A Multi-Phase Approach to Using Cases in the Classroom

• In Event: Exploring Effective Leadership Education Pedagogies

Short Description

While a popular approach to bridging theory and practice is using cases in the classroom, student outcomes are often predictable and relatively basic. This presenter will share classroom-tested ways to use published cases, rich narrative scenarios, and student-generated cases to enhance leadership wisdom, critical thinking, and analytic writing. Sample lesson plans and rubrics will be available.

Detailed Abstract

While teachers assign cases to help students apply concepts, student answers are often reasonable but banal. There are three usual problems for this: students may not relate well to circumstances in cases, students may not find the case questions particularly interesting or important, and savvy students soon figure out how to give expected answers without exerting significant effort. The ideal solution may be to have students craft their own cases and devise answers to their own questions. To get to that level of sophistication, students must be guided through a process from case learning to case writing. In this session, I present my classroom-tested approach to using published cases, rich narrative scenarios, and student-generated cases to enhance leadership wisdom, critical thinking, and analytic writing. Sample lesson plans and rubrics will be available.

Teaching leadership lessons through published cases is a common pedagogical practice, albeit one with limitations and staunch critics (Argyris, 1980). Although there are several ways of using cases, classroom cases commonly come from established sources such as textbooks, case journals, or well-known case providers such as Harvard Business Publishing or LearningEdge from MIT Sloan School of Management. The teaching note is a major attraction for published cases: it illuminates the purposes of each case, provides teaching guidelines to meet learning objectives, and suggests appropriate case questions and answers. Therein lies the fundamental problem: published cases focus on the authors’ interests and viewpoints, thus leading students to draw repeatable conclusions or known solutions.

Using published cases as intended allows students to apply theory, but often does not sufficiently challenge students to determine what is important to learn from the situation. Engaged students sometimes challenge the applicability of case questions and suggest alternatives, but many students simply find constructing such meaningful questions quite difficult (McDonald, 2013). Learning solely through traditional published cases the, is akin to forever riding a bike with training wheels: it does not prepare one to balance in the real world. Teaching students too craft and answer their own questions about the published case by providing only stated learning objectives is one way to overcome much of the rote learning problem. However, published cases frequently lack complexity, hence have something of a cartoon character.

Teaching leadership lessons through more extensive real or imagined scenarios using feature films or full-length books is another common case method intended to overcome the thinness of traditional published cases. Rich narrative detail and situation development of these genres help students grapple with more realistic complexity. Under the best of circumstances, teachers allow students to extract meaning by crafting learning objectives as well as answering their own questions about the case. Unfortunately, teachers often interrupt the learning cycle by asking leading questions about the case, once again urging students to state “right” answers. Even when a teacher allows students full responsibility in extracting meaning, the teacher has still pre-determined the subject and its applicability to specified learning objectives, thus remaining subject to criticism by those advocating more learner-centered instruction (Foster & Carboni, 2009). Replacing teacher-centered cases with student-generated cases is one way of ensuring inclusiveness and deep learning.

An excellent way to demonstrate subject mastery is to teach concepts to others. Storytelling itself is a time-tested way of illuminating concepts and experimenting with ideas that may be more useful than traditional cases (Mintzberg, 2004). When students write their own leadership cases, they write about issues of genuine concern to themselves and their peers. When students write their own teaching notes, they learn to ask fundamental questions: “What might be learned?” and “How might theory be applied?” These types of questions help students think more broadly, more analytically, and more critically, especially when they are encouraged to re-write their cases as their knowledge increases and revisit their solutions as their understanding unfolds (Slabon, Richards, & Dennen, 2014). It is also an opportunity for students to develop more cogent and more focused writing skills (Ashamalla & Crocitto, 2001).

As with any learner-centric tool, teachers must carefully weigh relative costs and benefits before incorporating it. Traditional case method is often done in teams. However, group writing is generally not effective with student-generated case writing even when team process is guided and social loafing is suppressed (Bailey, Sass, Swiercz, Seal, & Kayes, 2005). While individual writing is more effective, student-generated case writing does benefit from collaboration, especially working in pairs, while gathering data and peer-reviewing case drafts and analysis (McDonald, 2013). Unrefined student cases are often of limited utility and present underdeveloped solutions; therefore, it may be important to incentivize students to improve their work (Corrigan & Craciun, 2012). There is no doubt that there will be richer writing instruction when any aspect of student case work is involved.

Threading aspects of case writing throughout an entire program reduces the burden in individual courses and yields benefits across the curriculum. For example, in our leadership master’s program, authentic case work begins in the program’s first management theory course, is refined in the mid-way leadership course, and results in a fully-articulated case study with teaching note in the capstone course. Inclusive leadership lessons through enhanced case teaching can be scaffolded in three phases once underlying theory has been presented:
1. Student-crafted questions (after teaching the art of question-asking).
2. Student-crafted learning objectives (after teaching the art of extracting meaning from narrative within the boundaries of course objectives).
3. Student-crafted cases with teaching notes (after teaching the art of iteratively re-framing problems and their potential solutions).

Participant

• Elizabeth H. Jones, Notre Dame of Maryland University