Managing Hot Moments in 2025

If you've been around a center for teaching and learning in the last twenty-five years, you might have seen Lee Warren's article "Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom." Lee wrote this while at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, and it's been a favorite handout at teaching center workshops ever since. From the article: "Sometimes things seem to explode in the classroom, and what do we do then? Knowing strategies for turning difficult encounters into learning opportunities enables us to address important, but hot, topics -- religion, politics, race, class, gender -- in our classroom discussions."

I've been hearing from faculty and other instructors this fall who are especially worried about "hot moments" in their classrooms because the current U.S. political climate means that just about any topic could be a "hot" one for students. One might not think that a logo change at an "old country store" would be politicized, but that's where we are right now. Faculty are justifiably worried that a culture war could break out during a class discussion, and more faculty than I've ever known are considering avoiding politically charged topics in their teaching, even when those topics are squarely on the syllabus.

I wanted to provide some guidance for faculty who are facing this challenge right now, so I reached out to two teaching center colleagues, Rick Moore and Bethany Morrison, who teach in disciplines (sociology, political science) where instructors have long had to facilitate conversations on hot topics and who regularly consult with instructors across a range of disciplines on managing challenging class discussions. I asked them, What are teaching strategies for preventing and managing hot moments in the classroom when just about any topic could be "hot"? They had a wealth of advice, and I'm glad to share our conversation on this week's Intentional Teaching podcast episode.

Bethany Morrison is an assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. Bethany was on Intentional Teaching last year to share some strategies for teaching in an election year, drawing on a Michigan project about promoting civic learning and democratic engagement. Bethany has a PhD in political science science from Emory University and teaches courses in American politics and policy-making.

Rick Moore is an associate director for faculty programming at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis. I met Rick when I visited WashU last year, and I very quickly recruited him to put together a collection on teaching in turbulent times for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub. Rick has a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and teaches courses on the sociology of religion.

I encourage you to listen to the full conversation on the podcast, especially if you're in a discipline where managing hot moments isn't something you've had to do very often. Rick and Bethany explored the ways that student identities and experiences and lead to hot moments, and they pointed out that sometimes it's the cold moments that worry us more--the times when students shut down and disengage because of something said during class discussion. Bethany drew a distinction between hot moments and high-stakes discussions, and, while we might try to avoid a hot moment many of us feel a professional responsibility to facilitate high-stakes discussions for the sake of our students' learning.

We also talked about the stakes involved in these discussions for both students and instructors. What real or perceived stakes are there to students in participating in certain conversations? What stakes do we as instructors face when bringing certain topics or perspectives into our class discussions? Rick expressed a worry that "core discussions become no-go zones" because instructors fear the consequences of a class discussion going sideways, but he also acknowledged that for some of us, there are real risks. "Consider where your own personal lines are," Rick said, "and what you're wiling to risk." Bethany pointed out that these need not be binary choices, that there may be ways to address high-stakes topics that don't involve potentially charged class discussions.

One key strategy in managing hot moments is to help our students understand the boundaries of our disciplines, as Bethany said of her own discipline, "what political science can do and what it can't do." She described political science as a "field designed to explain and predict behavior and phenomena," not one "designed to answer questions about what ought to be, what values ought to be embedded in our decision making." Those values are important! And the work of political science can inform our values, but we can keep those things separate.I appreciated Bethany's example of operationalizing this principle: She asked students in her course about the U.S. court system to make a theory about why each Supreme Court justice made the decision they did in a particular case about qualified immunity. That's the legal doctrine that shields law enforcement officers from certain kinds of lawsuits, and it was a very hot topic when Bethany was teaching this course in fall 2020. Her assignment didn't ask students what they felt about qualified immunity, instead they were asked to use theory to explain judicial decisions, something squarely within the work of political science.

​You can listen to my entire conversation with Rick Moore and Bethany Morrison here, or you can search "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Teaching Students When (Not) to Use AI

​Last week in the newsletter, I floated the idea that we might see the use of generative AI tools to create audio summaries of course readings as one of many tools students might adopt to help them with challenging readings. Assuming an AI-generated audio summary doesn't replace the student's actual reading of the text, how is that summary different from the pre-reading lecture an instructor might provide to give context to the reading? Or a post-reading class discussion intended to help students go deeper with a text? There are important differences in these activities, and by incorporating a range of reading scaffolds like these, we have the opportunity to help students learn how and when to use each scaffold so that we're not just helping students make sense of the current reading, but we're building students skill in reading hard texts.

All that came out of a really wonderful conversation I had with Jim (Small Teaching) Lang on the University of Notre Dame podcast he hosts, Designed for Learning. My guest appearance on the podcast was published this morning, and you can listen to our discussion of generative AI's potential de-skilling effect on students here. We talk about better and worse ways to learn with AI, the sycophantic tendencies of AI chatbots and the importance of teaching students to approach AI output with skepticism, and developing students' metacognitive awareness and self-regulation so they can determine when it's helpful to a particular task to use AI and when it's not.

There's something about being interviewed for a podcast that motivates me to do some deep thinking! I appreciate Jim's excellence questions and the opportunity to do some deep thinking about generative AI with him.

Thanks for reading!

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