E tu, que farias neste caso …? O Caso Santini

Tales from the Trenches

Part 4: Faculty Reflect on the Challenges and Opportunities of Case Teaching

We reached out to numerous educators at different schools and asked them to share their perspectives on the case method. Though there were similarities in educators’ responses, the differences reflect the variety of circumstances in which faculty members use cases. The institutions where our interviewees teach vary in their emphasis on case-method teaching and the infrastructure they provide to support it.

Overall, however, the similarities in perspectives were more prominent. Our interviewees emphasized the case method’s unique power to engage and deepen active learning for both learners and educators. We consider these themes below as we explore faculty responses to six key questions.

The Initial Draw to Cases

We first asked interviewees to describe their experience with case teaching and how they started teaching with cases. Most of our respondents had some experience with cases when they were students, noting how much they enjoyed them and the experiences that they facilitated.

Associate Professor Ryan Buell, for instance, referred to when he realized as a student how engaging and transformational cases could be long before he began teaching them. Professorial Lecturer Meredith Burnett came to value case studies when she began teaching because of their ability to help students analyze issues that were relevant to their current or future careers, and for enabling her to dive into the challenges these issues posed for organizations. Professor Joshua Margolis noted how seeing an expert case teacher in action helped bring cases to life during an MBA class he took as a doctoral student.

At institutions where the case method is emphasized, our interviewees’ experiences with cases overlapped substantially with their time teaching in these programs. Sometimes, however, the decision to use cases was driven in part by pragmatism, as Associate Professor Leon Prieto suggested in his response about using cases so that his students would find his classes more meaningful.

Read the article by the HBP Editors >>