“In a year when teachers are struggling mightily, my students — all four classes reading the cases — are soaring” — CMI partner teacher in 2021
In 2013 Harvard Business School Professor David Moss introduced a case-based course called History of American Democracy, developed for undergraduates and MBA students. It quickly became one of the highest-rated classes at Harvard College, with students describing it as supremely engaging and crediting it with helping them to learn and retain course material more effectively. Many reported that taking the course had inspired them to become more civically engaged. As one student put it, “If this class didn’t make every student in it a better citizen, I don’t know what class would.”
As excitement for the course and the case method began to spread, Professor Moss was approached by high school teachers looking to try the cases with their students. In 2015, he launched a pilot program at Harvard Business School to test the effectiveness and appeal of the case method in high schools. Twenty-one teachers attended the first workshop in the fall of 2015, and the numbers grew from there. By 2020, the pilot had brought nearly 600 high school teachers through its professional development programs, and the teachers had in turn taught cases to approximately 35,000 students at 389 high schools in 45 states.
The pilot program yielded exceptionally strong results. In formal surveys, both students and teachers indicated that the case method was a highly effective teaching approach that increased student energy and engagement in a diverse array of history, government, and civics classrooms. Teachers reported that the case method had strong positive impacts on students’ critical thinking and evidence-based argumentation, and a significant body of anecdotal evidence attested to the case method’s positive impacts on student participation, the quality of student writing, and student performance on course and standardized exams. Teachers also discovered that the case method, when combined with the proper scaffolding, could make material written for a college audience accessible to students at all reading levels. Many students, meanwhile, expressed a clear preference for the case method over traditional teaching approaches and textbook readings, and reported in end-of-year surveys that the case method improved their understanding of historical issues and their willingness to consider multiple perspectives.
In addition to these impressive impacts on academic performance and the classroom experience, use of the case method showed positive effects on students’ civic interest, knowledge and engagement. In particular, rigorous comparison-group studies found that courses featuring the case method and the “History of American Democracy” cases contributed to greater results across a variety of measures of civic commitment, including the likelihood of students’ considering democracy “absolutely important” and expressing interest in personally seeking elected office, compared to students taking similar courses not featuring the case method.
Recognizing that the pilot project at Harvard Business School had demonstrated proof of concept, Professor Moss and his colleagues created the Case Method Institute for Education and Democracy, an independent nonprofit organization, in 2020. Since then, the Case Method Institute has increased the reach of the program by about 500 percent, bringing the total number of teachers trained in case-method instruction to more than 4,000. These teachers represent over 3,000 high schools across all 50 states, D.C., and several U.S. territories; and together they have brought cases and the case method to more than 230,000 students. While most teachers are adding cases to existing curricula, a growing number of instructors are implementing full semester or year-long history, government, and civics courses comprised entirely of History of American Democracy cases. Perhaps most important, even as the reach of the program has grown, we have continued to document the same essential impacts, both academic and civic, across every type of school and classroom.
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