How We Prepared to Teach a Case Method Lesson
Applying Professor David Moss and the Case Method Institute's materials at the high school level
As I've written about here before, I've been involved with use of Case Method Institute history materials for high school social studies of late. Specifically, I am part of a team that has spend the last two school years developing a new course offering within district—African American Studies. In the context of development, we've analyzed other states' standards and curricular documents, discussed a variety of texts and materials, and attempted to situate our course offering in the context of southeast Louisiana—with specific references to local history throughout.
In October of 2021, I took the opportunity to participate in a Case Method Institute professional learning session with Harvard Professor of history David Moss. The training involved examining a case—that of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma marches in the 1965—with the ultimate goal of coming to a justifiable position on an important historical decision—in this case, whether or not to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Tuesday, March 21st. I was intrigued and engaged by this method of history teaching, and I’ve spelled out some of my thinking on the historical-situation aspect as well as the method of questioning Professor Moss employed.
In the weeks since, our African American Studies team has selected a case from the Harvard materials, planned how to facilitate this learning process for 9-12 students, and facilitated a four-day sequence of learning for one section. We're in the process of facilitating these four days for two other sections as I write this, to be concluded on Tuesday, December 14th.
The case we chose for use in the African American Studies course is entitled "Reconstruction B: Jury Rights in Virginia, 1877-1880," and is described below:
This case continues to examine some of the central issues of Reconstruction by focusing on a racially-charged murder trial that took place in Virginia shortly after Reconstruction formally ended, and that ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The prosecution of two black defendants before all-white juries at the state level—and the unprecedented intervention of a federal judge—provoked questions about the role of juries in American democracy and the balance between state and federal power on the critical issue of black civil rights following Reconstruction. [This case is an abridged and slightly revised version of an earlier case titled “Race, Justice, and the Jury System in Postbellum Virginia.” The full case is also available to teachers who wish to use it.]
In the remainder of this blog post, I'll talk about what we did as a collaborative team as far as planning for this sequence of four lessons, and partnering with what was provided in the instructional materials.
First, what materials were provided? We've worked with (1) the case narrative which is a secondary source which rolls up the context of 1877 and Reconstruction in Virginia as well as the trials of Lee and Burwell Reynolds; (2) the Teaching Plan for the materials, or Professor Moss' notes for facilitation of the discussion after students have engaged with the case narrative; (3) a few ancillary resources in the form of other worksheets, question series', and assessment documents that teachers have developed with use of this material in high school classrooms.
Within these resources, we zoomed in on a recommendation to use three days to teach this case with high school students. From that point, we started to develop a more intentional plan with the understanding that, unlike with Professor Moss' examples at the collegiate level, we'll spend some class time going through the case narrative material before ultimately culminating in a debate on the final date around the questions of the case(s), then asking students to "be" Supreme Court Justices and render a decision.
In the planning process, we spend a few weeks going through the materials ourselves as educators—listening to an audio version of the case narrative, examining the question and assessment documents, and discussing some of the core, essential questions of the case at hand. Through this examination, it became clear to us that we'd like to support kids’ access to the materials through scaffolds around the 14th Amendment and the 1875 Civil Rights Act. We were also compelled to use some of the amazing material currently being generated for Crash Course: Black American History by Clint Smith III and PBS.
We came to this (at first) three day plan. As I'm a discussion-type fella (remember the point of this blog, Rod?), I'm always interested in finding ways to make debate, discussion, dialogue, and discourse in the classroom more accessible and engaging for students. That said, I came up with a four-corners activity wherein the language of the 14th Amendment was posted around the classroom in excerpts for students to examine with the ask: What do you notice? What do you wonder?
We fleshed this out on day two with use of the same procedure for examination of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This allowed us to "anchor" this language in our collective understanding in order for us to cite or refer back to it throughout study of the case narrative and discussion about some of the issues, concerns, and challenges at hand—namely what constitutes a fair trial by jury, and to what extent the federal government may exercise power over the states.
Additionally, I was looking for yes/no type questions to frame movement-based debates at the conclusion of the period. For this aspect, I returned to what I've written about here with regard to Macbeth. I pulled together some binary-type questions and we invited the students to stand, move to the side of the room that matched their position, and be prepared to share out their rationale and reasoning.
Finally, we worked with some of the text-based questions that came with the suite of materials in order to have those in front of students to guide and focus their reading as we engaged with the case narrative.
As far as getting through the narrative, we took a few different approaches—none of which I'm over the moon about at this point: (1) having the teacher provide a read aloud, (2) having individual or small groups of students engage with the text silently, or (3) using audio of the case narrative with pause points and guided questions. By the end of the fourth day, I found myself doing more of the teacher read aloud because of some of the flexibility this afforded me: I could spontaneously introduce pause points, I could respond to student questions authentically within the flow of the narrative, and I could provide annotation guidance to the group as a whole. Also, it helped me keep things on pace as with the audio I found that I was at the mercy of the rate provided in the recording, and this presented some pacing challenges.
We’ve been working through the details, the facilitation, and the administration of a debate or dialogue on the final of four days in this sequence. We’ve finished that bit with one of the three sections, and will conclude with the other two on the afternoon of December 14th, 2021. I look forward to reflecting on that nature of that dialogue—I already know I wasn’t satisfied with the first section—in an upcoming blog.