TY - JOUR
AU - Gvosdev, Nikolas K
AB - Abstract Much has been written about the need to “bridge the gap” between the academic study of international relations—particularly policy-oriented subfields such as foreign policy analysis and security studies—and the needs of policymakers. This important agenda largely focuses on encouraging academics to produce more policy-relevant, accessible research. While such efforts are indispensable, they neglect another important piece of the equation: teaching future policymakers how to translate theory into practice. The bridge needs to be a two-way street. Scholars add value for policy because their work is grounded in theory, offering analytical structure to make sense of a complex world. But applying theory to policy is unlikely to resonate with practitioners who do not have the basic conceptual literacy to grasp why theory-informed research is relevant to their own hands-on concerns. We therefore propose a teaching approach we term “practical theory,” geared specifically for professionally oriented students. Drawing on our own experience in teaching, developing curriculum, and writing for students in professional master's degree programs, we recommend instructors: choose theories and frameworks that are most likely to be useful in practice, update these theories for the times as needed, reconsider nomenclature and banish unnecessary academic jargon, and apply theory early and often. Extracto Se ha escrito mucho acerca de la necesidad de “cerrar la brecha” entre el estudio académico de las relaciones internacionales (en particular los subcampos orientados a las políticas, como el análisis de las políticas exteriores y los estudios de seguridad) y las necesidades de aquellos a cargo de elaborar políticas. Esta importante agenda se centra en gran medida en alentar a los académicos a producir investigaciones más accesibles y pertinentes para la elaboración de políticas. Si bien tales esfuerzos son indispensables, dejan de lado otra parte importante de la ecuación: enseñar a los futuros encargados de elaborar políticas cómo llevar la teoría a la práctica. El camino para cerrar la brecha debe ser de ida y vuelta. Los académicos agregan valor a las políticas porque su trabajo se basa en la teoría y, de esta manera, ofrecen una estructura analítica para dar sentido a un mundo complejo. Pero es poco probable que la aplicación de la teoría a las políticas resuene en los profesionales que no poseen el conocimiento conceptual básico para comprender por qué la investigación de políticas fundamentada en la teoría es relevante para sus propias inquietudes prácticas. Por lo tanto, proponemos un enfoque de enseñanza que denominamos “teoría práctica,” dirigida específicamente a estudiantes orientados profesionalmente. Basándonos en nuestra propia experiencia, al enseñar, desarrollar planes de estudio y escribir para estudiantes en programas de maestría profesional, recomendamos a los instructores: elegir teorías y marcos que tengan más probabilidades de ser útiles en la práctica, actualizar estas teorías a los tiempos actuales cuando sea necesario, reconsiderar la nomenclatura y desterrar la jerga académica innecesaria, y aplicar la teoría desde el primer momento y con frecuencia. Extrait: Beaucoup de textes sur la nécessité de « combler le fossé » entre l’étude universitaire des relations internationales (en particulier des spécialisations orientées vers la politique tels que l'analyse de la politique étrangère et l’étude de la sécurité) et les besoins des décideurs politiques ont été écrits. L'idée très importante est globalement d'encourager les universitaires à produire des recherches plus accessibles et plus pertinentes sur le plan politique. Bien que ces efforts soient indispensables, ils négligent un autre élément important de l’équation: l'enseignement de la manière de traduire la théorie en pratique aux futurs décideurs politiques. Le pont à établir doit pouvoir être emprunté dans les deux sens. Les universitaires apportent de la valeur en politique car leur travail est ancré dans la théorie et offre une structure analytique donnant un sens au monde complexe. Mais il est peu probable que l'application de la théorie en politique trouve un écho chez les intervenants qui ne disposent pas des connaissances conceptuelles de base nécessaires pour comprendre pourquoi les recherches politiques fondées sur la théorie sont pertinentes pour leurs propres préoccupations pratiques. Nous proposons donc une approche pédagogique que nous appelons « théorie pratique » qui est spécifiquement conçue pour les étudiants à vocation professionnelle. D'après notre propre expérience dans l'enseignement, dans le développement de programmes d’études et dans la rédaction de documents à l'attention d’étudiants en masters professionnels, nous recommandons aux enseignants: de choisir les théories et cadres les plus susceptibles d’être utiles dans la pratique, d'actualiser ces théories selon la situation actuelle si nécessaire, de reconsidérer la nomenclature et de bannir le jargon académique inutile, et d'appliquer la théorie aussi tôt et souvent que possible. international relations, foreign policy analysis, bridging the gap, teaching, Palabras clave: relaciones internacionales, análisis de políticas exteriores, cerrar la brecha, enseñanza, Mots clés: relations internationales, analyse de la politique étrangère, combler le fossé, enseignement Bridging the gap between international relations (IR) scholarship and foreign and national security policymaking represents a multigenerational effort within the academic IR discipline. More than a quarter century ago, pioneering foreign policy scholar Alexander George set out an urgent and ambitious agenda in his groundbreaking book, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (1993), challenging fellow academics to make themselves more relevant to the real-world practice of foreign policy. Other prominent IR scholars such as Joseph Nye (2008) took up this call. These efforts to bridge the gap between the “Ivory Tower” and the “Beltway” have resounded with many scholars over the years, especially those like ourselves with experience working in government and/or teaching at IR professional schools. The gap-bridging agenda has garnered renewed attention in recent years, as many advocates perceive a widening gap despite their best efforts. For example, Stephen Walt (2013) pointedly asks his peers, “Why does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a ‘cult of irrelevance’?” This damning critique is explicated at greater length in Michael Desch's recent book, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (2019), which in turn has sparked a new round of academic self-examination, including pushback from those who argue scholarship has become significantly more relevant (Farrell and Knight 2019). Perhaps one of the sharpest recent critiques comes from the former dean of a leading IR professional school who complains, “Articles and books are published to be read, if at all, only by colleagues who have the same high regard for methodology and theory and the same disregard for practice.” He continues, “That has created a profession that is inward-looking and concerned with arcane debate—a result that provokes and deserves all the insults thrown at the ivory tower from the world of policy and practice” (Gallucci 2012). The upshot of the critique is that theory is still mostly conveyed by academics, for academics, in ways that are not intuitive or salient for practitioners. Perhaps unsurprisingly in an environment in which academics write primarily for other academics, much of the gap-bridging literature focuses on how to cajole and equip academics to publish in ways more useful and accessible to practitioners. In addition to selecting policy-relevant topics and variables, Daniel Byman and Matthew Kroenig (2016) suggest scholars should build personal relationships with policymakers, prepare to position their work in the bureaucracy, and write for nonacademic outlets. Bruce Jentleson and Ely Ratner (2011) argue for changing academic professional incentives to reward policy-relevant research. They also advocate expanding academic interaction with policymakers, including by fostering more opportunities for academics to work in government and for policymakers to work as professors of practice. The renowned Bridging the Gap Project, a flagship initiative headquartered at American University's School of International Service, seeks to “equip professors and doctoral students with the skills they need to produce influential policy-relevant research and theoretically grounded policy work” (Bridging the Gap 2019). In sum, the focus is squarely on fostering policy-relevant research by current and future scholars. According to James Goldgeier (2018), one of the movement's leading figures, these efforts are bearing impressive fruit, inspiring and fostering an active and growing cadre of scholars who are now promoting and producing policy-relevant scholarship. This represents real and meaningful progress in the face of strong institutional and cultural headwinds. However, we propose that there is a gap in these gap-bridging efforts that hobbles long-term progress. It should be obvious even from this cursory précis that the focus of gap-bridging has been to redress the failure of the academic IR discipline—especially within ostensibly practical subfields like foreign policy analysis (FPA) and security studies—to equip and incentivize its members to value and connect with the interests of policymakers. If the movement had a slogan it would be: Scholar heal thy irrelevant self! As members of the discipline, we agree that academic culture and career incentives are a significant part of the problem that deserves continuing remediation. However, we posit the failure of scholars to value and connect with the work of practitioners is only part of the equation. Another prevalent shortcoming—or at least a not fully or consistently realized potential—is teaching future policymakers how to value and connect with the work of scholars. That is, conveying to professionally oriented students the benefits academic research and theorizing can bring to hands-on policymaking and analysis. Teaching, after all, stands alongside research as the twin pillar of our profession. It is here, in educating the students who will become tomorrow's policymakers, where we would respectfully suggest that more needs to be done to better enable students to fathom how scholarly research could be useful for their chosen practitioner career. Put simply, the bridge we are seeking to build needs to be a two-way street. Some recent work has begun to recognize the importance of addressing this other side of the gap. For example, distinguished foreign policy scholar Phillip Zelikow makes this case unequivocally by focusing on what he calls the “software” of policymaking (i.e., the analytic skills of policy practitioners). “Much of the debate about relevance in disciplines is a supply-side argument: that if they produced different scholarship, such work would be more influential ... [My argument] is a demand-side argument. It is that, as the software of policy work has deteriorated, the people doing policy work no longer do the analysis—or articulate the questions—to seek out and use relevant knowledge, whatever its source. I think it will be most impactful to fix the demand side of the problem” (Zelikow 2019). Building on Zelikow's critical insight, we argue a key part of “fixing” the demand-side is rethinking the way we teach theory to current and future policy practitioners. This is a particularly urgent imperative for professional graduate programs in international affairs and foreign policy, which specialize in preparing their students for careers as practitioners. Some of these programs already try to tailor theory education to the needs of practitioners. However, there is not a consistent model or even broadly recognized best practices for this. In what follows, we first explore the rationale for teaching academic theories to professional students at all, with an emphasis on what theory-informed academic research offers national security practitioners. We then examine the role theory currently plays in professional master's programs and propose a modest educational reform agenda for teaching what we term practical theory that is geared toward meeting the specialized needs of aspiring practitioners. Finally, we draw on our own experience developing curriculum for and teaching professional students (including authoring a theory textbook tailored for practitioners) to offer concrete suggestions for how to think about designing curriculum and engaging professional students in ways that maximize the chances these skeptical future practitioners will come to understand what theory brings to the policymaking table. A Gap in Gap-Bridging: Why Teach Theory to Practitioners? As noted already, much of the current literature on bridging the gap focuses on encouraging academics to produce more policy-relevant research that can better inform and influence practitioners. However, this is a difficult proposition to put into practice. Policy relevance is notoriously difficult to operationalize and definitions vary, ranging from output-focused standards based on the inherent policy nature of the work itself to outcome-based metrics based on the work's impact on policy. In Cult of the Irrelevant, Desch measures the policy relevance of a piece of scholarship by asking whether it includes concrete policy recommendations (Desch 2019). Jentleson and Ratner use a standard that measures whether the academic output advances “knowledge with an explicit priority of addressing policy questions,” (Jentleson and Ratner 2011, 8). Byman and Kroenig set an even higher bar—whether ideas are produced “that feature in the deliberations of senior government officials as they weigh policy decisions” (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 293). Similarly, James McGann offers three baskets of criteria to assess relevance: (1) whether work appears in the venues consulted by decision-makers, (2) whether a person is called upon to brief policymakers, and (3) the extent to which recommendations are “considered or adopted” by those in government (McGann 2012, 29–30). These disparate definitions and metrics raise the questions of why some pieces of scholarship that were not explicitly intended to influence policy become widely influential, and why others that include explicit policy recommendations do not. Just as a screenwriter once famously observed no one in Hollywood knows anything to explain why one film becomes a blockbuster while another flops, it seems persistently difficult to determine what makes scholarly research salient for policymakers. Zelikow notes, “[Political] scientists view the behavior of policymakers much as entomologists view the behavior of insects. Neither set of scientists are necessarily concerned with giving “how to” advice to their subjects” (Zelikow 2019). This can produce within the academy the hardwired attitude that policymakers need to be prepared to draw the “so what” and “how to” lessons for themselves without any help from academics. It is doubtful that even the most fervent gap-bridging efforts will ever do more than put a dent in this ingrained predisposition of the wider discipline. However, this makes it all the more vital for those teaching specifically in professional education programs to tailor pedagogies that equip their students to draw the “so what” and “how to” lessons for themselves. If scholars who are interested in producing policy-relevant research do not also pique the interest of their professional students regarding the practical utility of such scholarship, then it is unlikely that those students will ever develop such an interest later on as policymakers. As Byman and Kroenig argue, a “case can be made for getting to policymakers before they are policymakers”(Byman and Kroenig 2016, 307). For scholarship to influence policy, policymakers must not only be aware of and receptive to it, they must also have the mental frameworks in place that allow them to connect abstract ideas and proposals with impacts and effects in their own real-world experiences. Byman and Kroenig note, “Ideas can infiltrate the process directly if a senior government official reads and is influenced by a piece of scholarship, but much more likely is that the academic argument or finding influences the process indirectly.” They argue this indirect influence can occur when a scholarship has influenced the work of lower-level officials preparing materials for their superiors, or when policymakers use ideas they were “exposed to years before as students” to frame the ways policy is assessed or events analyzed (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 293). In terms of this last and most deep-seated source of influence, namely, ideas retained from prior academic studies, the role of theory in shaping the thinking of policymakers can be more significant than even they sometimes appreciate. For example, Walt convincingly demonstrates that, although policymakers may not necessarily realize it, the underlying assumptions of the major strands of IR theory often infuse their worldviews (Walt 2005). A policymaker may not describe (or even be aware of) herself as an offensive realist or neoliberal institutionalist, for instance, while nevertheless framing her approach to policy questions in ways that reflect these underlying precepts. If theory education can shape the way policymakers think about the world, it can also help them to understand their own roles. There can be a natural tendency among practitioners who are immersed in the maelstrom of policymaking to perceive that policy occurs as if by happenstance, and that decisions, as in the famous musing by President John F. Kennedy, are “mysterious because the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself.”(Kennedy 2005, xxix). One reason that mid-career civilian and military practitioners are encouraged—often required—to undertake graduate education that includes the study of IR and FPA is to dispel this simplistic understanding of their world. There is inherent value in having practitioners think deeply about the milieu in which they function through the structured conceptual rigor of professional graduate studies. As Jentleson notes, “The tenets of scholarly inquiry—differentiating between necessary and sufficient conditions, rigorous standards of empirical evidence and analytic logic for claiming validity for comparisons and other posited relationships, as well as thinking deductively from general propositions to specific applications—all have real policy applicability” (Jentleson 2002, 180). Both scholars and practitioners seem to agree that one of the primary means for academics to contribute to policymaking is by supplying useful conceptual frameworks, models, and paradigms—theories—that can help policymakers to make sense of a complicated world. In other words, scholars offer not only deep knowledge about facts and fact patterns, but also structured ways to think critically about them in broader systemic contexts. This latter aspect is key to what sets scholars apart from other subject matter experts. If academics try to compete strictly as atheoretical policy analysts, then they may end up adding little value. Governments are already brimming with talented analysts who are not only knowledgeable subject matter experts, but also bring levels of bureaucratic insight that most scholars cannot hope to match, not to mention access to classified information that is likewise unavailable to most scholars. Outside of government, think tanks are likewise brimming with talented analysts, many with advanced degrees and prior government experience. Academics can and do offer highly specialized subject matter expertise, sometimes beyond what governments or think tanks have on hand. However, the real competitive advantage that academics can offer is theoretically informed research and analysis, and the outside perspective that comes from not needing to focus on the daily realities of politics and policymaking. An essential starting point for enhancing scholarship's long-term contribution to policymaking is therefore not for academics to eschew theory in the cause of not alienating policymakers. However, the gap bridging literature is inarguably correct that theory must be applied in ways that are more accessible to practitioners and to educate practitioners about the real-world applications of theory. Jentleson succinctly identifies three ways in which theory can be of particular use: helping policymakers diagnose problems and trends, “providing the framework for putting a particular situation and strategy in the type of broader context that can facilitate the design and implementation of effective strategies,” and helping “broaden what can be learned” from past successes and failures (Jentleson 2002, 181–82). It is not enough, however, to persuade policymakers that academic theory can be useful in the abstract. They also need to be sufficiently conversant in the broad nuances of theory, if not to use it, then at least to perceive when it is being used to good effect for their purposes. This is precisely where a deliberate and consistent effort in professional education is both needed and wanting. In a survey of policymakers, Paul Avey and Michael Desch find that policymakers do use theory, although they often recoil at the “T” word because “they are skeptical of much of academic social science which they see as jargon-ridden and overly focused on technique” (Avey and Desch 2014, 228). At the same time, they find indications that practitioners are open to the value of education as a “backdrop to the daily policy decision making” and can appreciate how the academic ideas they absorbed as students “helps us frame our thinking,” even if did not always directly influence their policy choices. In terms of what practitioners themselves valued from their educational experience, they tend to “prefer that scholars generate simple and straightforward frameworks that help them make sense of a complex world” (Avey and Desch 2014, 238, 241, 244). The rub here is that even the simplest frameworks (by academic standards) require a degree of conceptual sophistication that practitioners may not have obtained as undergraduates or even as students in some professional graduate programs. The good news is that practitioners are persuadable. In principle, they value scholars for their “rigorous training in weighing ideas, and, especially, [their] relative bureaucratic independence and neutrality” (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 295). Scholars are generally seen as less interested in promoting or advocating for specific policies, particularly within the compressed timeframe of a specific administration, and more focused on understanding how and why decisions were made, and identifying enduring patterns, problems, and challenges that transcend partisan lines and personal loyalties. These are the very seeds of appreciation that need to be nurtured more deliberately with today's students in order to imbue tomorrow's practitioners with a habitual interest in engaging with policy-relevant scholarship. It is a truism that senior government officials have little time to think while in government. But when they are outside government ranks, they may then have the breathing room to engage in research and study that can contribute to conceptual thinking that they can then employ upon a return to government. One of the principal arguments in favor of a robust think tank sector is that these institutions allow their members the space to escape the reactive nature of government in favor of thinking about longer-term issues and trends. However, not every senior policymaker comes out of a think tank and few career officials get this opportunity for reflection. It would seem obvious that leveraging academia is a better way to educate practitioners about academics than relying on a smattering of knowledge that some few political appointees may acquire through autodidactic osmosis during stints at think tanks; at least we would like to think so. This still may not touch all or even most future national security practitioners, but it would ensure that there is an influential cadre of theory-literate senior policymakers who have the foundational skills to leverage academic theory for the betterment of practice. As Byman and Kroenig conclude, “If policymakers’ mindset upon entering senior positions is shaped by their educations and experiences, then there is an ineffable, but important, effect of scholarship in shaping the policymakers years or decades earlier in their life” (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 307). The Role of Theory in Professional Education: The Case for “Practical Theory” Pedagogy Our working premise is that policy-oriented terminal master's degree programs within IR professional schools are not as a group systematically teaching IR and FPA theory in a way that successfully connects with practitioner students, who often arrive with uneven knowledge and skeptical attitudes about the professional relevance of such theories. This premise is informed by our own recent experiences as academic leaders within a professional master's degree program over a ten-year period—receiving student feedback and engaging in substantive internal and external curriculum reviews—and from teaching at several leading civilian and military professional schools. To corroborate these personal experiences, we interviewed key program leaders (deans, department chairs, and program directors) from a cross-section of representative civilian and military IR professional schools.1 We also reviewed a sampling of core course descriptions and syllabi where available. Our outreach focused on security studies and foreign policy concentrations on the presumption that these would be among the most policy-oriented areas of study. These outreach efforts suggest that our own experiences are not atypical and offer a useful anecdotal snapshot of how IR and FPA theory is taught across various terminal professional IR master's degree programs. Our outreach revealed a widely shared mindset that theory education is useful for professional students only insofar as they can be taught to link it to practice. In other words, there appears to be broad agreement among program leaders that teaching theory to professional master's students in the same way it is taught to PhD students is not optimal. This perspective appears to be based on anecdotal classroom experiences rather than any formal or systematic assessments or metrics. Of course, our sample may be biased in that those program leaders most concerned with tailoring theory education for practitioners may have been most likely to respond to our request for interviews on this topic. To the extent the professional MA programs we reviewed include theory education, the stress tends to be on the most mainstream rather than critical or cutting-edge paradigms. Beyond these general tendencies, however, our most revealing finding is that the approach to teaching theory varies significantly across IR professional schools. We came across two programs that feature a robust theory requirement comprising several interlocking core courses or exams. This is not the norm, however. Many programs instead teach the basics of IR theory as a single required core course, making this the prevalent model to the extent that there is one. These stand-alone IR theory core courses sometimes include modules on FPA, but this only seems to be common for military schools. FPA theory may therefore represent a surprising lacuna in some programs. Of the syllabi we reviewed for these core courses—which, it should be noted, was constrained by availability and is not a large enough sample to draw definitive conclusions—we saw widely varying approaches. This is perhaps not surprising, as even where there is agreement among program leaders on the need to tailor theory for practitioners, this may not translate into how individual faculty design their syllabi. A number of program leaders indicate that professors are given broad discretion in determining the structure and content of these courses. We did find theory-heavy courses that primarily assigned academic journal articles and scholarly books—similar to what we might expect in a field seminar for PhD students in content if not quantity. For example, one IR course assigned readings from political science journals including International Security, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, American Political Science Review, and Journal of Politics, among others, and selections from classic academic books such as Graham Allison's Essence of Decision, Jervis's Perception and Misperception in International Relations, and Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, in addition to a smaller number of pieces geared toward a less-academic audience, such as articles from Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. On the other end of the spectrum, particularly in professional military education, syllabi tended to assign readings more from policy and practitioner-oriented publications such as Foreign Affairs, Orbis, The National Interest, and The Washington Quarterly, or from think tanks that focus more on analysis of current affairs than underlying theory. It should be noted that neither extreme was a pure type—the theory-focused courses also assigned some readings aimed at broader audiences and the practice-focused courses assigned some traditional academic work. While there is certainly evidence that a number of these courses set out to use theory to inform practical application, we argue more can be done to translate theory in a way that makes its application clearer. Many program leaders stressed that a significant number of their new students lack even an elemental grasp of IR theory. These students hail from a variety of academic backgrounds—only some with undergraduate political science majors—and for many programs include a significant cohort of mid-career practitioners who are far removed from their past education. Thus, a key goal for these core IR theory courses is to level the field by equipping all students with a basic conceptual toolkit. However, except for some military programs, the focus and pedagogy of these core courses are mostly left up to individual professors. As one administrator noted, students see theory “as relevant to the extent that faculty make a concerted and thoughtful effort to demonstrate how, when, and in what ways it can be.” Consequently, the extent to which content and delivery are tailored for the needs of professional students can vary significantly even within programs. One program leader observed that these were unpopular courses to teach and therefore are often relegated to reluctant junior faculty members with no particular background or interest in policy. While a few of these core theory courses are judged by program leaders to be effective at engaging professional students in the role and value of theory, the more common perception is that they are hit or miss. It is important to note that although this is a common model, not all programs have a dedicated or required theory course. Instead some cover IR theory as a module within a broader core course (e.g., global politics). Still, others have no theory courses or requirements at all, deliberately choosing to focus entirely on practical knowledge and skills. Finally, most programs do include substantive courses that feature intermediate-level theory—e.g., deterrence theory for a course on nuclear policy—but this too usually depends on the proclivities of individual professors. Again, we found no indication that these professional programs have systematically attempted to assess the efficacy of different approaches to theory education. This is entirely understandable in that theory proficiency is not an educational focus for these programs and therefore we would not expect it to feature significantly in assessing program outcomes. Another point of widespread agreement among program leaders is the deep skepticism, or even outright hostility, with which most professional students initially regard academic theory, especially those who are mid-career practitioners. In their own words about student attitudes toward theory: “They seek subject-matter knowledge and practical skills” “If you call it theory, it gets students’ backs up and you need to fight through it” “Most see little relevance for theory within their professional goals in foreign policy” “They are not theory people, and they are skeptical” “They want to get out there and practice and they don't want to waste time with theory” “Most students when they arrive don't see the point or the connection to policy practice” “They think theory doesn't have relevance” “A large number are impatient with it, evincing the typical wrongheaded view that it's not relevant to ‘real’ life” Overcoming this innate resistance is seen by those program leaders who value theory—and our relatively small sample is likely biased in that direction based on who responded to our questions about theory in their programs—as one of their key educational challenges. As one veteran professional school leader observed about his students’ reflexive disdain of theory, “This is profoundly misguided, but they need to have this attitude remediated, which these courses can do if taught correctly.” How successful in general are these programs at doing this? While acknowledging that these assessments are anecdotal, our outreach suggests that program leaders perceive markedly uneven efforts and outcomes. Some program leaders feel that they are very successful in teaching relevant theory, others see mixed results (usually depending on individual professors), others are struggling with the role of theory in their curricula, and some eschew or have simply given up on offering any theory courses at all. The one point of agreement seems to be that these mixed efforts reflect how effectively curriculum and professors can link theory to practice. Our findings accord with Avey and Desch, who asked where policymakers had “acquired their most important intellectual skills” and found approximately 50 percent said fieldwork or experience, with an additional 11 percent citing professional or on the job training, while only 27 percent said formal education. Only when policymakers held PhDs, particularly in political science, were they more likely than the average policymaker to report that most of their skills came from formal education (Avey and Desch 2014, 237). The authors conclude: “We suspect that the focus on social science techniques and methods that dominates so much graduate, and increasingly undergraduate, training in political science is not useful across the board to policymakers” (Avey and Desch 2014, 244). Failure to improve theory education for future practitioners will result in new generations of policymakers misunderstanding and/or undervaluing, and consequently underutilizing, what academics can bring to the table. Our provisory finding that many professional master's degree programs do not focus heavily or consistently on IR theory education is unsurprising. Theory mastery is not what professional master's degrees are for. This is not so much a curricular failing as a feature. At the same time, just because theory should not be a primary focus of professional degree programs, teaching reasonably sophisticated theory literacy at the graduate level ought not be seen as the exclusive preserve of PhD programs. Why? Because PhD programs miss the very students who are most likely to become national security practitioners. As one of us notes elsewhere, “Rather than political science PhD programs, the US foreign policy and national security elites hail disproportionately from professional master's degree programs at the small cluster of top public policy schools in international affairs. These are applied professional programs focusing on interdisciplinary concentrations such as security studies or international political economy where, along with strategic studies master's degree programs in the professional military education system (America's war and staff colleges), the esoterica of avant-garde IR theory attract little interest” (Cooper and Yoshihara 2014, 65). To be clear, we are not suggesting these programs should be interested in theory esoterica. But we are suggesting that many could up their game to instill a more sophisticated understanding and appreciation of the analytic value of theory for the policymakers of tomorrow—for the sake of making their students not only better policy analysts, but also ones who understand how scholarship is useful to support policymaking. But how? There is of course always the answer that professional students need to be made to eat their proverbial broccoli: we as professors know theory is good for them even if they do not like it or understand why. However, unless current and aspiring practitioners come to apprehend for themselves why theory literacy is a useful professional skill, this approach is unlikely to make a positive or lasting impression. It could even do more harm than good. At worst, theory education along these lines is endured rather than appreciated and becomes conflated with credentialism: a rote regurgitation of concepts in order to satisfy gatekeepers who control the degree process. Alternatively, we can let these skeptical and reluctant students have it their own way by following the example of programs that do not bother teaching theory. However, we argue that in different ways each of these two approaches reinforces in the minds of future policymakers that theory is something “academics do” that is irrelevant in the real world. That is precisely the other side of the gap that needs bridging. If we want tomorrow's policymakers to see the value in theory-grounded studies, then it behooves us to pique their interest while they are still students in our classrooms. Not just for their sake, but also for the sake of our own profession's long-term relevance. As we have already said, none of this implies convincing reluctant IR professional schools to teach theory esoterica. Teaching theory to those who are training to use it to inform and guide real-world policy decisions necessarily requires a vastly different approach than teaching theory to those who are training to develop and test it. Whereas developing and testing cutting-edge theory is the touchstone of PhD research, professional students by contrast must learn to apply theory—for example, using historical case studies and futurist scenario analysis—in ways that provide analytic cohesion and suggest areas for policy-relevant research. We also want to stress that we are not suggesting that these programs shift their core focus away from applied knowledge (e.g., regional and functional areas of study) or the teaching of practical skills (e.g., through simulations and professional writing). These are essential features of professional IR education that must be retained and strengthened. Any enhancement of theory education, therefore, needs to be supplemental and/or complementary. But it should not be haphazard or left to chance. Thus, the challenge is how to develop more useful theory education within professional programs that are not intended to focus on theory as such. All of which brings us back again to the central question posed earlier: how can more useful theory education be integrated into academic programs that are designed for practitioners? If a common approach is to tackle IR theory in a single core course—or perhaps only in a module of a broader class—then it is imperative to tailor this curriculum for practitioners to get the most out of it. Simply replicating courses designed for PhD students is probably not going to do the trick. Nor is it likely to be adequate simply to offer “lite” versions of academically oriented courses. After all, the goal is not to dumb-down theory education for practitioners, but rather to curate the most policy-relevant aspects. Abridged versions of scholarly courses are likely to come across as demeaning and tedious, and could alienate rather than winning over the hearts and minds of tomorrow's policymakers. This problem is only compounded in instances when such courses are developed or taught by reluctant faculty who lack either interest or experience in translating theory for practice. Instead, theory needs to be translated for practitioners using curricula and pedagogies developed to meet their unique needs. This boils down to blending conceptual rigor and applied professional relevance. We refer to this teaching approach as practical theory. What we are proposing is an aspirational educational agenda to bridge the gap in ways that complement existing efforts. Our ideas are germinal—we do not purport to have a fully developed, tested, and validated educational model to offer. The extent to which we can claim improved learning outcomes from this approach is merely anecdotal from our own experience with students engaging more effectively with theory in seminar discussions, papers, and exams. However, as a starting point, we can at least suggest some guiding principles and promising techniques from our own experience for others to consider and experiment with. These insights are drawn from our deliberate experimentation in our own programs and classrooms and in writing a graduate-level theory textbook geared for practitioners (Gvosdev, Blankshain, and Cooper 2019). We are not claiming to be inventing the wheel. The essentials of practical theory are doubtless already being used in some programs, or by some individual professors, perhaps alongside other techniques we have not conceived. Our purpose here is modest—to provoke what we hope will be a wider discourse about the idea that there is another side of the gap that needs bridging, and in the meantime to share useful ideas with likeminded colleagues who may wish to adapt, test, refine, assess, or build on them. A key principle of teaching practical theory is to understand that among professional students, a lack of proficiency in theory frequently reflects a lack of interest rather than ability. Aspiring practitioners logically have vastly different interests that reflect their distinctive professional goals and needs. Theory taught for the sake of theory is justifiably not among these interests nor should it be. Therefore, teaching theory the same way to professional students as to doctoral students is unlikely to succeed. These students must be reassured that we are not trying to turn them into academics. Instead, they must be coached to see basic theory literacy as an essential foundation for practical applications. What is needed is a more-than-superficial conversance in the elemental competing worldviews that comprise the mainstream IR schools of realism, liberalism, English school, and social constructivism, as well as the country-specific paradigm of FPA. These competing worldviews can and should be presented cohesively as a conceptual “toolkit” that if used properly can be highly relevant for the practice of foreign and national security policymaking and analysis. It is always easier to agree on the need for reform than on what it should entail. For his part, Philip Zelikow proposes a relatively radical and ambitious overhaul to focus on what he terms “policy engineering.” As the name implies, he draws inspiration from the discipline of engineering. “I break the engineering methods down into three interacting sets of analytical judgments: about assessment, design, and implementation .... I emphasize the value of practicing methods in detailed and more lifelike case studies. I stress the significance of an organizational culture that prizes written staff work of the quality that used to be routine but has now degraded into bureaucratic or opinionated dross” (Zelikow 2019). Zelikow's policy engineering agenda merits consideration. At the same time, we suspect it cannot realistically be achieved without a more pedestrian initial focus on fundamentals. We, therefore, move back a step, from teaching policy engineering to teaching practitioners to understand and use academic theory as a general proposition. Doing so could serve as an incremental step toward a more holistic revamping of public policy professional education. However, for now, we prefer to offer a set of practical techniques for teaching theory to future policymakers that individual professors can quickly and relatively easily incorporate and experiment within their own syllabi and pedagogy. Teaching practical theory more than anything requires striking a deliberate balance between taking an oversimplified approach versus forcing professional students to engage with conceptual complexities that are unlikely to have any significant career relevance. Adopting this approach is most straightforward at the graduate level—where most programs are explicitly designated as either professional or academic—but it is worth noting that the same logic applies for upper-level undergraduate studies. After all, most undergraduates taking IR or foreign policy classes, even those concentrating in these fields, never plan to become scholars, and are therefore unlikely to relate to academic theories without appreciating their real-world utility. If approached deliberately and tackled adroitly, “practical theory” should not be oxymoronic. However, in our experience, it is difficult to teach effectively. Practical Theory in the Classroom: Translating Theory for Practice We have collectively spent many years experimenting to design and teach curricula that engage with IR theory in ways that are interesting and useful for professional students. Our goal has been to introduce a mature and sophisticated body of academic theory to practitioners who might lack an intuitive understanding of its applied utility. Our approach to theory is shaped by teaching it in a program where the focus is necessarily on other skillsets. We have successfully field-tested these methods in our own classrooms, and gained experience and feedback from mentoring dozens of our colleagues in doing the same. These experiences provided the genesis for this article, by coalescing and stress-testing our ideas about teaching practical theory. Many of the specifics that follow are novel approaches that we have developed specifically for teaching FPA theory to practitioners. It is therefore unlikely these specifics are already being used elsewhere and we offer them here only as illustrative examples of a practical theory approach. We focused our curricular efforts on FPA because we saw this sub-field as low-hanging fruit for honing a practical theory pedagogy. After all, FPA was conceived to explain the real-world dynamics of decision-making. More than any other niche of IR theorizing, FPA theory would seem ideally geared for practitioners to grasp and use to good effect. However, the challenges we have faced proved far thornier than we would have anticipated going into this exercise. Suffice to say that we have found the pitfalls highly instructive. The point here is less our particular curricular decisions than that we made altogether different decisions than we would have in designing courses for scholarly students. Most of the quandaries we grappled with would never have been issues for a more academic audience: selecting a small and cohesive set of key concepts on which to focus; agreeing on consistent and intuitive terms; relating FPA more intuitively to broader IR theory; and, most importantly, communicating the value of academic theory to a presumptively skeptical audience. Nonetheless, resolving these quandaries did not require grossly oversimplifying theory—practical theory is not “theory for dummies”—but it did entail making theory far more cohesive and intuitive as a useful conceptual toolbox. The most important lessons we have learned involve avoiding the pitfalls of our own scholarly interests and comfort zones. For example, resisting the temptation to luxuriate overly in ongoing disciplinary debates about theoretical assumptions and the construction of models and paradigms, or imagining that deep down our professional students yearn to be doctoral candidates if only we could make them realize it. This means acknowledging their sometimes visceral (even hostile) skepticism about the importance of theory by engaging with their doubts directly, and without succumbing to defensiveness. Teaching practical theory thus requires internalizing respect for where these students are coming from and where we as teachers are trying to help them to go (which is not following in our footsteps). Below, we offer a set of specific recommendations for using a practical theory approach to curriculum development and classroom pedagogy. While our specific examples are based on our experiences teaching in the FPA subfield, the principles can be adapted to teaching other substantive areas of study. The Right Stuff The first challenge in introducing an academic field to a practitioner audience is to “declutter” the field of knowledge while preserving a reasonably high level of conceptual sophistication. This requires firstly choosing which theories, frameworks, or concepts are most important and relevant for practical application. In professional graduate programs, time for theory is of the essence. Theory is important, but it is not the primary focus of the degree or sometimes even the class. An approach that assumes one cannot hope to even begin to comprehend the literature meaningfully without studying its every nook and cranny is going to fail. Teaching practical theory to professional students requires enriching rather than competing with a primary focus on teaching professional skills. A related challenge is creating cohesion where none may exist. In presenting FPA as a unified field of knowledge for practitioners, we focus heavily on three primary theoretical frames: Kenneth Waltz's levels of analysis (Waltz 2001), Robert Putnam's two-level games (Putnam 1988), and Graham Allison's models of government decision-making (Allison and Zelikow 1999). We take deliberate liberties by adapting and synthesizing these frames to present a unified and intuitive conceptual toolkit. Our overarching purpose for introducing levels of analysis—using David Singer's broader term for Waltz's images—is to relate FPA to systemic IR theories, as practitioner students may not intuitively grasp how FPA intersects with IR (Singer 1961). For the “black box” of decision-making within the US executive branch, we parse and adapt Allison's organizational models to provide a more usable, and intuitive, analytical toolkit. Specifically, we expand upon Allison's original three models to build out six discrete “analytical perspectives”: unitary state, cognitive, organizational process, bureaucratic politics, subordinate bureaucratic politics, and palace politics. Finally, we streamline Putnam, stressing the two-level game analogy as a metaphor for the domestic and international actors with which the executive branch is simultaneously interacting from inside its “black box.” This then becomes the central conceptual device to bring domestic politics into the equation. We are by no means alone in assigning these foundational works—other courses certainly assign Waltz, Allison, and Putnam. We argue the value in our approach is in tightly focusing on a small number of key theoretical frameworks and adapting them for student use. The key point here is not why we adopt or how we adapt these particular paradigms. The takeaway is that we make significantly different choices than we would have for an audience of scholars or scholars-in-training. We settled on this set of paradigms because their underlying logic is relatively easy to grasp and they lend themselves to being translated into “plain language” even when, as in the case of Putnam's article, there are pages of technical jargon and even mathematical formulae. It has been our experience that many mid-career practitioners who are returning to the classroom find they recognize aspects of these paradigms from their own lived professional experience. Even if a veteran practitioner has never heard the names Waltz, Allison, or Putnam, she will, in the course of her career, be asked to develop or evaluate policy options based on the realities of the international system, the equities of different departments and agencies, the likely appeal to the president or other senior decision-makers, and the requirement to align any choice within statutes and budgets enacted by the Congress. Indeed, these realities are captured in guidance that is given to interagency working groups charged with developing policy options (National Security Affairs Department 2017). That brings us back to an earlier point that is worth repeating: by synthesizing these theories, students gain a basic framework to make sense of the environment in which they operate as practitioners in a structured, objective, and dispassionate manner. Scholars use theory to explain policymaking from the outside peering in, whereas if theory is to be of any use to practitioners, it is as a conceptual map to navigate within the maelstrom of policymaking. The underlying theory is the same, but it must be adapted for these very different uses. Presenting FPA as a cohesive overarching conceptual framework also facilitates the introduction of middle-level theory. This is helpful in that middle-level theory is often the most intuitive and relevant to policymakers. “There are many government officials who spend countless hours working on nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and many other functional and regional issues. This means that so-called middle-level theory on these regional and functional subjects is of immediate interest to policymakers, and academic ideas in these domains often feed into the policy process” (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 304). Along the same lines, policymakers also tend to gravitate toward theories whose independent variables are factors they can influence (Byman and Kroenig 2016, 305). Pairing theories at any level with real-world examples that demonstrate pertinent instances of such agency by policymakers is always helpful. It is not only what theories you choose to focus on, but also the order in which you present them. Typical sequencing schemes may need to be rethought for engaging practitioners. All constituent elements within bodies of theory build on each other in nonlinear ways, which always makes it difficult to decide what needs to go before what, regardless of the audience. But conceptual sequencing in a course syllabus requires a different logic for practitioners. In sequencing new concepts and frameworks, we find it useful to ask not only the usual question, “How does this theory relate to other theories?” but also, “What does this theory explain about the real-world to which practitioners can relate?” and “What foundational concepts does this theory assume knowledge of that practitioners may lack?” For example, we find that starting with the assumptions made by Allison's rational actor model (or, as we relabel it, the unitary state perspective, for reasons we will explain below) allows us to begin with the foundational assumption that states are motivated by their national interest—and to relate this to structural IR theory. This starting point allows students to assess the extent to which that theoretical answer actually explains what practitioner students have observed and experienced in real life (or can readily discern from real-world case studies). Given that practitioners are naturally inclined to see national interests as the desired explanation for foreign policy, we thus position the rational actor model first as a mental default against which students could grapple with the alternative explanations represented by the other perspectives. Times Change Temporal sensitivities are especially important for practical theory aimed at practitioners. When Graham Allison uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to explicate his models of government decision-making, this may still suffice even many decades later for scholars and PhD students for whom the theory is the point and the case study is one illustration or test of the theory. Practitioners by contrast want to see how theory explains the contemporary national security milieu in which they operate. This imperative for currency not only manifests in presenting contemporary case studies, but also extends to the substantive presentation of theory itself. Venerable paradigms may need to be updated to better reflect the realities practitioner students will face today and tomorrow. This requires striking a delicate balance between hanging on to what is important from older theories and updating them to fit current times. The US government has changed significantly since the 1960s and 1970s, and while classical lenses (like bureaucratic politics and organizational process) still explain much of government behavior and introduce important concepts, they miss out on dynamics that have grown in importance over the last few decades. The foundational theories about how foreign policy decisions are made were developed at a time when there were fewer cabinet departments, when foreign policy was largely concentrated within the Departments of State and Defense, and where the cabinet secretaries often also functioned as the President's inner circle of advisors. As we argue elsewhere in greater depth, many of those assumptions are no longer operative (Gvosdev 2017; Cooper, Gvosdev, and Blankshain 2018). A larger number of federal departments and agencies now claim portions of the foreign policy enterprise and both the State and Defense Departments have expanded in size, particularly through the explosion of functional agencies and the expansion of geographic coverage. Legal aspects of national security are now increasingly complex and pronounced, involving not only the Justice Department, but also lawyers and counsels spread across all corners of the national security apparatus who can sometimes influence the highest levels of policymaking. At the same time, the oversight functions of the Executive Office of the President have ballooned, while recent vice presidents have become substantial players in foreign policymaking, all with the attendant growth of White House staffs that are neither tethered to the departments nor responsible to them. Thus, when teaching FPA, we add a palace politics perspective to reflect an empirical trend: important players in the American president's inner circle are increasingly found not in the cabinet secretaries, but in the White House staff, or even confidants outside of government. One simply cannot explain the foreign policy decisions of the Trump administration or its recent predecessors without accounting for the palace intrigue of the modern White House staff (Gvosdev 2017). At the same time, the older assessment that a main driver of policy was division and competition between departments has been augmented by the rise of issue-based coalitions that span departments, which can often pit subunits of the same agency against each other at lower levels of the interagency process. Thus, we also introduce a subordinate bureaucratic politics perspective (sub-bureaucratic politics) to reflect another real-world trend: the rapid growth of the primary foreign policy bureaucracies, adding additional layers and divisions, particularly the growing chasm between geographically and functionally defined organizations or subunits (Cooper, Gvosdev, and Blankshain 2018). While scholars may not understand or care about sub-bureaucratic politics, if only because it is difficult for them to study, it is nonetheless an essential conceptual lens for practitioners who will be swimming in these subterranean waters. Our broad takeaway is that, when assigning classic theories in any field, instructors should think carefully about not only what has changed since those theories were first developed—advances in the academic literature to be sure, but also changes in the real world in which their students will operate professionally. Classic theories can then be modified or augmented as needed. This can often be an iterative process, with professors learning from their mid-career students and colleagues with recent practitioner experience, for example, highlighting assumptions that may no longer make sense. What's in a Name? A keen reader may have noted that in parsing Allison's three classic models of decision-making, we also take deliberate liberties with nomenclature—e.g., substituting “unitary state” for “rational actor” and delineating the “cognitive perspective” to encompass an entire literature on behavioral psychology that grew out of classic works such as Robert Jervis’ classic on leader misperception (Jervis 1968). These adaptations reflect another challenge of practical theory pedagogy: agreeing on consistent and intuitive terminology, even when it sometimes flies in the face of scholarly convention, or suggests a scholarly convention that does not actually exist. Willfully committing such heresies is likely to be unnerving for any scholar. Overcoming these deeply ingrained inhibitions requires reminding ourselves that the intended audience of practical theory is not other academics, but rather our own professional students. It is easy for academics to forget how vexing practitioner students may find it that we often use different terms to describe similar things, or similar terms to describe different things. Even where terms of art are widely used in academia, these frequently do not accord precisely with their use in either common or professional language. Social science literature refers to an “agent” as any person or entity authorized or capable to act; the Joint Chiefs of Staff glossary defines an “agent” as a person tasked with collecting intelligence (Department of Defense 2019, 9). Likewise, the academic use of “agency” is consistent with “agent,” denoting the capability to act to affect things, whereas bureaucrats know that an “agency” is an organization for which they work. These examples may seem trite, but such differences in academic and common or professional lexicons can be sources of bafflement or misapprehension for practitioners. A prime example is the concept of rationality. As Daniel Kahneman notes about his attempts to translate key developments in psychology and behavioral economics for a general audience: In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and values … in common language a rational person is certainly reasonable. For economists and decision theorists, the adjective [rational] has an altogether different meaning. The only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent … Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not. (Kahneman 2013, 411) The term “actor” presents a similar problem for practical theory, because of the popular understanding of this word to designate an individual playing a role, rather than an entity that is making choices or undertaking action. While students can understand that we often use anthropomorphizing language to describe the state (when say that “Russia wants this” or “Washington decided that”), in our experience their default fallback when hearing the word “actor” is often to associate it with a specific human being. Despite the careful social science explanations we offer in the classroom, when asked to define the “rational actor” model, we find year after year that at least a few students will revert to something along the lines of: “Are the president's judgments being clouded by emotions?” or “Is Kim Jong-un crazy?” For these reasons, we repackage Allison's rational actor model (also known as Model I) as the “unitary state perspective,” focusing students’ attention on another key feature of the model—the idea that the state is a unitary actor with a single set of national interests—before delving into the more complicated discussion of rationality. Thus, we can discuss at length Allison's core understanding of the state as a rational actor, but only after disabusing students of the common misperception that this is about assessing a leader's state of mind. This is an example of what we mean when we say that the goal is not to simplify theory, but rather to repackage it for practice. At the same time, liberties must not be taken too far. It is important to define widely used scholarly terms of art precisely, even when they do not accord with standard usage, both so students understand the terms when they read or converse with academics, and so they can glean the fundamental insights associated with the term. If we repackage theory too much, we risk widening the gap between practitioners and academics by denying them any common language with which to engage together on theory. One example of this is bureaucratic “politics.” Although the focus here is politics in the abstract sense of bargaining and trade-offs, practitioners encountering the term frequently revert to an association with partisan politics. Thus, a misapprehension we often encounter from practitioner students is that bureaucratic politics is what explains the inner workings of Congress. For this reason, we have seriously considered renaming this perspective to something more intuitive, such as “bureaucratic bargaining.” However, in the end, we think this would be a liberty too far, given both the scholarly ubiquity of the term bureaucratic politics and the importance of conveying the idea that politics does not exclusively mean partisan politics. Writing for and teaching practitioners continuously reminds us that we all use more scholarly jargon than we realize. The first task of teaching practical theory is to reduce the use of academic terminology that would reinforce the pre-existing bias of practitioners that academics offer nothing of value for those working in the “real world.” Yet we are the first to confess we still regularly catch ourselves speaking and writing in ways that are not the most accessible when discussing familiar (to us) social science concepts, such as endogeneity. At the same time, we need to remain alert that for classes with seasoned mid-career practitioners, there is the opposite danger arising from professional jargon. National security professionals hail from a variety of backgrounds. For example, diplomats, congressional staffers, and military, intelligence, and law enforcement officers all reflect distinctive cultures that speak different professional languages. It is therefore easy for a class of mixed mid-career professionals to become mired in a tangle of inconsistent professional lingo. A Foreign Service Officer understands what a demarche is but may be clueless when someone refers to a Joint Staff “JP” (although she might discern the meaning once she is told that JP stands for “joint publication”). Even within the same department, a term might have multiple meanings (e.g., at the Defense Department the acronym “PM” can refer either to patient management or to peace-making operations). A term used by one branch of the military may be completely unknown to others. For example, the expression “tooth-to-tail” ratio may make perfect sense to army officers, while being totally unfamiliar to those from the navy. Apply Early and Often When teaching theory to practitioners, it is essential to focus on how and why your students will use the conceptual tools you teach. Ask yourself why they need to know this before they ask you. In the classroom, we often start the day's session with a discussion of recent news items that can be made sense of using frameworks and concepts covered in the course. At the beginning of the term, we as instructors frequently supply the news items and walk students through application, but by the end of term students often come to class eager to discuss some breaking news in conceptual terms. Similarly, in writing a theory textbook on FPA that is geared for practitioners, we included tips for applying the analytic perspectives in each chapter, and ended the book with a practical application annex, which includes several case studies and a set of questions practitioners can ask when applying theoretical tools to real-world situations. As Jentleson writes, “Teaching is enhanced when students’ interest in ‘real world’ issues is engaged in ways that reinforce the argument that theory really is relevant, and CNN is not enough” (Jentleson 2002, 170). We find it beneficial to use a mix of historical and very recent examples. A variety of examples helps students understand what is new and what is not, makes the case that these theories are relevant today and have staying power for tomorrow, and helps engage students across a range of ages and professional experience. We have found the use of historical examples to be particularly important as practitioners are often inclined to see situations as sui generis, leading to a “groundhog day” phenomenon in policy, particularly at the beginning of each new administration. At the same time, the use of parallel contemporary examples helps to reinforce the idea that foreign and national security policy is always a mix of continuity and change. We also use real-world anecdotes and case studies in a variety of ways. A colorful narrative can draw students in, focusing their attention on phenomena to be explained by a theoretical framework. Policymaker's memoirs, such as Ben Rhodes’ account of the Obama administration's policy decisions toward Syria, often work well for these purposes (Rhodes 2018). Detailed, step-by-step applications of concepts to historical events, such as Steven Hurst's application of Putnam's two-level game framework to the Iran nuclear negotiations, can help students make sense of abstract ideas (Hurst 2016). Full-blown case studies, with little or no mention of the theoretical tools, give students an opportunity to practice applying the tools on their own, building confidence in their ability to understand and utilize theoretical perspectives and frameworks. For this purpose, we frequently assign long-form “tick-tock” style journalism—for example, selections from Bob Woodward's books such as Bush at War or Obama's Wars (Woodward, 2006, 2011), or Peter Baker's detailed coverage of President Obama's decision-making leading up to the surge of American troops in Afghanistan (Baker 2009), Congressional Research Service reports, or collections of news articles. This reinforces the central goal of practical theory education: to give future practitioners a useful conceptual toolkit to help them utilize scholarship to make sense of a complex world. Assessing Results Of course, the key to any curricular reform is assessing whether it is achieving desired learning outcomes. We are in the early days of having fully implemented these methods in our own classrooms over the past two years, and thus do not have comprehensive data with which to evaluate our approach. Instead, we offer some preliminary indicators of success and suggestions that other adopters can use to evaluate our “practical theory” approach moving forward. As noted above, one encouraging sign we have noted is students, near the end of term, proactively seeking out news stories and applying theoretical concepts from class with minimal coaching. Another has been less vocal resistance to learning and using academic concepts. We also see conceptual paradigms being used more and more effectively in classroom discussions, case-study analysis, and exams. Moving forward, we suggest more formal mechanisms for evaluating the practical theory approach. While student course evaluations are an imperfect measure of curricular and pedagogical success, to say the least, if a goal of the practical theory approach is to alleviate student (and faculty) dissatisfaction with these introductory theory courses, they may be useful in narrow contexts. Furthermore, a key objective of this approach is changing students’ attitudes toward, and openness to, academic theory. This could be measured using a survey of student attitudes toward academics and theory at the beginning and end of the teaching term. A second objective is to improve students’ understanding of, and ease with, key theoretical constructs. Faculty (and ideally outside observers) can review students’ work with a focus on evaluating their understanding of, and ability to apply, academic theory to real-world cases and events. A final objective is to help “bridge the gap” by making academic work more accessible to practitioners on the demand side. This could be assessed by surveying alumni who have begun or returned to practitioner careers to ask about their use of academic theory and research in their jobs. Conclusion To bridge the gap between academia and the policy world the bridge needs to be more bidirectional. We need to build strong foundations on both sides, including refocusing the way we teach future practitioners. Encouraging scholars to conduct policy-relevant research and write accessibly is important, but it is not enough. It is also crucial to equip future policymakers with the necessary theoretical grounding to value and make the most of academic contributions. Our experience exploring a “practical theory” approach to our pedagogy in professional graduate classrooms has led us to a number of hard-learned lessons that we believe can be applied to a range of IR and other topics: carefully choose theories and frameworks that are most likely to be useful in practice, update them for the times as needed, reconsider names and banish academic jargon when possible, and apply theory early and often. We hope that other professors might benefit from these insights to bring more practical theory into their classrooms, and that doing so will produce students and policymakers who are less skeptical of theory, and more open to engaging with policy-relevant academic work. Interviews Betts, Richard. Leo A. Shifrin Professor of War and Peace Studies and Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies and Co-Director of the International Security Policy Program, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (April 16, 2020). Biddle, Stephen. Professor of International and Public Affairs and Co-Director of the International Security Policy Program, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (April 9, 2020). de Nevers, Renée. Associate Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs and Chair, Social Science Program, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University (April 27, 2020). Dinar, Shlomi. Professor of Politics and IR, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Innovation, and Director of the Master of Art in Global Affairs Program, Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University (April 15, 2020). Dueck, Colin. Professor and former Graduate Director in Political Science, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University (April 10, 2020). Feinstein, Lee. Professor of International Studies and Dean of the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, University of Indiana (April 17, 2020). Gartner, Scott Sigmund. Professor of International Affairs, Law, Political Science and Engineering Systems and Director of the Penn State School of International Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University (April 13, 2020). Haggard, Stephan. Krause Distinguished Professor and Director of the Professional Master's Program, School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego (April 13, 2020). Karlin, Mara. Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Strategic Studies Program, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (April 29, 2020). Knopf, Jeffery. Professor and Program Chair of the Master of Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (April 13, 2020). Moltz, James (Clay). Professor and Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School (April 10, 2020). Morgan, William. Professor of Strategic Studies and Course Director for Diplomacy and Statecraft, Marine War College, U.S. Marine Corps University (April 14, 2020). Reveron, Derek, Professor and Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs, College of Naval Warfare and College of Naval Command and Staff, U.S. Naval War College (April 19, 2020). Rudolph, Chris. Associate Professor of IR and Program Chair of the Master's Degree Concentration in Global Governance, Politics, and Security, School of International Service, American University (April 9, 2020). Shambaugh, George. Associate Professor of International Affairs and Government and Director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Smith, Courtney. Associate Professor and Acting Dean, Seton Hall School of Diplomacy, Seton Hall University (April 14, 2020). Sotomayor, Arturo. Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Security Policy Studies Program, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University (April 13, 2020). Notes Author's notes: All views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent official positions of the U.S. Naval War College or any other agency or institution with which we are affiliated. Footnotes 1 To avoid unfairly castigating or lauding any particular program, we anonymized the results of our interviews and curricular review. See Interviews for a full list of interviewees and Supplementary Information for more detail on our interviews and a complete list of programs and syllabi reviewed. References Allison Graham T. , Zelikow Philip. 1999 . Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis , 2nd ed. New York : Longman . 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TI - Bridging the Other Side of the Gap: Teaching “Practical Theory” to Future Practitioners
JF - International Studies Perspectives
DO - 10.1093/isp/ekaa010
DA - 2020-09-24
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/bridging-the-other-side-of-the-gap-teaching-practical-theory-to-future-21mPXcEycs
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -