Challenges of case-based teaching.

Abstract

For decades, teacher educators have emphasized the importance of devising more effective ways of preparing preservice teachers for the classroom. Generally, these efforts encompass more effective preparation in content area knowledge, teaching methods, interprofessional skills, and classroom management (Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002). The need for teaching higher levels of professional performance has been exacerbated by numerous calls for teacher education reform and students' academic performance, most recently enshrined in No Child Left Behind (NCLB). These calls for reform imply the need for (a) collaborative team approaches for more effective service delivery, (b) consolidation of organizational configurations requiring increased professional collaboration as school districts strive to become more cost efficient and effective, (c) the move towards including students with special needs in general education classes, (d) an increased understanding that the complex needs of most students require an array of professionals who are able to work together more closely than previously, and (e) that novice teachers, by virtue of these factors, need effective instruction in these areas prior to graduating to their new profession (Cohen & Ball, 1999). Case-Based Instruction Generally, in research and teaching, case studies have been seen as a precursor to legitimate scientific research or as a way of studying extremely rare, one shot phenomena (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). An alternative view, however, suggests that cases can describe real-world contextual problems that are probably too complex and unique to approach experimentally (e.g., Cohen & Ball, 1999; Yin, 1984). The current popularity of the approach began after Shulman's 1985 call for a pedagogy of cases (Floyd & Bodur, 2005) Rationales for incorporating real-world situations in preservice and novice teacher education vary, but generally incorporate the following: First, teacher education research has consistently acknowledged that classroom events are contingent on a host of interrelated contributory factors that are mutually influential, to a greater or lesser extent, in producing teacher and student performance (Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002). Teaching via the case method appears to be an ideal way of communicating the detailed, interrelated, and often densely interrelations necessary to explore the multidimensional nature of what students and teachers do in classrooms. Second, there is a pivotal need to ensure that preservice and novice teachers are able to apply what they have learned from research on teaching and learning to complex classroom situations, thereby narrowing the research-to-practice gap (Floyd & Bodur, 2005). In this regard, cases allow for infusing of research knowledge in a comprehensive and comprehensible form to almost any intended audience. Third, the characteristically complex nature of the case study reflects situations and vectors of influence likely to be found in the real-world setting of the classroom (Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, & Shulman, 2002). Cases, therefore, investigate phenomena in a real-life context; Fourth, the complexity of classroom interactions quickly, in many instances, erodes firm boundaries of all-or-nothing thinking, and teachers are compelled to use highly developed skills and behaviors for effective teaching and classroom management (Wasserman, 1994). Teaching these skills using cases appears to be beneficial seeing that in complex case simulations, the boundaries between participants and the setting are often not clearly evident. Fifth, teachers are compelled to use many available sources of information and skill sets to judge any given teaching and learning situation, all contextually nested in the common teaching and learning relationships of the classroom (Laframboise & Griffith, 1997). Cases use multiple sources of evidence to describe the phenomenon under investigation and to unpack complex activities into more manageable subsets. …

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