Teaching Partners

The Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers (EMK) is an in-district charter school (also known as a Horace Mann Charter School) within the Boston Public School system. The in-district charter classification of EMK grants teachers “special freedom to pursue innovative, challenging academic and extracurricular programming.” In terms of demographic makeup, the student body of EMK is predominantly Hispanic (46.8%) and black (44.6%); 54% of students qualify as “Economically Disadvantaged,” and in 2014-2015, over 77% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.

In September 2016, Mr. Alex Kaufman, a history teacher at EMK, attended the Case Method Project workshop at Harvard Business School. By coincidence, Alex had recently inherited responsibility over the school’s full-year civics elective. After completing the workshop, he immediately proposed to fill that elective with 13 cases from the “History of American Democracy” curriculum.

At first glance, EMK may not seem like an obvious candidate to adopt a course originally designed for college students. Although the graduation rate is very high (93.5%), EMK students face significant obstacles. More than 50% of EMK students list English as not their first language, and 13.6% are English Language Learners. The percentage of students listed as “chronically absent” is 32.8%, nearly three times the state average. Academically, EMK students trail the state averages in several key areas: of those who take AP Tests, only 19.4% receive a passing score, and the average SAT score in 2015-2016 was 350 points below the state average.

Whatever conclusions one might draw from these metrics, Alex was undeterred. He noted that all of his students had already taken 8th grade civics and that they “had guarded expectations when entering [the] course this year.” But when the students first learned about the “History of American Democracy” curriculum, they quickly embraced it as not only a fresh take on civics but also as a way to “identify, model, and practice college ready skills.” From the very first case, Alex reported that his students “reacted with enthusiasm and a renewed passion as they engaged in the challenging case method.”

For all of this enthusiasm, however, the students initially struggled. Even working through the readings as a group, the class sometimes only managed to get through two pages over a full class period. Whereas Harvard undergraduates complete two cases in a week, the high school students at EMK took more than three weeks to complete the first case.

But Alex and his students persisted. As they gained familiarity with the case format, they gradually accelerated the pace. Meanwhile, Alex devised a variety of exercises to cultivate the various skills—supporting a claim with evidence, for example, or framing a counterargument—that the case method demanded. The graded discussions became the capstone activity after the students spent several days processing and analyzing each case. And these discussions often grew “animated,” with students sometimes rising from their seats to make their points. As the course progressed, according to Alex, the students began to “recognize how they [were] drawing upon their knowledge from previous cases to inform their discussions.” Students were able to analyze “the arcs that tie these cases together, developing a cohesive and detailed understanding” of American democracy.

Other pieces of anecdotal evidence also attest to the impact the curriculum was having on students’ curiosity and their general attitude toward their schoolwork. On numerous occasions, Alex conveyed to Project staff questions his students had about the material. In nearly every instance, these questions pertained to specific details—for example, the meaning of the word “master” in the context of nineteenth century apprenticeships—that demonstrated a genuine curiosity about history, quite distinct from the desire simply to fulfill course requirements. Perhaps even more telling, the majority of students elected not to use the annotated versions of the cases even after they became available, preferring to embrace the challenge of the college-level cases without any “shortcuts.”

When Alex began teaching the course, he hoped that his students would eventually be able to participate in case discussions without relying on any extra supports. As the school year drew to a close, he worked with the Case Method Project to organize a special event that would put his students’ new skills to the test: a true Harvard Business School-style case discussion, held on the HBS campus and led by Professor David Moss. Despite the unfamiliar and high-pressure environment of an HBS classroom, Alex’s students performed admirably as they discussed the case, “Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Black Voting Rights.”

In a short debrief session following the discussion, the students also showed they were fully aware of the skills they had developed as a result of practicing the case method. One commented that the class had made their discussions of history “more evidence-based,” and others mentioned how the class helped them become more “outgoing” and willing to speak their minds. One student commented that the class “made us feel like we want to engage in the types of conversations that our classmates are having,” which encouraged him to read the text closely. A number of students also remarked that the course helped them to recognize the importance of “voting” and “participation” in our democracy. Numerous students even said they were considering running for public office someday.

The EMK students’ reactions to the “History of American Democracy” curriculum demonstrated that it is resonating, exciting these young citizens about a subject that had mostly never excited them before. Alex Kaufman’s teaching approach, moreover, demonstrates how the challenges presented by the case method can, when properly presented, motivate high school students to elevate their expectations for their classmates and themselves.