for policymakers, academics and practitioners who seek to make significant and valuable contributions towards achieving peace.

Title: Managing Public Disputes: A Practical Guide for Professionals in Government, Business and Citizen’s Groups
by Susan L. Carpenter and W. J. D. Kennedy
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787957429

From the Publisher

For more than a decade, Managing Public Disputes has been the first choice, hands-on guide for managers, offering useful instructions for handling a wide range of large and small public controversies from the national to the community level. It includes:

• Ten proven principles for managing conflict
• A comprehensive framework with step-by-step procedures for creating productive outcomes
• Seven illustrative case examples
• Detailed advice on effective methods for collecting information, conducting interviews, and analyzing a conflict situation
• Suggestions for handling special problems such as reluctant participants, keeping people at the negotiation table, and handling situations where emotions are running high
• Eight tasks targeted for designing an overall strategy for managing public disputes

Title: From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation
by Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov
Publisher: Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195166434

From the Publisher

This volume represents an important new step forward in the fields of conflict resolution and peace studies. Its essays argue that, while conflict resolution is well equipped to bring about temporary settlements and brief periods of peace in volatile situations, conventional conflict resolution techniques are not capable of building long-term stability.

Instead, the authors contend, practitioners of conflict resolution need to focus more on reconciliation (the restoration of confidence, friendship, and harmony between rivals) than on mere conflict resolution. Whereas traditional conflict resolution has focused primarily on halting quarrels with agreements between leaders on each side of a conflict, reconciliation techniques shift the focus in two ways.

First, they take more of a grassroots approach, building agreement among the members of rival communities, not only between leaders. Second, reconciliation takes a long-term view of dispute resolution.

While the authors acknowledge that the role of traditional conflict resolution is important in stopping violence and tension, they argue that, in order to achieve stable peace, negotiators and practitioners of conflict resolution must focus much more on what is to be done after an agreement among leaders is reached.

Title: Emerging Systems for Managing Workplace Conflict
by David B. Lipsky, Ronald L. Seeber, Richard Fincher
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787964344

From the Publisher

Emerging Systems for Managing Workplace Conflict presents illustrative real-life examples as well as cutting-edge methods and tools for integrating systems of dispute resolution into standard corporate procedures.

This vital resource investigates the systems that organizations have developed to manage common and costly workplace conflicts involving supervisor-employee relationships; race, age, and gender discrimination complaints; sexual harassment; occupational safety and health; reasonable accommodation of the disabled; and wrongful termination, as well as other problems stemming from governmental regulations and court actions.

Contents

Part 1: The Evolution of Conflict Management Systems
Introduction: The emergence of conflict management
Forces of change: The transformation of the social contract in the workplace
The rise of Alternative Dispute Resolution
New strategies of conflict management: The emergence of a new paradigm

Part 2: The Establishment of Conflict Management Systems
Design of conflict management systems: Internal features
Design of conflict management systems: External features
Implementation of conflict management systems
Evaluation of conflict management systems

Part 3: The Future of Conflict Management Systems
Barriers to the growth of conflict management systems
The future of workplace dispute resolution

Title: Mediating Legal Disputes
by Dwight Golann
Publisher: Aspen Law & Business; ISBN: 0316319899

From the Publisher

Unlike other mediation publications which tend to focus on emotional issues and win/win solutions, Golann looks frankly at the adversarial legal process. The author discusses not only the very real psychological dimensions of disputing, but it also grapples with tough techniques like decision analysis and evaluation to deal with real disputes over who will win in court. You will find that Golann’s approach is a must for mediating any legal dispute.

Dwight Golann and eight expert contributors show how you can benefit from unique and powerful mediation methods that:

• Minimize the impact of “spin” tactics, private agendas, and hard-line bargaining strategies
• Calculate the cost of litigation alternatives as part of the mediation strategy
• Overcome hidden obstacles to settlement, such as emotional/psychological “sticking points”
• Apply sophisticated techniques (such as on-the-spot laptop computer programs) to analyze risk and break negotiating impasses
• Meet the challenges posed by specialized disputes such as employment and environmental cases

You’ll also learn mediation techniques for reducing friction, counteracting “bad blood,” and guiding your case to satisfactory solutions.

Title: Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution : Tools for Powerful Groups and Communities
by E. Franklin Dukes, Marina A. Piscolish, John B. Stephens
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787950580

From the Publisher

Few groups harness the power of their members’ collective wisdom and aspirations to achieve something out of the ordinary. In fact, effective, powerful groups and positive group experiences tend to be the exception. How can groups go beyond the common experience and reach for higher ground? There is a simple, but not simplistic answer.

In Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution, John Stephens, Frank Dukes and Marina Piscolish present an original approach to group problem solving and conflict transformation, demonstrating the value of setting up and maintaining deep commitments and broadly shared expectations as an integral part of effective group process. As the authors show, this practical approach can go a long way toward creating authentic community and sustainable agreements in group settings.

For everyone who works in and with groups - including mediators, managers, committee chairs, team leaders, consultants, teachers, and trainers - Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution presents clear principles and proven techniques for productive group experience.

The book includes a wealth of examples and practical advice on how to guide groups to: articulate the values they hold dear, develop the principles that will guide their efforts, and clarify the shared expectations that will be honored throughout their work. Here you will find the knowledge and learn the skills necessary to demystify and facilitate conflict transformation and successful group problem solving.

Easily applied to a wide variety of organizations and group settings, these practical and flexible tools and techniques include:

• Advice for getting group buy-in to the need for shared expectations
• Directions for guiding a group’s development of context- and culture-sensitive shared expectations
• Ideas for determining the right level of attention to shared expectations given the group’s characteristics and needs
• Suggestions for working with problematic groups
• Procedures for monitoring a group’s success and promoting growth and learning

This inspirational and challenging resource teaches how to help a group engage in problem solving in a way that reaches for not just common but higher ground.

Title: I Hear What You Say, But What Are You Telling Me? — The Strategic Use of Nonverbal Communication in Mediation
by Barbara G. Madonik
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; ISBN: 0787957097

From the Publisher

It has been estimated that less than twenty percent of all human communication is express through words. This means that in order to get to the heart of what people are really saying we must have the ability to read the subtext of nonverbal communication. Yet mediators often lack the skills they need to analyze and utilize the reach meaning that is found in nonverbal communication.

I Hear What You Say, But What Are You Telling Me? is a fascinating, original, and invaluable tool kit filled with practical information and techniques for mediators who want to use nonverbal communication to their strategic advantage. Employing a proven process, Barbara Madonik – communication expert, mediator, and international consultant – reveals that it takes to understand, analyze, and utilize nonverbal communication to greatly enhance the mediation process.

This step-by-step handbook teaches you to tune all your senses into what is happening with parties and counsel during mediation and thereby increase your ability to prepare for and facilitate the overall process.
In this important resource, Madonik outlines her tested seven-step process that reveals how to:

• Prepare yourself and set up your working environment to increase your effectiveness as a mediator
• Maximize your initial telephone contact
• Manage the mediation environment so you can control it
• Assess the parties and create a useful profile of each person
• Engage each party to create powerful rapport and guide all parties to communicate with each other
• Trigger action that puts derailments back on track and builds momentum toward resolution
• Employ a variety of techniques to bring closure to the parties and the process

This practical guide will uncover the hidden meaning of conscious and other-than-conscious communication – body language, breathing, dress, speech patterns, and more – to help achieve a deeper understanding of a wide variety of conflicts, including employment, labor, commercial, consumer, family, community, and government disputes.