The Role of the Instructor in the Case Method Classroom

Some years ago I served as faculty leader of the required curriculum committee of the Darden School. In this capacity I sought to promote the already-strong teaching culture at the school, by designing a coffee mug as a gift for my colleagues. I hoped that this mug would promote faculty reflection on the set of professional values underpinning the philosophy of student-centered learning. Though a mug may seem an odd medium for a collection of philosophical expressions, it does have the utility of sitting where one is bound to see it and be reminded of its ideas. The quotations on this mug help one consider three questions:

What is student-centered teaching?
Why is student-centered teaching valuable?
What does excellence in student-centered teaching require of the teacher?

You might take a moment to ponder the quotations on the mug before reading my thoughts on them, which follow.

Quotations on the Mug

Ideas About Excellence in Student-Centered Teaching and Course Development "Without a vision, the people are lost." (Proverbs 29:18) "The word 'education' means literally, the process of leading out. Thus we are talking of the way in which all your faculties and capacities should be encouraged to expand and unfold themselves. The essential spring of all growth is within you." (Alfred North Whitehead) "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin) "Telling children, and then testing them on what they have been told inevitably has the effect of producing benchbound learners whose motivation for learning is likely to be extrinsic to the task at hand--pleasing the teacher, getting into college, artificially maintaining self-esteem." (Jerome Bruner) "The only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning." (Carl Rogers) "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment" (Walter Wriston) "Teachers also must learn." (Charles Gragg) "Be daring; be first; be different." (Anita Roddick) "God is in the details." (Mies van der Rohe) "Overfamiliarization is a trap. That is the irony of skill: the more adept you are at something, the less likely you are to appreciate a varying interpretation; the greater your mastery of the skills and routines associated with a particular discipline, the less you will be tempted to generate new approaches." (Denise Shekerjian) "A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage." (Edwin Land) "Success is never final." (Winston Churchill) "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." (Thomas Jefferson) "In dialogue, people become observers of their own thinking." (Peter Senge) "It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that just ain't so." (Satchel Paige) "Knowledge is not necessarily a comfortable thing to acquire." (Steven Weiss) "We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the tenderness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart." (Martin Luther King, Jr.) "All knowledge begins with a question." (Neil Postman) "The answers worth getting are never in the back of the book." (Jeff Millman) "Every case is as different as the people to whom it happened." (Abby Hansen) "To learn requires a willing suspension of disbelief." (Robert Dorfman) "The successful teacher is known by the mark he leaves on his students." (Robert F. Goheen) "Teaching is like sending a letter with an imperfect address: you never know where and when the message will be delivered." (C. Roland Christensen) (Copyright © Darden School 1994)

Commentary on the Mug

"Where there is no vision, the people are lost." (Proverbs 29:18) Class teaching plans, whole courses, and even entire institutions can lose their way relatively easily. To become lost means to be diverted from core goals and values. Having a clear vision of where the class, course, or institution should be headed is the first defense against aimless diversion. Darden's Mission Statement, adopted in 1992, is an example of an institutional vision: it outlines what the school values, and by omission, what it does not. A good syllabus should do the same for a course. And two or three clear teaching objectives should do the same for each class. All this seems unarguable, except that most professors and institutions do not try to articulate their visions. Critics of vision statements call them "Motherhood," and "boilerplate." They may have a point: developing a vision is not worth the trouble if the vision is not practiced. Instructors and institutions must convey their vision not only by stating it, but also by modeling it--one must not only "talk the talk"; one needs to "walk the talk" as well. The quotations that follow can help an instructor envision, and practice student-centered teaching. A sound vision is the seed of excellent teaching and course design.

"The word 'education' means literally, the process of leading out. Thus we are talking of the way in which all your faculties and capacities should be encouraged to expand and unfold themselves. The essential spring of all growth is within you." (Alfred North Whitehead) The notion that growth originates from within the student is a radical challenge to the job of the teacher. First, it undercuts the traditional teacher-student contract that the student should be a passive vessel for ideas to be received from the teacher. Instead it suggests that the student is perhaps the prime actor in the educational process. Second, it implies that the job of the teacher is to lead the growth process, rather than manage or control it. Leadership requires a considerably different mind-set, one with a heightened sensitivity to educational process (i.e., how the student expands and unfolds.)

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin) "Telling children, and then testing them on what they have been told inevitably has the effect of producing benchbound learners whose motivation for learning is likely to be extrinsic to the task at hand--pleasing the teacher, getting into college, artificially maintaining self-esteem." (Jerome Bruner) "The only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning." (Carl Rogers) The half-life of didactic learning is extremely short. The half-life of experiential learning is considerably longer. The case method trains students to develop recommendations to realistic problems through direct engagement with those problems. Having to invent solutions to practical problems trains you in the objective knowledge necessary to confront the problem, and also in the arts of problem solving and invention. Teaching-as-telling not only has a short impact, it produces the wrong behavioral responses from the student. Teaching-as-leading (i.e., leading through experiences) produces lasting learning. Franklin's key point is that educational success so often begins with the right attitude on the part of the instructor: involving rather than telling.

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." (Walter Wriston) I believe that the greatest value-added in professional training is in the growth of judgment, as opposed to growth of objective knowledge such as terminology, formulas, etc. Wriston, the former CEO of Citibank, rightly argues that good judgment cannot be taught, it can only grow through experience. Thus, professional training should have a significant experiential dimension. Book learning isn't enough. Of course, Wriston's dictum is applicable to the art of teaching: we grow in teaching judgment by trying new things, stretching our capabilities. Indeed, if the teacher does not experience a failed case discussion, or program event, or course, every now and then, the odds are that he or she isn't stretching enough.

"Teachers also must learn." (Charles Gragg) In a famous essay with this title, Gragg argued that teachers not only must talk; they must also listen. By listening, the teacher could detect the mood and needs of the students for learning, and thus tailor the teaching approach for greater impact. I like this quotation for another interpretation too: teachers must continue to be students of their field so that they model the learning process for their students, and master fresh ideas and events as they come along.

"Be daring; be first; be different." (Anita Roddick) This is provocative advice for someone seeking to enter a new market. (Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop, and defined a new segment of the health and beauty aids industry.) In teaching, one enters a market each day, a market for ideas in the minds of students. One hears much about the virtues of "getting out of the box" of preconceived notions in order to invent new products and market entry strategies. Roddick's advice is as relevant to teachers and course designers as it is to market strategists.

"God is in the details." (Mies van der Rohe) Van der Rohe suggests that excellence resides not so much in the grand design of a project, as in its detailed execution. So it is with the design of a course, and the design of a teaching plan for an individual class. There is little in our training to be professors that prepares us for mastering the minutiae of teaching, yet it is in the minutiae that the consciousness of students for the material may be won or lost.

"Overfamiliarization is a trap. That is the irony of skill: the more adept you are at something, the less likely you are to appreciate a varying interpretation; the greater your mastery of the skills and routines associated with a particular discipline, the less you will be tempted to generate new approaches." (Denise Shekerjian) Shekerjian wrote these words in her book, Uncommon Genius (Penguin, 1990), the survey of 40 MacArthur Award winners--she asked, what are the attributes of this unusually gifted and prolific group of people? Among them was the avoidance of intellectual ruts. Instructors have their own ruts, borne largely out of training and accumulated teaching experience. These ruts tend to prevent instructors from listening well in class, and from designing innovative and compelling courses. To be creative and prolific, the instructor continually must step beyond what he or she already knows. I seriously doubt that Shekerjian was arguing that the instructor should abandon his or her skills, but rather should seek to push the application of them in new and counterintuitive ways.

"A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage." (Edwin Land) Land, the inventor of polarizing film and former CEO of Polaroid, builds on Wriston's idea with a radical suggestion: mistakes (or bad judgment) are exploitable. Like many other R&D champions, Land had a special gift for turning laboratory failures into successful products. So it should be in the classroom "laboratory." All too often, instructors teach the safe subjects and cases, fearing failure. But from Land's perspective, classroom failure should not be fearsome--as long as we strive to learn from those failures and turn them to advantage. I believe that to achieve a truly excellent curriculum, what is needed is an institutional culture that makes it possible to celebrate failure, to study it, and turn it to advantage.

"Success is never final." (Winston Churchill) One of the most important contributions of the case method is to help students develop a sense of irony about "success." Yesterday's technology is obsolete today. Today's clever innovation is tomorrow's commodity. Solving one case is no guarantee about your success with the next. Rules change constantly. The future is a moving target. So it is with any instructor's favorite cases, course design and teaching skills. One prospers in these conditions by tinkering constantly. One should aim to adapt flexibly to change.

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." (Thomas Jefferson) Random effects significantly influence any teacher's efforts. Yet a common feature of all the excellent instructors I have observed is their depth of preparation. Usually this begins months before the class, when the course is designed. Perhaps new materials are written, or supplemental readings are gathered. News clippings are gathered relevant to the cases, so that updates and epilogues might be fresh. Preparing to teach a new case could take 5 or more hours of homework. All of this is funneled into an 85-minute class. The effective delivery of student-centered teaching is enormously time-intensive.

"In dialogue, people become observers of their own thinking." (Peter Senge) Organizations that survive and prosper in this turbulent world are organizations that learn. The capacity to learn depends crucially on the ability of an organization to have a dialogue within itself, because it is through dialogue that thinking is critically re-evaluated. The case method of instruction models dialogue, and builds the skills of students to participate in it. Instructors and teaching teams can model this dialogue process in the way they plan curriculum, and lead classroom discussions. Peter Senge is a professor at M.I.T., and has propounded the concept of a learning organization.

"It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that just ain't so." (Satchel Paige) A hallmark of the professional is an openness to surprise, anomaly, and to the possibility of being wrong. Stubbornness in the face of Truth is no virtue. Knowingly or not, students gain versatility in the case discussion process. One's growth as a professional depends crucially on acquiring this versatility; yet it is a slow and sometimes painful process. The instructor makes an enormous contribution in helping students see things that "just ain't so." Satchel Paige was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history; I believe that he uttered these words regarding racist attitudes in the Major Leagues.

"Knowledge is not necessarily a comfortable thing to acquire." (Steven Weiss) In classroom teaching, one of the most delicate balances for the instructor to strike is that between comfort and challenge. Students like comfortable courses that ease the learning process and bolster student self-confidence (building student self-esteem seems to be a hallmark of education today.) But is comfort the same as effectiveness? Do we serve our students well by stroking them? Weiss, in his highly recommended article, "I Remember Max," (Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 1982) argues that a challenging style of teaching is a surer route to solid learning. Classroom discussion should not be riskless to the student. However, the instructor should take care not to carry a challenging style to the extreme: the classroom bully is odious and inconsistent with the mutual respect required between teacher and student. Excellent instructors strive for a reasonable balance between comfort and challenge.

"We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the tenderness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart." (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Toughmindedness is certainly one of the hallmarks of practical business people. Case analysis builds toughmindedness. But toughmindedness does not necessarily dictate toughheartedness. Instructors can help students cultivate the ability to present toughminded perspectives in respectful ways, otherwise dialogue breaks down, and potential for learning disappears. Maintaining a classroom climate that is characterized by tough minds and tender hearts requires vigilance, great skill and keen judgment on the part of the instructor.

"All knowledge begins with a question." (Neil Postman) A student once asked me, "Why does a case discussion typically begin with a cold-call?" When I pressed her for an alternative, she suggested using a mini-lecture that would present a framework for the case analysis, and you know, warm the students up so that they would naturally volunteer to start the discussion. My reply was that the cold-call absolutely replicates professional work--one rarely starts with a framework and looks for a question; rather, one starts with a question and borrows whatever framework is available and necessary to answer it. Also, questions make the student the protagonist in the educational process rather than the professor--the learning is student-centered, not professor-centered. Learning to teach one's self is good training for professional life where there are few professors available to give answers. Neil Postman, an author and Professor of English Education at New York University, has been a steady critic of teacher-centered education in America; I recommend highly his book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

"The answers worth getting are never in the back of the book." (Jeff Millman) Students who are new to the case method naturally suspect that every case has an answer, THE answer. They ask for references to readings in textbooks believing that case solutions are to be found there. From this perspective, a case is nothing more than a gigantic textbook problem, for which the solution exists in the back of some book. Such is rarely true; instead, students must invent an original solution. An important contribution of the teacher of young professionals is to help them make the transition from searching-for-rote-solutions, to invention as a source of solutions. One must be careful in thinking about Millman's statement. It is not an appeal to anti-intellectualism, but rather an appeal for originality. This is excellent training for professional life. Jeff Millman is creative director at the Leo Burnett advertising agency.

"Every case is as different as the people to whom it happened." (Abby Hansen) Case instructors often say, "there is no right answer to a case." What is more accurate to say is that there might be many right answers. Business administration can be quantitatively rigorous. But no matter how refined is one's quantitative analysis, it must always be filtered through the human mind and personality. What is a sensible interpretation and recommendation to one person, may seem outrageous to another. Thus, one must anticipate the possibility of different perspectives on a case, and different "right" answers. Students who have a low tolerance for ambiguity will struggle with this; nevertheless it is an important contribution of the instructor to help students engage the struggle. Abby Hansen's statement appears in what is arguably the best book on discussion leadership, Education for Judgment (Christensen, Garvin and Sweet, eds., Boston:HBS Press, 1991).

"To learn requires a willing suspension of disbelief." (Robert Dorfman) Students are increasingly forthright in asking instructors to justify an idea, assignment, or practice. This largely reflects, I believe, the natural skepticism that any novice brings to a field of study, as well as the tendency of instructors to forget what it is like to encounter that field for the first time. Dorfman was a graduate economics professor of mine and uttered these as stray words in the midst of a longer conversation, the substance of which I have forgotten, though these words stuck with me. He argued that a priori the inherent worth of ideas is usually far more apparent to the instructor than the student. The instructor needs to help the student suspend disbelief by igniting the student's curiosity; case studies help enormously in this regard, though one can go even further through highlighting relevant connections to the real world and to other coursework the student may have had, and even the artful use of humor. Ultimately, however, the instructor needs to recognize that surmounting the disbelief is essentially an issue of trust in the instructor, and the course of study. To trust the instructor is a choice the student must make. The instructor must recognize that he or she can influence the degree of trust students feel by the care and self-confidence with which they teach, and certainly the avoidance of practices that undercut that trust. Donald Schön once framed the immense significance of trust in the teacher-student relationship in an address to a group of graduate students in architecture at Queens University. His subject dealt with how studio masters teach what it means to "think architecturally," and concluded that professional understanding simply could not be told; instead the student has to trust the professor to lead him or her through a set of experiences to build that understanding. Schön's full statement is given in the box above.

"The successful teacher is known by the mark he leaves on his students." (Robert F. Goheen) How should teachers evaluate their own work? This quotation is a challenge to teachers to attend to the outcomes that really count. These are the surprising "Aha's" in class or after that transform the student's thinking and strengthen judgment. Applause, ratings, and awards are ephemeral marks of success. What really matters is steering students along paths of healthy professional development. This may mean doing relatively unpopular things such as demanding rigorous preparation for class, cold-calling, openly challenging a student's erroneous thinking in class, requiring steady attendance and on-time arrival, requesting re-writes of papers and presentations--all of these take enormous energy from the instructor. But done thoughtfully and carefully, they can leave a positive mark on the student's professional development. Robert F. Goheen was the President of Princeton University in the 1960s.

"Teaching is like sending a letter with an imperfect address: you never know where and when the message will be delivered." (C. Roland Christensen) The mark the teacher leaves on his or her students may be invisible for some time--this can be discouraging if you believe that it is the mark (not the applause) that counts. This discouragement can be acute in our present-day environment of rising consumerism (where students want the "deliverables" here and now). Christensen's quotation counsels patience, both for the length of time to response, and for the extreme variety with which a group of students will grasp the lessons. Christensen never said that the letter would certainly arrive; for some students it never will. Instructors must carry an extra store of patience, and faith that the deliverables will indeed arrive eventually, and when they do, they will have an impact. The corollary of this quotation (and others here) is that quick learning is a quick fix for nothing. C. Roland Christensen, University Professor at Harvard Business School, has been perhaps the premier student of student-centered teaching. I recommend highly his two books, Education for Judgment (with David Garvin and Ann Sweet) and Teaching and the Case Method (with Abby J. Hansen.)

In Conclusion
These quotations suggest many attributes of excellence in teaching and course design. In the spirit of student-centered teaching, I leave these attributes for you (the student) to extract. Please let me know your reactions to this commentary, as well as any other favorite quotations, which you would care to share with me.

Most recent update: 9-16-99