Teaching Partners

When Maureen O’Hern first encountered the Case Method Project after ten years of teaching at Boston Collegiate, she quickly recognized the case method as a perfect match for the school’s “philosophy of student-centered learning.” Boston Collegiate, which is classified as a Commonwealth Charter school, operates independently of the Boston Public Schools, selects its students from throughout Boston by lottery, and focuses on sending 100% of its graduates to college—a goal it consistently meets. An alumna of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Maureen not only saw the case method as well-suited to her school but also was particularly intrigued by its potential to “help students better retain the details of history” through its focus on narrative and decision-making.

During the 2016-2017 school year, Maureen incorporated four cases from Harvard’s “History of American Democracy” course into both her junior AP U.S. History and senior AP U.S. Government classes. As the year progressed, she became “increasingly impressed with how well the case method works in a high school classroom.” As she led her students through case discussions covering the U.S. Constitution, the secession crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and Citizens United, she consistently experienced “higher student participation” from “a wider range of students” than she normally saw in traditional seminar classes. Moreover, she witnessed her students’ excitement at discussing “core democratic ideas” such as James Madison’s concerns about “tyranny of the majority” and the question of whether “money is a form of speech.”

As the academic year wound down, Maureen found that the case method had exceeded her initial hopes: students demonstrated not only “a strong retention of information” but also the ability to connect big ideas to new topics.

“We discussed the [James] Madison case in October,” she wrote in a letter to the Case Method Project, “and still this spring the students bring up the idea of the tyranny of the majority in class conversations” about history as well as current events.

In light of these observations, Maureen devised an experiment to measure the impact of the case method. After each case, she gave students the same end-of-unit assessment that she had used in previous years (i.e., before she had tried the case method). On these assessments, students who read and discussed the cases performed better, on average, than students from previous years. The final assessment, which took place after students used the Citizens United case, showed a particularly strong effect. Compared to students from the previous three years, students who read the Citizens United case participated much more frequently in class and were far more likely to ace quiz questions on campaign finance. The results, in fact, suggested that students retained information from cases and case discussions better than material covered in other ways.

At the end of the year, the AP exams confirmed the results of Maureen’s experiment. Her AP U.S. History students achieved the second highest rate of qualifying scores (3 or above) in the school’s history. Maureen’s AP Government students, meanwhile, achieved the highest rate of qualifying scores ever recorded at Boston Collegiate.

Based on the success of her experience in 2016-2017, Maureen decided to significantly expand her use of the case method in her history and government classes moving forward. For the 2017-2018 year, she also launched a new case-based course for seniors, “Democracy in America,” featuring a dozen cases from Harvard’s “History of American Democracy” syllabus. By incorporating the Harvard case studies into the AP curriculum, Maureen demonstrated the case method’s ability to improve student performance even on standardized tests. Now, by bringing a fully case-based course to Boston Collegiate, she hopes to unlock the deeper potential of case method teaching—that is, to transform a high school classroom into a forum for lively debates and high-level critical thinking about politics, history, and the most profound elements of American democracy.