No. 19, January - February 2023.
The conversation with the colleague was lively: why not ask the same questions in class that are assigned for case preparation? It often makes sense. To start the discussion of a case set in a setting unfamiliar to most students, it makes sense to assign and start the class with the same open-ended question about the situation.
So I began a case study session on the first self-governing municipality in a Central American country by asking students about the history of the community. Joe Bower, a Harvard Business School professor who was observing the class, suggested that next time I start with a more provocative question, for example: How does this grain of participatory democracy emerge in a hotbed of corruption?
The first HBS teaching case-which just celebrated 100 years-ended with a list of three questions. It was common in the early years of the method to end cases with questions to guide the student in preparation for the case discussion: the "study questions."
It was a lousy idea. It turned the case into a kind of "story problem" like those arithmetic exercises assigned to elementary school students.
Teaching cases are not exercises. What is sought in the discussion of cases is not an answer but, in the words of teacher Charles I. Gragg, is the willing suspension of disbelief: that students forget they are in a classroom; that they imagine they are immersed in the real situation of the protagonist. Ending the case with study questions breaks that illusion.
The alternative is not to omit the guiding questions, but to let the instructor formulate and pre-assign them, depending on the subject matter and learning objectives of the session. The function of these questions is to ensure that students pay attention to those parts of the case that will be relevant to the analysis. They are therefore guiding questions.
If one of the objectives is to develop independent judgment skills, the instructor can assign the case without questions, leaving students to use their judgment to understand the situation and decide what is relevant to resolve it.
But there are cases that, because of their complexity and time constraints for preparation, deserve to have some guiding or "study" questions. These questions can also serve to organize the discussion of the groups that meet before the class.
The questions the instructor throws out in class have another purpose: not to guide preparation but to generate discussion to illuminate the various facets of the decision facing the protagonist. They tend to be more direct, less abstract. If the study question is, "What should be the criteria for evaluating the sales manager?" the discussion question might be, "Should the sales manager lose his or her job?"
Discussion questions have other functions as well: to vary the level of tension to avoid monotony; and to introduce an element of surprise. Where the custom is to repeat the same preparation questions in class discussion, I have observed some discussion groups that simply engage in answering the questions.
Good questions (is there a problem in this case?) sometimes serve both the preparation as well as the discussion of the case. But not always.
