Instructor Interview

Below, Prof. Lawrence Susskind describes various aspects of how he and Lidia Cano Pecharroman taught 11.255 Negotiation and Dispute Resolution in the Public Sector in spring 2021.

OCW: How much background did your students have in negotiation and dispute resolution?

Lawrence Susskind: There are no prerequisites for 11.255, but the majority of graduate students in the class had sufficient work experience in the public sector that they understood immediately the hypothetical contexts we are imagining. 

OCW: Much of the learning in this course happened through role-playing simulations. What specific negotiation skills can students learn from such exercises?

Lawrence Susskind: Role-play simulations are the most efficient learning-by-doing tool. Based on real situations, a role-play provides a short scenario and offers confidential instructions for students assigned to each of up to eight roles. The confidential instructions mirror what people in those roles actually said and did. These are not case studies because they sort confidential advice into separate packets for each role-player. The students have 60–90 minutes to see if they can resolve a hypothetical dispute or reach agreement on a public policy decision that has to be made. Sometimes, we have multiple groups of students at separate tables doing the exact same role-play. 

The role-plays in 11.255 usually include technical material in the role-specific confidential instructions. The students apply what they are are reading and learning in assigned role-play simulations each week. In post-exercise debriefings, the instructors ask students to reflect on their negotiation strategies (i.e, what they believe is the best way of handling the type of negotiation challenge with which they were presented). Students have a chance to get candid but supportive feedback from their negotiating partners—not something that happens in real life very often. Students are assigned roles randomly; so, a student may be asked to play the part of a character in the scenario whose values and interests are unlike their own. This turns out to be a great way to help students understand more about the conflicts at the heart of many negotiating situations. 

Students move through 8–9 simulations during the semester—moving from just two parties negotiating a few issues to many parties negotiating many issues. Students write a short reflection after each of these exercises where they keep track of how their negotiating skills and intuitions evolve throughout the semester and where they set goals for themselves for upcoming negotiations. This is both a tool for students to keep track of their progress and for the instructors to guide them and support them in the process.

OCW: You asked the students to create their own edited videos of the negotiation scenarios. What role do those videos play, either in the students’ learning or in your assessment of their learning?

Lawrence Susskind: Every group doing a role-play exercise is assigned a videographer. These are students in the class who are given a “suitcase” with all the tools they will need to record, edit and present a 5-minute “news report” on the role-play simulation they observed. (Every student in the class will be a videographer once during the semester.) During the pandemic these were software tools instead but we were still able to keep the videographer rule despite being remote. The videographer’s broadcasts often include running headlines or video after-effects. 

The students in each role-play eagerly await the showing of these news reports in the following class session. They learn a lot about how they appear on camera and in the media. They gain an independent perspective on each negotiation process and their contribution to it. They learn about non-verbal communication and messages they send without meaning to. They also get experience in how the mass media focuses only a very limited slice of a complex set of public interactions when they report on an actual negotiation in the public sector. Having to distill what happened in an hour-long negotiation into a few minutes becomes a very useful exercise for students to process what happened, and to reflect on the myriad of possibilities that were in front of them and could have materialized had they done things differently.

OCW: Before the final exam, you provided your students with an extensive list of possible questions. Why do you share this material in advance, and how do you asses the students’ work on the exam?

Lawrence Susskind: The exam must be completed during the 90 minutes of the last scheduled class. I start two weeks before the final class with a set of 20+ questions about a range of negotiating situations. To prepare, students review all the material we covered during the semester. They are welcome to write out answers to all 20+ questions if they want, and then wait to see which three they want to hand in on the day of the exam. What the faculty cares about is that students review the assigned material covered and feel confident using it to address challenges that may well come up in their practice. Memorization of assigned reading (on negotiation principles) won’t help very much in preparing a personal response to a normative question (e.g., “What’s the best advice you would give a community activist that has a chance to negotiate with a real estate developer proposing an unwanted project in their community?”). 

The faculty prepares a template outlining how a student can earn 10 points (maximum) if they answer all the parts of each question. Most of the points are awarded for taking a personal point of view and backing it up—not with footnotes, but with strong arguments. Students are welcome to see the grading template and how their score on each question was determined. It takes a lot of careful reading to grade this kind of exam. 

OCW: How did you and Lidia share teaching responsibilities for the course?

Lawrence Susskind: I did most of the 30–40 minute mini-lectures at the beginning of class sessions in which there was no role-play—usually summarizing an instance of professional practice and pursuing extended exchanges with individual students who are asked to share their emerging “personal theory of negotiation practice.” Lidia guided student-led discussion of assigned readings on several occasions and guided students as they prepared for the negotiations. Lidia did a first reading of all the final exam questions. I reviewed her grades/assessments and we conferred if we disagreed. As you can see, only an advanced doctoral student—with professional negotiation experience before coming to MIT—can be a graduate instructor for this class.

Curriculum Information

Prerequisites

None

Requirements Satisfied

11.255 can be applied toward a Master’s Degree in City Planning, but is not required.

11.255 can also be applied toward the Policy, Technology, and Society requirement for the degree of Master of Science in Transportation, but is not required.

Offered

Every spring semester

Assessment

• Facilitation of scenario discussions, including the preparation of framing memos: 20%
• Self-reflection memos and feedback to student’s negotiating partner: 30%
• Video presentation: 15%
• In-class final exam: 20%
• Class participation/attendance: 15%

Student Information

Enrollment

16 students

Breakdown by Year

Primarily first-year graduate students, along with a few advanced undergraduates.

Breakdown by Major

About half the students were in the Master’s in City Planning program; the remainder were in the doctoral program in Urban Studies and Planning, the Humphrey Fellows program, the Technology and Policy Program, the Sloan School of Management, or were cross-registered from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

How Student Time Was Spent

During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:

In Class (4 hours)

Met 2 times per week for 2 hours per session; mandatory attendance

Out of Class (8 hours)

Outside of class, students read assigned texts, wrote framing memos and self-reflection memos, composed feedback to their negotiation partners, edited negotiation videos, and prepared for the final exam.