Bridging Divides: What to Do When People Disagree

Two-Day Skills Training

This course examines disagreement through the frameworks of mediation, deliberative dialogue, and conflict resolution. Participants will explore how underlying interests, values, assumptions, and power dynamics shape conflict, and will practice strategies such as active listening, reframing, perspective-taking, de-escalation, and interest-based problem solving. Emphasis is placed on sustaining constructive dialogue across difference, improving mutual understanding, and identifying areas of shared concern without requiring consensus.

13 Contact Hours

1) Course Goals

• Build participants’ capacity to understand and respond constructively to interpersonal conflict.
• Strengthen practical skills for de-escalating emotionally charged situations and communicating across disagreement.
• Equip participants to move beyond positional gridlock toward solutions that address the underlying needs and interests of those involved.
• Provide a strong foundation in conflict management skills that can support later training in mediation, restorative justice, dialogue, and/or other formal models of conflict management such as interest-based negotiation.

2) Learner Objectives

• Identify common sources, patterns, and dynamics of conflict in public, workplace, board, and community settings.
• Recognize the role of emotions, unmet needs, perceptions, and interests in escalating or sustaining conflict.
• Use active listening, constructive questioning, paraphrasing, reframing, and perception checking to improve communication.
• Distinguish stated positions from underlying interests and needs.
• Apply verbal de-escalation strategies when people are angry, frustrated, or highly invested in an issue.
• Generate and assess options that respond to multiple interests rather than relying only on compromise.
• Communicate personal or organizational needs in ways that increase the likelihood of a constructive response.

3) Learner Outcomes

• Participants can diagnose a conflict more accurately and identify factors that may be driving the disagreement.
• Participants can respond to high emotion without unnecessarily escalating the situation.
• Participants can uncover underlying interests and needs even when they are not stated directly.
• Participants can communicate across disagreement using language that promotes understanding and problem solving.
• Participants can help shift a difficult conversation from confrontation or impasse toward workable options and shared problem solving.
• Participants leave with a practical conflict-management framework that can be applied in professional, civic, and community settings.

4) Core Skills

• Conflict analysis
• Emotional self-management
• Verbal de-escalation
• Active and reflective listening
• Constructive questioning
• Perception checking
• Neutral paraphrasing and summarizing
• Reframing
• Identifying positions, interests, and needs
• Interest-based problem solving
• Option generation and evaluation
• Consensus-oriented communication