This blog was written by Katie LaCommare, with the help of Sarah Silverman , as part of the Hub Affiliates program.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
In my first blog post “Thinking of Transforming your Introductory Course?” I made the case for transforming our introductory courses. When students succeed in their first courses, they are more likely to reach graduation. We owe it to them to help them graduate and case studies can help achieve this. However, we also know that incorporating a new activity or new technique into our teaching is no easy feat. Any teacher can tell you, it doesn’t always go according to plan. Even with the “best laid plans”, an activity can go awry. Students may take a lot longer on a topic or activity than you expect. They may come away with the wrong impressions or understanding. Or maybe your attempt at eliciting participation is met with stares or one-word answers. We have all been there. To avoid these pitfalls, I am taking advantage of the teaching and learning literature to gain some specific “how to” strategies to utilize in the classroom.
One resource that I have used this summer is: Start with a Story: The Case Study Method of Teaching College Science by Clyde Herreid. While the title is a harbinger that the book is a plea for using case studies in science teaching, the book and its information is applicable and generalizable to any classroom and subject. The format is easily digestible because it consists of 20 sections with each section containing multiple short chapters. I have been using the book to help me systematically think about my transformation – plan my syllabus, content schedule, specific cases and classroom activities, grading, assessment, and evaluation. For anybody interested in case studies, I would recommend the book. The book provides concrete classroom tips, clarifies definitions, reminds us to be patient and forgive our mistakes and finally makes clear distinctions between grading, assessment and evaluation with respect to how to measure success. The book contains many great tidbits, but like anything, it also has weaknesses.
In the first three sections, Herreid makes the case for case study teaching, defines it and provides an overview of the different kinds of cases that can be used in the classroom. These chapters reinforce ideas that are peppered throughout the active-learning literature – building engagement in the classroom and curriculum means that we must take students beyond the content. A central feature of case studies – the contextualizing of content in a story makes it germane to students by illustrating the relevance of a concept and by teaching skills, collaboration and scientific process along with the content. For example, Herreid argues that teaching scientific process, collaboration and analytical skills are just as important as learning the detailed chemical pathways of photosynthesis. While Herried is making this case for the sciences, I suspect that in our ever-evolving educational and societal landscape, a teacher can easily swap out “science” for “history” and that a professor teaching freshmen history is equally concerned with teaching historical literacy as they are with teaching historical analytical skills, collaboration and process. I suspect that these goals are high on the list of most of our academic programs. In section 3, he provides a table that is meant to illustrate the intersection between different kinds of teaching methods and how the student experiences them in the classroom (e.g. a term paper is an individual assignment and the socratic method is a classroom discussion). Sarah and I found this to be limited in its utility and have provided a reimagined version here that we hope helps faculty think about how case studies can be embedded into the curriculum.
It is in sections IV through XV, the book clarifies pedagogical definitions and makes concrete suggestions for classroom management. Herreid provides clear definitions of case study teaching, team-based learning, and of different kinds of cases. I appreciated this clear development and use of definitions. In my experience of wading into pedagogical literature is a bit like navigating through a tangled bank, a single acronym (e.g. PBL – see below) or term has multiple meanings and applications. This can be frustrating and this frustration is eased with clear definitions. Herried provides clear definitions of the different types of case studies and how they get used in the classroom and provides specific tips and examples for how to use each particular type of case. It is these concrete suggestions that I found particularly useful. For example, in Chapter 6 he provides specific step-by-step tips for using team-based learning in conjunction with case studies – a process I intend to adopt. He repeats a variation of this advice in Chapter 8 which leads to one of my biggest takeaway messages: be formulaic! Follow the same structure with every case and when using teams, take time early in the semester to set-up and establish teamwork.
It is also in these sections that my biggest frustrations with the book began to mount. Clear classroom strategies were provided in both a disorganized and repetitive manner – same advice given in multiple chapters or sections. He provides the same suggestions in Chapter 6, 8 and 29. Other tidbits and suggestions are scattered through-out the chapters, but not necessarily in the chapter you might think. For example, some of the best advice on grading is in Chapter 29: Larry Finally Wrote his Book. Not in Section XVIII: How to Grade Students where he provides advice on evaluating participation, but doesn’t provide other specifics on grading. In the end, the reader has to wade through a lot of repetitive and unnecessary information to get to the best advice and suggestions.
That said, I very much appreciated the reminders to be patient, forgive mistakes and expect to have to practice the craft. I am the type of person that goes straight for the negative reviews when I am researching a new purchase. So, one of the first chapters that I read was Chapter 46: How Not to Teach with Case Studies. And, I particularly liked the quote on page 337:
“The road to wisdom? – Well, it’s plain and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.”
I think that this is powerful, because it does remind us that we will make mistakes, but overtime less and less of them. And, teaching, like anything else requires practice. You wouldn’t expect to know how to hit a softball in one swing, play a musical instrument the first time that you pick it up, or fly fish for the first time, why would you expect that we would be able to utilize a new teaching technique perfectly for the first time. If you decide to adopt case studies as a pedagogical technique, expect it to require practice!
Finally, I appreciated the clear distinctions that were made with respect to grading students, assessing students and evaluating the role of case studies in course and program goals. These chapters were a useful reminder of the distinction between these aspects of appraising the utility of pedagogy on course, program or college-wide learning goals and outcomes. However, specific suggestions or references for how to do this would have been useful.
Overall, I found the book to have a lot of value in helping me think about how I will incorporate case studies into my course and syllabus and how I will appraise my outcomes; I found many specific hints and nuggets of information to help me organize a single class period and an arch of class periods around a single case. My biggest complaint is that I found the book to be repetitive and the good, specific, how-to tips to be quite dispersed and therefore difficult to find and nail-down.
Note from Sarah – Instructional Designer
Katie does an excellent job of reviewing this book and recommending some strategies from her perspective as a STEM instructor and generalizing to other fields. I want to take a moment to reinforce this point about how case-study pedagogy can apply throughout campus. The College of Arts and Sciences has embarked on an initiative to promote Practice-Based or Problem-Based Learning (PBL) more generally in the college. Case-study pedagogy is also very prevalent in business education, with the cases developed at Harvard Business School gaining popularity throughout the country. Many other disciplines use methods similar to case study pedagogy, although referred to by a different name given disciplinary tradition – see for example the use of the “thought experiment” in philosophy or simulations political science. While perhaps not identical to the type of case-based pedagogy that Katie discusses while reviewing this book, these methods all share the key component of asking students to learn by applying their knowledge to a real or imagined scenario or problem rather than just memorizing content.
If you are interested in learning more about or implementing case study pedagogy more generally, I recommend the following resources in addition to the book that Katie reviews above.
Summary of Case-Study Pedagogy from Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching (5 minute read)
Toward a Pedagogy of Cases in Teacher Education (20 minute read)
Inquiry Based Learning in the Humanities (15 minute read)
The Hub is, as always, available to support efforts to try new instructional approaches such as case-based learning. Some ways you can work with the Hub include one-on-one consultations with a Hub Instructional Designer, or gathering a group of co-instructors or a group of interested faculty to explore a new pedagogical practice together, with the facilitation of an instructional designer.
Table 1
Featured image by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash