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: 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: 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: Critical Issues in Restorative Justice
by Barb Toews and Howard Zehr
Publisher: Criminal Justice Press; ISBN: 1881798518

From the Publisher

In a mere quarter-century, restorative justice has grown from a few scattered experimental projects into a worldwide social movement. Moving beyond its origins within the criminal justice arena, restorative justice is now being applied in schools, homes and the workplace.

The restorative justice approach challenges the idea that state punishment is the best method of achieving justice. This “restorative” alternative strives to directly address the needs of all persons affected by a crime or a harm, often by bringing together victims, offenders and community members in some form of structured mediation or dialogue.

The distinguished contributors to this book are all long-term advocates and practitioners of restorative justice from North America, Europe, Australia/New Zealand and South Africa. The 31 chapters confront the key threats to the integrity and effectiveness of the emerging international restorative justice movement:

(1) Cooptation or diversion from its core mission, and the possibility that reforms may cause unintended consequences;
(2) Being relegated primarily to “minor” crimes or conflicts, so that it has minimal impact on the overall system or justice; and
(3) Inherent flaws that undermine its effectiveness, such as failure to address social problems that breed conflicts, and methods skewed by cultural or gender biases.

Title: Barriers to Conflict Resolution
Edited by Kenneth Arrow, Robert H. Mnookin, Lee Ross, Amos Tversky, and Robert Wilson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393037371

From the Publisher

Why can’t we all just get along? In family life, schools, law, the business world, and domestic and international affairs, it is all too common for disputes to fester unresolved even when the parties are committed to a negotiated settlement. In this book members and associates of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation address the complex issues that protract disputes and turn potential win-win negotiations into conflicts that leave everyone worse off.

Drawing on such diverse but related disciplines as economics, cognitive psychology, statistics, and game and decision-making theory the book considers the barriers to successful negotiation in such areas as civil litigation, family law, arms control, labor-management disputes, environmental treaty making, and politics.

• When does it pay for parties to a dispute to cooperate, and when to compete?
• How can third-party negotiators further resolutions and avoid the pitfalls that deepen divisions between antagonists?

Offering answers to these and related questions, this book is a comprehensive guide to the latest understanding of ways to resolve human conflict.

The editors of this book have all served as principal investigators at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation.

Title: Gestures of Conciliation: Factors Contributing to Successful Olive Branches
by Christopher Mitchell
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN: 0312230524

From the Publisher

Gesture of Conciliation examines the ideas, assumptions and theories that underpin how leaders of parties in intractable conflicts begin and sustain a process of peacemaking by offering their adversaries “olive branches” – in more modern times symbolic gestures, concessions, tension-reducing moves or confidence-building measures.

Using President Anwar Sadat’s efforts to start a peace process between Egypt and Israel between 1970 and 1978 as a framework, the book moves from an assessment of factors that helped to make conciliatory initiatives credible and successful in a number of historical cases to more abstract concepts and theories that illuminate what conditions might, in general, make for success in launching a peace process.

The author discusses means of overcoming barriers to accurate communication, problems posed by entrapment, the difficult dynamics of mistrust-reduction, and the nature of “ripe” structural conditions, ending with tentative hypotheses about the overall process of conciliation.

Title: How to Resolve Conflict in the Workplace
by Hoda Lacey
Publisher: Gower Publishing Company; ISBN: 0566080737

From the Publisher

In the world of work, conflict is never far away. It can arise between boss and subordinate, between peers, between departments. You may be directly involved as a party to the dispute, or indirectly as a referee or mediator. Whatever the circumstances, conflict is probably the most common cause of stress in the workplace, affecting motivation, teamwork, productivity and ultimately profit.

Indeed, unmanaged conflict is probably the largest reducible cost in organizations today. Hence the wise manager will ensure that he or she is equipped with the strategies and techniques of conflict resolution. Rooted firmly in the philosophy of win/win, Hoda Lacey’s book will enable you to use conflict in ways that actually benefit both yourself and your organization. And by encouraging you to become aware of your own behavior it will also give you a basis for avoiding conflict in the future.

Drawing on the approach pioneered by the Conflict Resolution Network, it provides a step-by-step method of tackling the problem. Part 1 sets the scene and Part 2 introduces the skills involved, including creating empathy, using assertiveness, dealing with emotions (your own and other people’s) and overcoming reluctance.

Finally, Part 3 presents some practical conflict resolution tools. The text is reinforced throughout by examples, illustrations and real-life case histories, and there is an appendix containing details of useful contacts and organizations

Contents

Part 1: The Nature of Conflict
Learning and unlearning
The anatomy of a conflict
Conflict in the workplace

Part 2: The Skills of Conflict Resolution
Developing a win/win approach
Learning to respond
Creating empathy
Using assertiveness
Handling power constructively
Dealing with emotions
Overcoming reluctance

Part 3: The Tools of Conflict Resolution
Mapping
Mediation