In his most recent blog post, Dean Robert Bruner of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business sings the praises of studying cases in the business school classroom rather than learning through rote memorization.
Bruner is a self-proclaimed advocate of providing students with “learning that sticks,” not just telling them what they need to know. Case learning, argues Bruner, helps students make their own meaning out of problem situations. “Simply absorbing someone else’s meanings doesn’t lock learning in place the way that sorting things out for yourself can accomplish,” he writes.
According to Bruner, a great MBA education should help students develop in at least seven key ways. It should hone leadership skills, encourage critical thinking, teach students to debate and defend their ideas, heighten ethical intuition, instill pragmatism, highlight the value of understanding things in context, and emphasize wisdom – that is, the ability to make wise business decisions – over knowledge. Case learning achieves all of these things, he writes.
Of course, Darden is not alone in employing the case method in its MBA curriculum. Columbia, Yale and Harvard are just a few of the other top schools that employ case study as a means of teaching students to think for themselves.
Amar Bhidé, Columbia’s Glaubinger Professor of Business, uses case studies as the building blocks for learning in his classroom. “Rather than give people a theory, I emphasize moral challenges of developing your own worldview and theory,” he says. “I think what is distinctive about the course I teach is that the unit of analysis is the individual rather than some abstract right answer.”
At Yale’s School of Management, the focus is on integrated teaching – helping students draw connections between traditional MBA subjects. Yale’s Integrated Curriculum is built around eight multidisciplinary first-year courses, called Organizational Perspectives, designed to teach students how to manage across a range of organizational roles. But at the core of this integrated curriculum, cases reign supreme. The Yale Management Case Portal – used for all core courses – includes original source documents (e.g. 10-Ks, analyst reports), Yale faculty-developed articles and interviews with individuals involved in the business situation described in the case, as well as articles and video clips from business news outlets and other multimedia content.
Of course, a discussion of case learning could not be complete without mention of Harvard Business School. In fact, HBS faculty pioneered the case method in the 1920s, and it is employed in more than 80 percent of the school’s courses today.
“The case method forces students to grapple with exactly the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers confront every day,” reads the HBS website. “In doing so, it redefines the traditional educational dynamic in which the professor dispenses knowledge and students passively receive it.”
Very often, HBS professors themselves will have authored the cases they introduce into the classroom, and in many instances, the actual case protagonist will participate in the class or arrive via live video feed to answer questions and explain how things really turned out. What’s more, professors increasingly are turning to technology to enrich their teaching. Harvard Business School Publishing this month is unveiling a new line of online simulations as part of its catalog of learning materials – available to educators around the globe. The first, a Universal Rental Car Pricing Simulation, provides a tool for teachers to convey the principles of pricing through real-time simulation.
While its proponents are certainly plentiful, the case method is not the only means of providing a business school education. In future posts, we’ll take a look at alternative methods employed at other top schools around the globe. In the meantime, good luck with those applications!
