White & McNergney 1991 Case-Based Teacher Education, The State of the Art

8/13/2019 White & McNergney 1991 Case-Based Teacher Education, The State of the Art

1/12

Survey of Case Use 1

Case-based Teacher Education:

The State of the Art1

Bonita C. White and Robert F. McNergney

Commonwealth Center for the Education of Teachers

University of Virginia

Paper presented at The Case Method in Teacher

Education: A Working Conference James Madison

University, Harrisonburg, VA, June 21, 1991.

We wish to thank Wilson Marston for his help with thismanuscript.


2/12

Survey of Case Use

2

The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of a survey

designed to assess the extent and nature of case-based teacher

education in the United States. "Cases," "case-method

instruction," "case-based teaching," and similar phrases appear with

increasing frequency in discussions and writings about the education

of teachers. But despite the attention given to cases, it is

difficult to determine how wide and deep this interest runs in the

teacher education community, and what "interest" really means.

We think it important to try to describe the state of the art

of case-based teaching in teacher education for two reasons. First,

we have a personal interest in developing, using, and evaluating

cases. People at our own institution and at other colleges and

universities with whom we work in the state, are involved in various

ways with case-based teaching. We want to identify others around the

nation who are also interested so we might share ideas. Second, it

is difficult to measure progress, or lack thereof, without benchmarks.

If we use Bob Bush's (1954) book, or Lee Shulman's (1986) presidential

address to the American Educational Research Association (AERA), or

some other standard against which to gauge progress, we have an

opportunity



3/12

to observe the pace and viability of curricular innovation in

teacher education.2

We can informally assess interest in cases fairly easily. The

past several years there have been numerous indications that

case-based teacher education is on people's minds: one session at

the annual meeting of AACTE in 1990, four sessions at AACTE this year,

two or three sessions per year the past several years at AERA

meetings, four or five sessions at this year's meeting of the

Association of Teacher Educators (ATE), two stories on case-method

teaching in Education Week last year, a small stack of journal

articles, papers from a Virginia conference on case methods, several

books on the subject, and several others in preparation. These

events and products serve as evidence, haphazardly acquired, of

professional interest in the topic.

Judging what is meant by teacher educators' "interest," even

informally, however, is another matt -. People say they "use" or

"teach with" cases, "assign" cases, have students "read and

2Friedman (1973) estimated it took about 30 years for the

case-method to be adopted completely by 12 law schools andpartially by another 48 schools. Eventually every major and mostminor law schools shifted to case-based teaching. If Bush could haveforeseen the pace of curricular innovation vis-a-vis case-methodteaching in teacher education, he might have been less sanguine whenhe wrote: "We are inclined to the view that the case methodlong usedin medicine and law, and more recently in public administration and

businesswill in the coming decades be relied upon increasingly inthe field of education, both in the pre-service and the in-servicetraining of teachers and administrators. That it has not been adoptedmore rapidly is primarily due to the lack of adequate case recordssuitable for instructional purposes." (1954, p.vi)


4/12


interpret" cases, and the like. Even passing familiarity with the

range of materials referred to as "cases," make these contentions

sound reasonable if somewhat unclear. If we can clarify why and how

people use cases, and how they judge the success and failure of their

efforts, we may be able to encourage true innovation and resist the

stultifying brand of institutionalization that has characterized

other attempts at programmatic and curricular reform.

Method

In our efforts to decide what questions to ask teacher educators

about case-based teaching, we found five works particularly useful:

Christensen (1987), Kleinfeld (1988), Merseth (1990), and Shulman

(1986; 1989). These writers suggested in various ways, the

importance of several issues that we, in turn, used to structure the

questionnaire.

We wanted to learn about teacher educators' sources of case

materials. The materials are the heart of case-based teaching, and

people express concerns about finding suitable case materials. We

were curious about the purposes for which cases are used. It seemed

that people can and do use cases for a variety of often overlapping

purposes. If cases are being integrated into teacher education,

there are several ways this may be happening. We sought to identify

these ways. Those who use cases contend their approaches to the

material have desirable effects on students. We wondered how they

reached theseSurvey of Case Use

5


5/12

conclusions, in other words, how they were judging the effectiveness

of case-based teaching. Even advocates of case-based teaching admit

there are problems with the approach. We asked what, if anything,

people found troubling about using cases.

The ten-item questionnaire allowed people to respond by

checking all applicable answers from arrays of possibilities we

supplied. We also provided blank spaces for write-in responses. We

mailed the questionnaires on January 18, 1991 with the deadline for

their return on March 15, 1991.

SampleQuestionnaires went to 3,479 people. Of these, 3,175 went to members

of Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) in AERA who resided

in the United States and another 38 in Canada or overseas.

Questionnaires were sent as inserts in the fall 1990 newsletter of

the Commonwealth Center for the Education of Teachers (Herbert and

Tate, 1990). We distributed about 200 within Virginia. We sent the

remaining 50 or so to people in the United States who are interested

in teacher education. We received and analyzed completed

questionnaires from 128 people. Although our sample does not exhaust

the community of scholars who might be using cases, we believe it

fairly accurately represents that group. Division K members and

others on the Commonwealth Center News mailing list are involved in

teacher education at all kinds of institutions. In addition, if the



6/12

person who received the questionnaire was unable to respond, we

requested that she or he give it to someone else at the same

institution who might be better able to respond. We interpret the

low response rate as an indication of the fact that few people are

using cases. Respondents' work locations are noted in Figure 1,

along with the locations of others they identified as people "who use

cases to educate teachers."

Insert Figure 1 about here

Results

Where do people get cases?

Most cases in use today are from published texts or are

unpublished cases written by professors. (See item #1 in Table 1.)

One person reported using situations from books and novels as cases.

Five said they used videotaped cases they had produced themselves.

Six indicated they used "real" cases obtained either form practica

or clinical situations.

Insert Table 1 about here

Where do cases fit into programs?

As item #2 in Table 1 indicates, very few respondents indicated

the entire content of a course was imparted via cases. And not many

more noted that cases were clustered into units ofSurvey of Case Use7


7/12

study. The method of choice was to use cases for single lessons, and

only when they fit the content being taught. When we asked people

to list the courses in their teacher education programs in which cases

were used, we found that most often they said cases were used in

methods courses (elementary, secondary, science, mathematics, and

social studies). In addition, cases were used in about every other

kind of professional course imaginable. Why do people use cases?

Respondents used cases for a variety of purposes (item #3 in

Table 1). Most often people used them with preservice teachers to

practice critical analysis or problem solving skills and to encourage

reflection. Many respondents (22%) indicated they used cases for

purposes other than those listed. Six said they use cases to bridge

the theory-practice gap. In addition to indicating they use cases

to practice critical analysis or problem solving skills, five

specified the use of cases for further problem solving purposes,

either collegially or for diagnosis.

How do instructors judge the effectiveness of case-based

teaching?

Most respondents indicated they evaluated case-based teaching

by reflecting on their own performances after teaching a case and by

assessing some kind of student output--journals, logs of students'

participation, tests, essays on case issues, and student-written

cases. Interestingly, although the literatureSurvey of Case Use 8


8/12

suggests that case-based teaching relies heavily on group involvement

and student-student interaction, only 15% of the respondents

indicated that they asked a colleague to observe a teaching session

and to provide feedback. While using teams to solve cases may be

common practice, using teams to evaluate case-based teaching appears

to be unusual.

What if anything do instructors find troubling about using cases?

Nearly 77% of the respondents used the blanks we provided to mention

some kind of problem they had with case-based teaching:

Cases are too simplistic or too general to providestudents with realistic views of life (16%).

Obtaining cases is a problem (14%).Students' interpretations of cases caused concern. Most

people who raised this issue said students tended to

overgeneralize or to go beyond the issues in the case (12%).

Either cases are too long or insufficient time existsto discuss and analyze cases adequately given the

course objectives which need to be learned by students

(12%).

Respondents expressed concern about determining what,if anything, students had learned from case-based

instruction. They wanted some kind of evidence that

cases worked better than traditional instructional

strategies (11%).Survey of Case Use 9


9/12

People believed they lacked expertise in planning for

and conducting case discussions (10%.

Cases don't work! (3%).Discussion

We capitalized on a convenient sample to collect these data, and

our one-page questionnaire limited the quantity and quality of

information we received. Moreover, the people who responded are

interested in case-based teaching. We know nothing of those who do

not share this interest. If our results are characterized as another

benchmark along the road of curricular progress in teacher education,

it might be best to think of them as a scratch on a telephone pole

set firmly in sand.

Many educational institutions are using cases for a wide variety

of purposes. Some of the concerns people raised about case-based

teaching might well be asked about other teacher education

strategies, yet they are indicative of what is unknown about

case-based instruction in teacher education. What do students learn?

Do cases work better with some kinds of problems and some kinds of

content than others? Do cases actually lessen the gap between theory

and practice? If so, how? Do cases help preservice students become

better teachers faster, or is some teaching experience necessary for

students to benefit from case-based instruction? If working through

cases is beneficial to preservice teachers, does this kind of

activity warrant the time it requires? Because cases are used most

often as lessons, notSurvey of Case Use 9


10/12

as units or courses, possibilities for evaluating case-based

teaching are limited. But trying to answer these questions, however

crudely, should not dampen enthusiasm for experimentation with cases.

If anything, a discerning eye will record information that will be

useful in shaping case-based teaching for the better.Survey of Case Use 10


11/12

References

Bush, R. N. (1954). The teacher-pupil relationship. New York:

Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Christensen, C. R., & Hansen, A. J. (1987). Teaching and the

case method. Boston: Harvard Business School.

Friedman, L. M. (1973). A history of American law. New York:

Simon and Schuster.

Herbert, J., & Tate, P. (Eds.). (1990, Fall). Commonwealth

Center News.

Kleinfeld, J. (1988). Learning to think like a teacher; The

study of cases. Unpublished manuscript, College of Rural

Alaska, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska.

Merseth, K. K. (1990, June). The case for cases in teacher

education. Paper presented at The Role of Case Methods in

Teacher Education, Charlottesville, VA.

Shulman, L. S. (1989). Toward a Pedagogy of Cases or A Case for

Pedagogy. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University,

Stanford, CA.

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth

in teaching. Educational Researcher, 2, 4-14.


12/12

Figure 1. Case-based Teacher Education Nationwide

= respondents involved in case-based teachereducation

o = other users of cases

Documents

White & McNergney 1991 Case-Based Teacher Education, The State of the Art