No. 15, September 2022.
In his book Keep Sharp, CNN health correspondent Sanjay Gupta proposes five pillars for maintaining mental acuity: diet, exercise, rest, purpose in life and social connection. When someone asks him which of these pillars predominates, his answer is surprising: it's neither diet nor crossword puzzles, but exercise, movement. Believe it or not, Gupta, a medical neurologist, presents evidence that exercise is "the only activity that triggers biological effects that can maintain a healthy brain."
What do these findings have to do with case method teaching? EVERYTHING. Just as a novice swimmer has to think about breathing and arm and leg movement before integrating these skills into swimming, the instructor can think of "questions, listening and answering" as separate elements of the process of leading a case discussion.
Let's start with questions: C. Roland Christensen offers ten categories of questions in Education for Judgment (Chapter 9): open-ended, diagnostic, information, challenge, action, priority, and prediction questions; hypothetical, extension (implications), and generalization questions. Choosing from this range, to ask the right question to the right person at the right time, requires a well-honed mind.
Listening and responding are even more challenging because the discussion leader has to do both at the same time, which requires discerning the relevance of the comment, its connection to previous and future input, while formulating his or her response. Some veterans argue that these skills are developed over years of experience; that they are not teachable.
They are wrong. Being able to refer to a typology like Christensen's empowers the novice to mine the richness of the art of questioning. But it is a craft that does not lend itself to following manuals; much is learned by trial and error.
In my coaching, I don't try to present a single roadmap but rather share what goes through my head when I'm teaching and the decisions I need to make. I think about what the students' responses might be to the "trigger questions" I throw out at the start of each discussion block, and how I should respond.
I can explore his line of thinking if it's interesting, probe with follow-up questions if his analysis is shallow, or pass the floor to another student if he says something controversial and there's opportunity for debate. The range of options Christensen presents contains 18 types of answers, and selecting among them, in nanoseconds, is not for lazy minds.
Until the age of 57, when I became president of a company with active projects on four continents, I always thought I had no time to exercise. During that experience, hard but successful, I realized that I could not afford not to exercise. And since the age of 60, when I returned to academia, this habit has served me well, in and out of the classroom.
But you don't have to wait until you're 57 to discover the magic of movement. Nor do you have to be a fanatic to start an exercise routine that maintains mental agility. Experts agree that 150 minutes per week may be enough, and Dr. Gupta gives us a simple recommendation: try to do something that produces a light sweat-every day.
