Evaluators expend huge amounts of energy observing teachers in
typical self-contained classrooms, searching for signs of effective teaching. In
doing so they may gain a sense of what teaching influences student learning in
these situations. At the same time they
risk losing opportunities to judge teaching and professional behavior under
other conditions. Case methods offer a possible remedy to this problem.
“We are inclined to the view that the case method—long used
in medicine and law, and more recently in public administration and
business—will in the coming decades be relied upon increasingly in the field of
education, both in the pre-service and the in-service training of teachers and
administrators.” (R.N.Bush, Stanford,
1954).
Early adopter Bob Bush correctly predicted the power of
cases to educate educators. We have stretched his prediction to use cases—or multimedia
web-based slices of educational life—to judge educators’ abilities to make professional
decisions in any and all aspects of their work.
How? We record
situations that educators face in their everyday lives and enrich the accounts
with data and artifacts. Teaching Notes
pose questions that prompt others—teachers, administrators, and parents—to make
explicit what they know and what they think they know that is relevant to the case. We push case analysts to describe what they
might do, why, and what might happen if
they pursued a particular course of action. Answers to these questions provide the grist
for judging people’s abilities to forecast behavior that is more and less
defensible. Critical
perspectives—analyses offered by people recognized as knowledgeable in the
facts of the case—serve as benchmarks
against which analyses can be judged.
Like other empirical research, good case analyses are high
in external validity. Smart educators craft
solutions that plausibly “fit” the people involved and the ecology—classrooms,
schools, and communities—of the case itself.
Bob McNergney is co-founder of and partner in CaseNEX-DataCation, LLC.
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