I wish she had mentioned teachers. Teachers should be in
that lineup. Stories are their natural allies in the transmittal
of the wisdom of the tribe from one generation to the next.
Although I am not taken by Dr. Estes' notion of the Jungian
archetype she so eloquently argues for in her book, Women
Who Run With Wolves, I do agree there is something in
stories that touches our fundamental nature. Estes again:
Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories
since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not
require that we do, be, act anything---we only need listen.
The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic
drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement,
sadness, questions, longings, and understandings that spontaneously
bring the archetype...to the surface.
Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about
the complexities of life.
But not all stories are created equal. Some are better than
others. And that brings us to the issue of this column, What
makes a good case? Rather than begging the question or ignoring
it altogether, I propose that we look at research that has
been done in one of the citadels of case study instruction,
Harvard University. John Bennett and Balaji Chakravarthy wrote
an article for the 1978 Harvard Business School Bulletin
presenting the results of detailed interviews and questionnaires
of faculty and students. Later, Dorothy Robyn of the Kennedy
School of Government wrote a note on "What makes a good
case" (N15-86-673). I have mixed and matched their conclusions
and amended them for our purposes:
A good case tells a story. It must have an
interesting plot that relates to the experiences of the audience.
It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end may
not exist yet; it will be what the students need to supply
once the case is discussed.
A good case focuses on an interest-arousing issue.
Malcolm McNair has written, "For the case to be a real
living thing and for the student to forget that it's artificial,
there must be drama, there must be suspense.....a case must
have an issue."
A good case is set in the past five years. To
appear real the story must have the trappings of a current
problem. This is not to denigrate classical or historical
cases, but unless a case deals with current issues and the
student feels the problem is important, some of its power
is lost. If a student has just seen the problem mentioned
in the media, so much the better. Thus, a case on human cloning
will awaken the students' interest before one on the Copernican
revolution. Even a case on cold fusion is old news today and
lacks the luster it did in the chaotic days of the original
report.
A good case creates empathy with the central characters.
We should create empathy not only to make the story line more
engaging but because the personal attributes of the characters
will influence the way a decision might be made. Certain decisions
are beyond the scope of the characters' personalities and
powers. It may be unrealistic for us to expect President
Clinton to declare human cloning illegal all over the world
by fiat, or for him not to comment about the NASA "Life
on Mars" episode.
A good case includes quotations. There is no
better way to understand a situation and to gain empathy for
the characters than to hear them speak in their own voices.
Quotations add life and drama to any case. Quotations from
documents and letters should be used as well. Quotations provide
realism.
A good case is relevant to the reader. Cases
should be chosen that involve situations that the students
know or are likely to face. This improves the empathy factor
and makes the case clearly something worth studying. Thus,
for a graduate student in science, a case involving people
arguing about authorship of a paper is of greater interest
than sand flies in Uganda.
A good case must have pedagogic utility. Only
an educator would use this jargon, but the point is valid.
What function will the case serve? What does it do for the
course and the student? What is the point of the story in
the education of the student and is there a better way to
do it?
A good case is conflict provoking. Robyn argues,
"Most cases are fundamentally about something controversial,"
if not, what is there to talk about? She goes on, "Is
this an issue about which reasonable people could disagree?"
If so, you have the beginning of a good case.
A good case is decision forcing. Not all cases
have to be dilemmas that need to be solved, but there is an
urgency and a seriousness that is involved with such cases.
We can easily second guess the owners of the shipping lines
about the Valdez oil spill in retrospect, but at the time
many of their decisions may have seemed quite reasonable.
In dilemma or decision cases, students can not duck the issue,
they must face problems head on. Without a dilemma in the
case, a student can sit back and tsk tsk the way that a case
unfolded. When they are forced to take a position, they are
thrust into the action of the case.
A good case has generality. What good is a
case that is so specific that one can use it only as a curiosity?
Cases must be of more use than a minor or local problem; they
must have general applicability. If one writes a case about
the cold fusion affair, there must be more to it than to state
that Pons and Fleischmann made a mistake or that particular
chemical reactions are not going to solve the world's energy
problems.
A good case is short. It is simply a matter
of attention. It is easier to hold someone's attention for
brief moments than long ones. Cases must be long enough to
introduce the facts of the case but not so long as to bore
the reader or to make the analysis tedious. If one must introduce
complexity, let it be done in stages. First, give some data
and then a series of questions and perhaps a decision point
before more information is introduced. After all, that is
the way life plays out...little bits at a time.
So now we have the recipe, can we bake the cake? Can we take
a subject that tickles our fancy and write a case that will
work? Let us try an exercise for starters. Let us see how some
of these ideas work out in practice. I have written two versions
of an incident to emphasize the key points. Since readers of
this column come from different disciplines, we will take a
problem familiar to all teachers: cheating.
A CASE OF CHEATING?
Version I
A teacher was instructing 24 students in an introductory
physics course during the summer. She was using a version
of cooperative learning where students worked in small groups
throughout the term. She gave daily quizzes, first individually
and then in groups. The professor had a habit of leaving the
classroom during the quizzes. All went well until the last
day of class when she heard from one of her best students
that cheating had occurred during the quizzes. When
she gave out peer evaluation forms for the students to rank
their teammates, she gained additional information. Two Asian
students in adjoining groups had been cheating. Six separate
students wrote about how the two friends had cheated and that
they had been told to stop by their teammates but to no avail.
There were no more class periods left, only the final exam.
What should the teacher do?
Version II
"I couldn't stand it! I had to move. They were cheating.
I study hard to get my 'A,' and they were cheating."
Physics professor Margaret Blake looked hard at the young
women in front of her quietly telling her story. Paula was
one of her best students. Margaret had asked her why she had
suddenly moved during the daily quiz.
"Lang, the guy in the group next to us, writes his multiple
choice answers in large letters on his quiz paper. He holds
it up for Mengfei who is in our group to see while you are
out of the room. We all told them to stop, but they keep doing
it."
Margaret replied, "I wish you had told me sooner, we
could have done something. Today is the last regular day of
class. Friday we have the final exam. There isn't much we
can do now. Well, at least today we are having the peer evaluation
where you rank the contributions of the rest of the members
of your group. Be sure you write down your complaint."
"I guarantee that lots of us will complain."
Not long after the class was over, Paula's words came true.
Six students had pointedly written about the cheating between
the two Asian students. One student in Mengfei's group was
especially angry: "Meng gets such a low mark because
he is never prepared. He comes to lab whenever he feels like
it, and he and his buddy cheat every single day. Did you see
how badly Meng did on the quiz when you stood behind him?
And he always changes his answers on his bubble sheet and
pretends they were scored wrong. I HATE CHEATERS! AARRGH!"
Margaret sat there in her office stunned. She always thought
that group learning prevented this sort of thing, otherwise
she never would have left the room during the quizzes. Now
what? Paula's last words rang in her ears, "They were
cheating. What are you going to do about it?"
Most people, I believe, would find the second case more compelling
than the first. Why? Both versions tell essentially the same
story. Both deal with an interesting issue and are recent,
relevant, pedagogically useful, conflict provoking, decision
forcing, have generality, and are brief. But while the first
version is a rather cold rendition of the facts, the second
gives us a feel for the characters through their speech and
thoughts. We can identify and empathize we them. They seem
real, and because of this we care about the decision. If we
had spent a little more time we could have even shared Margaret's
anguish as she wondered about her own culpability in the situation.
Had she expected too much from the students? Was this a cultural
problem? Were these Asian students really aware of the rules
in her classroom? What were her responsibilities to the rest
of the students?
So what is the essence of a good case? It is this: A good
case has ambiguities and it requires space to give a richness
of texture to a story. The audience never knows how it will
all come out, and that is at least half of the magic. And
this half of the magic matters greatly in the classroom where
the case will be "solved." No two discussions will
ever be the same in a great case. There should be new flecks
of gold to be panned each time the stream is visited.
If uncertainty, richness, and options are one half of the
magic of a good case, what is the other half? I would argue
it is the realism that is captured in the story line. The
best cases conjure up the sounds, smells, and sights besetting
the protagonists. It is not essential that the story line
be so compelling that the reader can literally feel the deck
of the Titanic as it slips beneath the waves or hear the cries
of the winged monkeys as they carry Dorothy off to the castle
of the Wicked Witch. But it must be real enough to make the
reader believe the problem is worth solving and care what
the solution should be. Given that, the battle is won. And
if the story teller is good enough that the reader can indeed
close his eyes and believe the knight is there on a white
charger, lance in hand, and feel the hot breath of the dragon,
so much the better. It is something to strive for in case
writing. Such magic is hard to find.
This article originally appeared in the Dec.1997/Jan. 1998 issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching (pp.163-165). It is reprinted here with permission from NSTA Publications, Journal of College Science Teaching, 1840 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201.
