A Teachable Moment

Thank you to Howard and to the PrawfsBlawg community for the opportunity to blog this month.  This semester I'm teaching Administrative Law in what amounts to an ongoing teachable moment for that subject. 

My fellow blogger, David Fontana, recently discussed the topic of law professor neutrality in our political moment.  I'd like to ask a related, but different, question:  What are techniques to bring this teachable moment into the classroom?  For some, I recognize, this question may seem the wrong one to ask.  For instance, bringing the day's headlines into class will raise the questions about neutrality that David posed.  It also raises questions about responsibility to students, some of whom may be directly affected by the latest action of the Administration.

Still, I've seen several benefits this semester from teaching Administrative Law through the lens of our teachable moment.  First, it helps students connect with difficult and sometimes abstract material.  Second, it helps students understand not only the promise of the rule of (administrative) law, but also its limits.  Third, it responds to students' own demands.  Fourth - and this last point is focused on Administrative Law - it has helped me tell a story that focuses students on presidential administration, a story that might not otherwise be apparent from many of the canonical cases. 

There are, it seems to me, several ways to bring this teachable moment into class, at least for an Administrative Law class.

Perhaps the lowest cost approach is to work real-world examples into Socratic questioning or lecture.  At the beginning of the semester, I did a fair bit of that during the opening of class.  For the most part, it seemed to work well.  And by that I mean, it helped students get some sense of the stakes of the administrative law we planned to discuss, such as due process.     

Another option is to pull problems from the headlines for intensive focus during class.  I use problem-based teaching frequently.  Creating in-class problems based on the latest action from the Trump Administration helps students see the material as relevant, which can be difficult in administrative law.  At the same time, there are risks.  For example, there's a temptation to wrestle with any given class session's material even if it does not fit well with the latest headlines.  Avoiding that temptation, I've found, isn't always easy, particularly if students are eager to connect the law they're learning with what the Administration's doing.  For those who, like me, used problem-based teaching, this option may work well, though it requires generating new problems as the semester goes along.

The most interesting option - at least for me, and I hope for students - is to allow the students to put what they're learning to work.  This semester, my students are each writing a comment on a proposed agency action.  (Some students did not find a real-world proposal that interested them, and therefore worked with me to predict an action that the Trump Administration might take in the future as the basis for the written assignment.)  I just finished grading the students' outlines of their comments, which reflected careful thought and genuine passion for the issue(s) they discussed.    

There's much more that could be said, of course, including the questions that David posed about teaching during the Trump Administration.  I'm interested in what others have done and think about the pedagogical benefits and costs of connecting class with this teachable moment.