Analyzing the skills of student mediators as key to the success of school mediation programs

Abstract

There is a paucity of research on the skills that students acquire during their training as school mediators and the main difficulties that they face during this process. This paper examines the use –frequency and adequacy- of active listening skills by 9 Secondary and Post-Secondary Education students who were enrolled in a school mediation training program. An observational analysis was conducted during simulations of mediations based on true cases. In addition, interviews and discussion groups were conducted to analyze students’ perceptions on their own performance. The results confirm that students mainly use the strategy making open-ended questions, followed by summarizing and paraphrasing; while reflecting and I-messages strategies are practically unused. This coincides with students own perceptions, since they consider it difficult to put these skills into practice. These results show on one hand, that it is important for school mediation training programs to provide a greater range of opportunities to practice these skills. On the other hand, they point out the need for incorporating a period of supervised practice, as well as sequencing the difficulty of the cases where students who have just started to mediate are participating.