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What
Makes a Good Case?
Some Basic Rules of Good
Storytelling Help Teachers Generate Student Excitement in the Classroom
Clyde Freeman Herreid
Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient
community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras,
cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.
--Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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.
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