The idea that teachers should negotiate with a student, whether it’s about their behaviour or discussing what they should be learning, is an incredibly divisive issue. Some teachers believe that “pupil voice” and a collaborative approach to topic choice, rules and learning techniques are productive. Others think that this is the devil’s work because kids don’t really know what they want or what is good for them.
The latter camp believe that negotiation is a sure-fire sign of weakness and a route that won’t get you to where you or the pupil need to be. For Richard Mullender, this view is problematic.
As one of the world’s leading hostage negotiators, Mullender has negotiated with the Taliban for the release of hostages, dealt face-to-face with slippery career criminals and taught negotiation tactics to organisations such as the FBI and the secret service in India. Over the decades, he has read all the research there is about the best ways of negotiating and why you should do it.
Although the connection between dealing with children and dealing with terrorist groups or criminals may at first sound tenuous, Mullender - who was lead trainer at the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit at Scotland Yard, training hostage negotiators across the UK - believes that these interactions rely on the same skillset. Namely: the art of listening.
When he is training someone how to negotiate, one of the first things he teaches them to do is to listen.
“The problem is that most people don’t really know what listening is,” says Mullender. “If you ask someone to teach you how to listen, just see what happens. They might say ‘keep eye contact’, but that’s looking. They might say ‘ask questions’, but that’s talking. They might say ‘summarise back what someone has just told you’, but that’s talking again.”
According to Mullender, the definition of listening is the “identification, selection and interpretation of key words that allow you to move information into intelligence”.
Once you’ve understood what listening is, you then need to learn what to listen for.
“Facts, emotions, motivators, values, beliefs and currency” are the main things you need to identify, says Mullender. “The facts are easy; the emotions less so, but they are still obvious; motivators, values and beliefs are not so easy, although people usually give this away; and then the currency is what makes someone tick.”
Mullender says that starting a dialogue with someone - particularly a child - and getting them to open up about their problems can be incredibly tough. However, if an individual comes forward to discuss a problem, it makes the situation so much easier because you know that person is willing to talk.
“If a child comes to you, the secret is not to ask too many questions,” he says. “Just let them talk and as they start to talk, they will give themselves away and tell you what you need to know. Then gradually you can delve deeper into it.
“But if you need to talk to them, you’ve got to find a reason why they should talk to you. Often people take the wrong approach and they will say, ‘I’m the teacher, I need you to talk to me.’ That’s not the way to get someone to talk to you.”
Mullender explains that one effective approach is to ask the question, “How are we going to sort this out?”
“That’s a great way of saying to the child, ‘It’s not your problem, it’s not my problem, it’s our problem.’ So now you become a team.”
Another trick that he thinks would work well, particularly during a first meeting between a teacher and a child, is to ask the child who their favourite teacher is and why they like that teacher so much.
“That one question will tell you how they like to learn and give you an idea of what the child is like,” says Mullender. “You could also say that to the [child’s] parents on parents’ day. Ask them who is the favourite teacher that they have worked with in the past and why they think that teacher was so good. This will give you an idea of what the parents are looking for, so when you sit down at parents’ day, or if you’re talking to the child, you’re not talking a different language to the people you are looking at.”
He argues that negotiation conversations need to follow a “communication route-map”, the first stage of which is getting the child to like and trust you.
“The first meeting will always be about, ‘Can I get the second meeting?’ Do they like you enough to talk to you. Can you get them to relax.
“The next step is the investigation. If a kid comes to you and they’ve got a problem, you’ve got to investigate what the problem is. Not just investigate what happened, but why it has had the impact it’s had on them. So you’ve got to look far deeper. Then you need to find out the emotions the kids are feeling and why they feel that way.”
The final stage of the route-map is coming up with a workable solution. Mullender says that you need to create a solution that is going to be acceptable to them and then work out how you are going to sell the solution to the child in such a way that they will buy it.
“It’s all about selling,” he explains. “So you put forward the proposal and at the end of the proposal they will say, ‘I can’t do this,’ or, ‘I can’t do that.’ To all intents and purposes, that’s the counter-proposal.
“Then you enter into a negotiation and say, ‘OK, what can we do?’”
One way of helping to ensure that the negotiation goes smoothly is to ask for input from the child around what solution they think would work best.
“Then they will buy into that plan because they have actually put the proposal forward,” says Mullender. “They might say, ‘I can do this.’ To which you reply, ‘If you can do that, let’s do that then’ - provided the proposal is acceptable to you. And if it’s not acceptable, you start to bargain, so you start with their idea and then add on to or take off it. If you get the child to put forward the solution then you can always go back to them if it’s not working and say, ‘You said that you could do this, not me.’
“It’s always better to get the person to commit themselves rather than you getting them to commit to something.”
Mullender stresses that, for teachers, another area where these listening and negotiating skills can be incredibly useful is in dealing with parents. He knows how difficult these interactions can sometimes be as two of his children are teachers.
“My son sometimes has to call parents up and say, ‘Your son has been very badly behaved and we’re going to have to exclude him.’ To which the parent will reply, ‘I don’t want my son excluded.’ So you say to them, ‘Well, what can we do about this? This is the situation that we find ourselves in. Give me a suggestion as to what we can do about it.’
“You might get a parent who responds with, ‘That’s up to you,’ to which you could counter, ‘Well, as I said before, if you leave it up to me we are going to exclude him.’ You should always try and push it back on to the parents because there has to be a partnership: ‘This is your child’s education and we want to get it right for them, so let’s get it right for them.’”
Sometimes you might encounter parents who go into what’s known as the “never defer” position, which means that no matter what you say, they’re not going to listen.
“This puts you in a very difficult situation, but that’s where policy comes into play,” says Mullender. “The one big thing that every school needs is good policies, which ultimately give you something else to blame and fall back on. You can say to the parent, ‘It’s really not my fault. The school’s policy says that’s the way it’s got to be, so that’s the way it’s got to be.’”
Based on first-hand experience, Mullender knows that these interactions and negotiations often aren’t easy, particularly when you have to deliver a difficult message to someone, but he says that the best way of doing this is by practising what negotiation experts call “compassionate exertion”.
“If you’ve got to tell someone that they smell, you’re going to have to tell them they smell. There is no easy way of doing that. You have to just tell them and get it over with. Too many people go round and round in circles in the hope that a problem will go away, but it’s not going to go away. I always say it’s a bit like delivering a death message. There is no easy way of delivering a death message, so you just deliver it and do it as nicely and kindly as you can.”
Ultimately, he believes negotiation should be a skill that every teacher possesses. But he admits that listening is tough; it has to be worked at and practised. He likens the skill to that of a Formula 1 racing driver.
“They practise, practise, practise, but when they are taking a day off, they enjoy the drive like all of us. No one can operate at this level all the time. It has to be something you switch on when you need to, but if you don’t practise, the skill soon fades. I practise an hour a day every day, and I am still learning.”
Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist
Richard Mullender was in the military before joining the Metropolitan Police and becoming a detective. He soon moved to hostage negotiation and eventually became lead trainer at the National Hostage and Crisis Unit at Scotland Yard, training hostage negotiators across the UK. He has also advised the FBI; the UN; the Indian secret services; The Scorpions, an anti-corruption unit in Mandela’s South Africa; and the World Food Programme.
• Dispelling the Myths and Rediscovering the Lost Art of Listening (Communication Secrets of a Hostage Negotiator) by Richard Mullender (book)
• The Art of Negotiation: how to improvise agreement in a chaotic world by Michael Wheeler (book)
• The Art of Negotiation: how to get what you want (every time) by Tim Castle (book)
• Never Split the Difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz (book)
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