Boyne, S M --- "Crisis in the classroom: using simulations to enhance decision-making skills" [2013] LegEdDig 27; (2013) 21(1) Legal Education Digest 40

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S M Boyne

Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2012-2013, pp 311-322

There is no better way to capture students’ attention than to detonate a ‘dirty bomb’, or rather a simulated news report that a dirty bomb has exploded less than ten blocks away from the law school. Certainly this was no ordinary class session, but instead a well-planned counter-terrorism simulation involving 40 students drawn from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis and the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) held in October 2009. From the early minutes of the simulated decision-making exercise to its conclusion three hours later, the highly engaged students responded to a series of public safety crises while striving to balance competing objectives and operate within the boundaries of the law.

My own introduction to non-clinic based experiential teaching methods occurred in the summer of 2006 when I attended the Summer Workshop on Teaching Terrorism (SWOTT) held at the University of Maryland. The SWOTT program mixes lectures and teaching demonstrations in an attempt to introduce participants to the best practices in teaching terrorism-related courses. While high-level government officials and noted academics updated us on the latest developments and research in the counter-terrorism and homeland security fields, the hands-on teaching exercises were creative and thought provoking. One particular exercise, in which groups were asked to plan a terrorist attack using common household materials, remains fresh in my memory to this day. The exercise quickly forced participants to adopt a terrorist’s operational mindset. Most importantly, the session demonstrated to me how active student engagement in a creative problem-solving exercise could challenge student performance, capture student attention, and develop critical thinking skills.

As I began my own academic career, I was determined to supplement the traditional Socratic Method with a variety of exercises that forced students to approach the law not as law students, but as legal practitioners. My own experience as a prosecutor in the State of New Mexico, as well as my research on the impact that organisational culture plays in shaping legal decision-making in government service, spurred my search for teaching exercises that would highlight the constraints and challenges facing lawyers in government service.

Many of these challenges were brought to the forefront in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, national and international criticism of the Bush Administration’s policies regarding torture, the use of force, and the rendition and detention of enemy combatants highlight the tension that lawyers employed in government service may confront in finding legal support for policies that may violate national and international law. Whether one points to the infamous ‘torture memos’ drafted by Bush Administration lawyers that allowed waterboarding of suspected terrorists or the government’s illegal targeting of immigrants and the use of racial profiling to target persons of particular descent in the wake of 9/11, the fingerprints of government lawyers are adhered to some of the most questionable government practices of the past decade.

While it is easier now, more than a decade after 9/11, to second guess decisions made in the aftermath of those attacks, my goal in teaching the seminar was not to take a stand on those decisions but rather to bring to life for the students the challenges of preserving allegiance to the rule of law while protecting national security. Although traditional law school courses in professional responsibility may touch on the ethical dilemmas confronting lawyers in public service, the volume of material that must be covered in that course invariably means that brief attention is given to the topic. Thus, as I prepared my syllabus for a new seminar in comparative national security law, I sought to find a teaching exercise that would specifically highlight the tension that government lawyers face as they advise government leaders in times of crisis. To get my students to appreciate the contextual pressures of making decisions in a crisis management mode, I wanted to find a way to recreate a crisis environment and then ask them to make decisions in that environment.

My initial vague goal of introducing students to an atmosphere of crisis decision-making resonated with the need to provide students with several of the fundamental lawyering skills and values identified in the MacCrate Report. In particular, my goal of teaching crisis decision-making by stepping beyond the four corners of appellate opinions, from the start coincided with two key skills identified by the report, namely, problem solving and recognising and resolving ethical dilemmas.

As I began planning my counterterrorism course, I stumbled upon a description and some short videos describing a series of counter-terrorism simulations that Amos Guiora had run at Utah Law School. While I embraced many of the Utah model’s core components, I decided to break from the model and include students from the Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Administration (SPEA). With dreams of matching the sophistication and excitement of the Utah simulation, I approached two members of the SPEA faculty whose knowledge and prior experience in the fields of public safety and counterterrorism far exceeded the length of my college and graduate school education.

As with many multi-disciplinary projects, our initial planning meetings were marked by tentative commitments and scepticism. Although I wanted to place ethical decision-making at the centre of the simulation, my partners were initially more operationally focused. While I was envisioning decision-making dilemmas based on issues of constitutional law, my partners questioned how law students would be able to make operational decisions.

Two key goals were involved in the structuring of the script. One was to create enough action to involve approximately 50 students who would play roles at different levels of government. The second goal was to create a decision-making dilemma that would force students to wrestle with the core concepts of the class. I began with an initial rough idea of a scenario – a dirty bomb attack in Indianapolis with possible international implications. As the idea evolved, I decided that I needed more action to engage the decision-makers at the White House and to challenge students to set priorities. To accomplish this goal, I added a series of embassy bombings in Washington D.C. In the midst of the bombings, I threw students a curve ball involving international politics by having the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations visiting the Pakistani Embassy to the US as a bomb exploded outside the embassy. This allowed me to add a statement by the Iranian President that blamed Israel for the embassy attack as well as a threat from Israel to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. This action sequence naturally lent itself to the inclusion of an American embassy in Israel.

With the script for the news broadcasts written and sent to the ‘studio’ for filming, we set about planning the sets and roles for the simulation. We ended up with five main sets: (1) White House National Security Council; (2) White House National Security Council Support Room; (3) Office of the Governor of Indiana; (4) Office of the Mayor of Indianapolis; and (5) US Embassy, Israel. In addition, we had a generic press conference room that could be used by any of the officials who wanted to give a press briefing.

The key technological pieces of the simulation included installing a videoconferencing capability in each room, designing a Web dashboard that the students could use to view the media reports and through which the public could watch the action taking place in each of the rooms. As the simulation exercise was taking place, members of the public could access the dashboard and view the action live as well as access the media reports. The dashboard also performed a coordination function as it enabled our control room staff to monitor the action in each of the rooms and be on the lookout for any unanticipated problems.

Each student received his or her assigned role two weeks before the simulation. At minimum, students were expected to research the function and responsibilities of the position, the function of that position within the larger institutional structure, as well as current possible threats that an individual in that position might be expected to confront. Most of the students reviewed the course materials and read recent media reports related to terrorist attacks prior to the simulation as well as a plethora of articles and information my research assistant had compiled in an intelligence database. Just like government officials in real life, the students had little time to sort through volumes of material and determine what was relevant to their role.

As the simulation began, the simulation dashboard lit up with reports of a bombing at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC and the explosion of a dirty bomb near Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The students in the DC and Indianapolis locations were quickly involved in trying to verify the information reported by the media, determine casualties and response needs, and to assess the likelihood of further attacks. In order to facilitate information gathering, I had a handful of students, faculty members, and members of the community playing the roles of actors in the field including a police sergeant playing the role of the commanding officer at the scene of the explosion at Lucas stadium.

In addition to cell phone communication, the student teams could communicate with each other through videoconferencing capability provided in each room. Intel ‘injects’ were the final piece in our information management strategy. At various points in the simulation, we sent envelopes into the room directed at certain participants with special instructions for that participant. The injects contained new information from the ‘field’ as well as instructions to key participants that were designed to move the decision-making processes forward or to add additional uncertainty to the scenario. Sample injects included: (1) an instruction to hold a press conference in ten minutes to answer questions from the press corps; (2) the revelation that a member of the press was about to post inaccurate and potentially panic inciting information on a newspaper blog; and (3) top secret information that one country was going to take advantage of the situation by bombing another country.

The performance of each team ranged from good group decision-making with effective leadership to a less inclusive leadership style that left some students on the periphery of the decision-making processes. In general, the undergraduate public policy students interacted well with the law students.

The primary goal of hosting the simulation exercise was to improve students’ critical thinking skills through teaching techniques that go beyond the Socratic Method. As students read or listened to the news reports, they had to decide how the government should best respond to the events. But as the response planning efforts commenced, the key decision-makers also had to determine what further information was needed to guide the planning efforts and direct their staff to obtain that information.

Some of the field intelligence agents provided only vague information at first and students learned quickly that the mere relaying of information from the field would not satisfy the information needs of the key decision-makers.

The simulation format forces students to take steps to determine and weigh sifting facts on the ground and reach decisions that will have consequences for the security and civil rights of other players in the game. By creating a series of decision scenarios that forced students to think through the consequences of action or inaction, the exercise challenged students’ critical thinking skills beyond the typical class room format. Moreover, the decision scenarios had multiple ripple effects on the actions of other teams.

The second pedagogical goal was to introduce students to the challenge of working with individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds. Not only did the student teams mix law students with undergraduates in the public policy school, but we injected law enforcement and public safety personnel into the simulation as well. The individuals who relayed what was happening at the scenes of the terrorist attacks were police officers with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. After the exercise, the law students reported that it was an interesting challenge to work with the embedded experts as well as the public policy students and that everyone was not always on the same page. There were interdisciplinary challenges between the law students as well. The students appeared to quickly adopt the mindset of their respective agencies as the individuals assigned to defence and intelligence roles essentially ignored any recommendations produced by the State Department. In the heat of the simulated crisis environment, the student decision-makers in the White House roles were more likely to turn to the tools of warfare rather than diplomacy even as embassy personnel in the Middle East recommended diplomacy.

One of the key themes of the Carnegie Report is its call for law schools to teach professionalism. Our simulation project aimed to embrace the concept of professionalism on two levels. First, regardless of their role within the simulation, students were encouraged to act as a professional and to communicate with each other respectfully. Second, the instructions to the law student participants asked them to reflect upon their identity as a future member of the legal profession and to act with good judgement during the simulation. To this end, it was evident that students took their assigned roles seriously.

By using a team centred decision-making model, the simulation encouraged students to share information, discuss possible courses of actions, and to reflect on the short-term outcomes of their decisions. By targeting students’ abilities to solve problems, communicate effectively, and work in a multidisciplinary team, the project targeted key skills critical to the successful practice of law.

In the field of public sector management, many governments have turned to simulation exercises to improve leaders’ ability to respond to a crisis. Yet, as the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, many public leaders and front line responders are often unprepared to handle the communication and decision-making challenges posed by a crisis. For these reasons, educational institutions that hope to prepare their students to assume positions of leadership, cannot afford to ignore the fact that the complexity of the modern decision-making environment requires the use of new pedagogies to prepare students.