CaseTeachingEmail

This page last updated on: March 5, 2009

Email send to members of the Baruch Faculty on Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Case Studies and Other Classroom Reality Shows

From: David Birdsell, John Casey, and Dennis Slavin

 

We are developing a series of faculty development workshops to strengthen the use of case studies in our classrooms. The workshops will focus primarily on the case study method, but will also cover a wide range of techniques that professors use to bring reality into the classroom. The workshops will address three main issues:

 

• Innovative practices using case studies. This session(s) will highlight current practices by Baruch professors who use cases and other similar artifacts to involve students in the analysis of situations related to professional practice.
• Teaching with cases. This session(s) will look at how cases can be embedded into a course syllabus and how to manage the classroom processes of teaching with cases.
• Preparing case studies. This session(s) will look at how best to use cases from established sources (Electronic Hallway, Harvard Business School, etc.), how to adapt readily available materials such as press articles and online videos, and how to write cases studies from scratch.

Case studies are true stories, “reality bites,” that educators bring into the classroom to try to bridge the gap between theory and practice. They can be powerful pedagogical tools that encourage students to analyze and make decisions about the situations they will encounter in professional practice.  

They also serve to create new dynamics in the classroom by breaking down the traditional role of professors — they become facilitators of a more student-centered learning process. By working with case studies, students can better retain knowledge through active learning and develop a range of skills that include problem-solving, decision-making, group work, effective communication, and time management.  

Cases come in many forms: they can be written, audio-visual or online; they can be 5 lines or 50 pages; and they can be fictional accounts of real situations or a collection of media reports about actual events. The use of cases is closely related to other student-centered approaches including problem/project-based learning (PBL) and resource-based learning (RBL), and to a range of teaching techniques that bring real life situations into the classroom, such as scenarios, simulations, and role-plays.

This series of workshops is still the in the planning process. We encourage you to send suggestions for topics and to (self-) nominate faculty members who could showcase their own work to Hartley Bramhall at Hartley.Bramhall@gmail.com.