Challenges With Orchestrating a Case Method Discussion
How a flop with one section informed more vigorous and rigorous debate in two others
So, I didn’t really intend this to be a Professor David Moss and Case Method Institute fan (fiction) blog—but it’s funny how things turn out. I can be a bit of a one-track, obsessive-type dude, and it’s very clear to me with a bit of hindsight right now how this method and these teaching materials have so thoroughly piqued my interest that they’ve now become the bane of my wife and I’s evening convos—another of the quixotic episodes she’ll call me out on.
And I’ll definitely be reading Professor Moss’s “Democracy” tome through the break; and I’ll probably blog about his claims at the start of that book about the ubiquity of political conflict and turmoil across our nation’s history—something that is absolutely not private to our current cultural and political moment. That said, this blog will recount some of the challenges we faced while attempting to facilitate discussion at the conclusion of our Reconstruction B case in African American Studies.
As I’ve already written about, we were primarily working with a couple core pieces of material provided by the Case Method Institute: (1) the case narrative, (2) the teaching notes, and (3) the case audio. Throughout the professional learning the CMI provides, there was an emphasis on trusting the materials and attempting to apply the teaching and learning in as close a way as possible to what we were able to experience as participants with Professor David Moss in a live session about MLK Jr, as well as what the CMI provides with video recordings of Professor Moss facilitating dialogue around the other cases.
Additionally, it was strongly suggested that we attempted to replicate the board setup that Professor Moss uses throughout the discussion. These “boards” are part of the teaching note materials, and consist of what should be marked on the chalkboard (or otherwise) during the course of the discussion. These serve almost as exemplars or “worked examples,” or what Doug Lemov’s new version of Teach Like a Champion calls “exemplar planning.” If the case materials demand pros and cons—and many of them deal with pivotal Supreme Court cases which have arguments voiced for opposing sides—then the board will represent points for each side. For example, with Virginia v. Rives in our Reconstruction case, we were mapping out what Virginia’s arguments and claims were against the actions of Rives as a federal judge; and we mapped out Rives’ defense as well.
So, this is where my old colleague Mr. Shawn Riley will emerge. We taught together for my first three years in education in New Orleans for a few different charter organizations. He was the social studies guy, and I was the ELA guy. Those were heady, early days of really challenging teaching by day, really ambitious teacher-philosophizing by night .. probably in a NOLA haunt. I bring up Riley here, though, because he was a baseball coach and he always said “Trust the process.” If you’ve been following my writing and thinking, you know I’m a bit of a curriculum wonk—a bit of a high-quality curricular resources fanboy—and the nature of my work in and around Louisiana schools has been focused on that for about five years now.
Then, why wasn’t I following the hallowed Mr. Riley’s advice? Why was I taking all these invitations to modify, translate, supplement, and alter the materials provided by the CMI? But let me back up a bit—let me write a bit about how the first discussion went.
With the board setup—that’s where I got hung up. So the first go-round with the discussion, I was really concerned with making sure I was offloading the bits of discussion offered by the students into a sensible configuration on the marker board in the room. I’d seen this done by Professor Moss in a live simulation, I'd seen it done in videos from his Harvard course, and I’d appreciated how it helped us as learners organize our thinking around the complex question and the positions advanced. But with the complex nature of the cases at hand (it wasn’t like the MLK Jr example where it was straight up: Should they cross the bridge?), I got hung up with how to phrase the question and how to document what was contributed.
When we went to administer this day with the other two sections, there were some other variable shifts as well. These sections had more ninth graders, had larger rosters, and had kids without as much prerequisite type work in US History and Civics. We had some concerns about the prior knowledge kids would or wouldn’t have in those sections, and we wanted to be prepared to mitigate for that as we went along. Then, as with most things teaching and learning, we were surprised to find that our assumptions about kids were basically wrong, that 9th grade kids were more than capable and excited about engaging in complex questions about what constitutes a jury of your peers, and what extent the federal government may exercise power over the states.
When we got to the final date, we were blessed with the opportunity to spend basically two collaborative planning sessions talking through what didn’t work the first time, and better planning what could happen the second and third. This is when we went back, very intentionally, into the teaching plan. Therein lied many questions in almost decision-tree format—a question about Judge Rives’ decision, a series of follow ups about legal and non-legal basis for actions, a series of questions about juries, and the contingency for asking further probes if students continue to all take a position that Judge Rives’ was right in his actions (some prior knowledge required here).
The approach I took for those final discussions was a bit of a 180 on the first section—no boards at all, only the questions. Surprisingly—or not surprisingly at all—these came across as much more robust, much more authentic, and much more rewarding. In fact, it had me thinking about the potential move of holding a literary discussion in an ELA classroom and saying, “Now, put all of your things away except for the book. Yes, I mean also the discussion tracker and brainstorming tool. Now we’re going to have a discussion. Let’s talk.” It’s funny how less-is-more tends to work in myriad ways in schooling.
With the help of Professor Moss’ exceptional questions, we had a much more robust and enriched debate about juries, what constitutes a jury of one’s peers, and the relationship between federal and state governance and judicial systems. Furthermore, students were able to zoom out and then take this specific case as a touchpoint for their understanding of the challenges and successes of Reconstruction, and the prominence of the 14th Amendment as a result of the Civil War. Overall, and I’m sure you can catch it in my tone here, it’s been an invigorating and amazing experience. We’re surveying the kids about their experiences as well, and we’re already gearing up to perhaps try some things out with another case in African American Studies, as well as one in US History. Surely, I’ll report back here.