AASP Newsletter - February 2017

John Coumbe-Lilley, PhD, CC-AASP, CSCS, University of Illinois at Chicago

This article was inspired by a teaching session I was invited to facilitate with students at the University of Denver in April 2016. The session I led there was typical of teaching case sessions I lead at my own institution in courses in the fields of sport and exercise psychology, nutrition counseling and teaching in higher education. Like many other readers of fiction, I enjoy a good story. But I prefer reading non-fiction even more because I am inspired by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I am amazed when unexpected situations happen to them or they are involved in challenging moments demanding they face them and strive to reach a goal. This article outlines the teaching case method; my belief is that it is the nexus of classroom learning bridging fact and fiction in our field to enhance the decision making capabilities of emerging and new professionals.

Through my teaching, I have used many fantastic text books in sport and exercise psychology providing surveys of the field, but not really helping me in ways I needed to develop critical thinking and decision making in my students (Gallucci, 2014; Weinberg & Gould, 2014). There are terrific case study texts where leaders in our field provide expert views and pathways guiding us through how they approached specific cases (Hemmings & Holder, 2009; Murphy, 1995) and AASP has introduced Case Studies in Sport and Exercise Psychology to disseminate learning and experience from actual cases. These are positive learning opportunities, however, for me, none are gripping enough to focus the critical attention of my students or recognize the nuances and inconsistencies of the human character, competition and organizational contexts in sport. On one hand, they represent what I feel is best about our field, which is knowledge production, sharing, and strong scholarly communication. However, on the other hand, I found it challenging to engage my students in the content and promote independent critical thinking, allowing them to identify the key facts for themselves, make up their own minds about an approach, and then defend their own decisions about how they would handle a specific case. In my view, the spirit of discovery and exploration with an expert teacher facilitating the conversation is at the heart of guided learning for discovery and beyond the scope of many texts in our field. This article is aimed at the creative, open minded and collaborative sport and exercise psychology instructors who want to challenge themselves and their students to immerse themselves in the teaching case method.

Just as soccer midfield players in possession of the ball perceive the options around them and make a decision based on the information and their ability to act on it, so too should sport psychology practitioners. In order to do this, sport psychology professionals need to have been prepared thoroughly enough to identify the key facts and features with which they are presented and make judgments and decisions leading to positive actions. Teaching cases can prepare new professionals to do this and help accelerate their understanding of behavior and context. How is this rapid learning achieved?

The Teaching Case Method
The Teaching Case instructional method is a content-rich, discourse-facilitated process led by a subject matter expert who is skilled at facilitating whole class discussions. This approach is not new; according to Herried (2011), the use of this kind of method started at Harvard University 100 years ago. It began in the business school and spread to other disciplines in other forms through the 20th century. These forms included the lecture case, told in the form of a story, firmly instructor-centered with analysis and wisdom imparts by the professor about the case. Discussion cases were whole-class-facilitated discussions led with the idea that group dialog would conjure up learning and wisdom. Throughout the decades, small group discussions focused on a teaching case took root and evidence began to show that small cooperative and collaborative groups learned more compared to the other methods. This approach was found to promote diverse opinions, and respect for alternative judgments and viewpoints. Direct cases are those given to individuals to process on their own and return to class with a response for discussion.

For the teaching case method to be effective, the case presented to students should follow the principles Abell (1997) recommends:

1. Assuring the case presents an issue that must be resolved, not just a story.
2. The case tackles an important issue in the field.
3. The case should encourage discovery by the student of alternative points of view.
4. Use a case that has a sense of controversy about it.
5. Contrast and comparisons should be part of the teaching case method.
6. Introducing a case with specific details from which students might develop generalized applications.
7. The case should contain data in the form of contextual descriptions, quantifiable information and the predispositions of the individuals in the case.
8. A case with recognizable characters add a personal touch for the student.
9. A case should be concentrated and concise and no longer than 10 pages of double spaced lines.
10. The case should be easy to read and follow.

Instructors are responsible for assuring students have the necessary content knowledge to respond to the case and they are prepared to be unsettled in the learning journey. The role of the instructor in the classroom is to facilitate effective discussion with prepared questions that guide a discussion toward consensus and then change direction to create controversy. A contest of ideas should be promoted and encouraged. Weighing and evaluating evidence should be part of the discussion and white board work is essential. This is not an opportunity for a text heavy PowerPoint slide deck to make an appearance, but rather the performance of an effective college educator who is demonstrating a constructivist teaching style through dialogical examination of the case presented.

Preparing to Lead Discussions
Classroom discussions can deteriorate into unhelpful and uninspiring moments in the classroom. These moments are characterized by some students listening without contributing to the collective discourse. One or two individuals speak their thoughts out loud and go on unless reigned in and the goals of the discussion are often obscured as the instructor focuses on managing the room and not facilitating the discussion. To overcome these moments in the classroom, there are several preparatory steps an educator can take to assure a quality discussion.

According to Hollander (2002), concurrently with content knowledge learning, instructors can set expectations for student engagement using three short assignments leading into the teaching case discussion. The first assignment is a short 1-2 page reflection responding to the questions: What makes a good discussion? What kind of discussion do you find most helpful to your learning? What makes someone a good discussion contributor? What kinds of discussion behaviors are helpful or unhelpful to your learning? The second assignment is a short goal setting exercise for the students asking them to set learning goals for the upcoming teaching case discussion using specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-framed (SMART) goal-setting principles. The final assignment is a 1-2 page evaluation of the teaching case discussion asking students to reflect on what happened in the discussion and their role in its quality. Students are asked to outline how they reached their discussion goals and how the discussion helped or hindered their learning of content. These assignments promote thoughtful student reflection and preparation for discussion and allow the instructor to learn about their students before the teaching case discussion occurs and make reasonable preparations. These assignments also permit minority students to express themselves in ways they might not in whole class discussions, which helps to tackle labels and bias the instructor might hold about a specific cultural group (White, 2011).

This approach educates the students to their role and responsibility for the upcoming discussion and opens the opportunity for learning and explicitly accountability between students for their behavior during discussion, and the instructor and his/her class. There is no doubt, this process takes effort and commitment from the student and the instructor, but the payoff is the richness of discourse and the opportunity for multiple levels of learning in knowledge acquisition, application, and discussion capabilities.

How Can You Get Started Using Teaching Cases?
Get trained: Harvard PT Chan of Public Health offers an annual three-day program showing you how to write, facilitate, and validate your teaching cases. I found the training and the faculty outstanding. There are business school faculty in the USA who occasionally lead workshops for others about how to use teaching cases. If you have three days and the funding for this program, I highly recommend it. You will leave with the tools necessary to get started immediately. On the other hand, there are lower cost opportunities. A range of texts like Teaching with Cases: A practical guide by Anderson, Schiano, and Schiano (2014), teaching scholarship articles, and YouTube content demonstrating the teaching case method, might be organized and curated into a self-directed learning program.

Write your own: I had several long-term and short-term intense commitments with a number of sport teams. I documented most of my work, answering the key questions of who, what, why, when, where and how in narrative form. I decided to replace the identifying facts and features of the characters but essentially keep the content as it was when it happened. Occasionally I added a “head line” like effect from current specific sport news. I wrote half a page, one page, two pages and so on, until I reached the recommended 10-page limit.

Progress from short and simple to long and complex: Recognize that you must start short and small in content and length. The shorter your work, the less detail and complexity there will be, but this is okay because you need practice writing your cases and you need to test your work weekly with your students. Use your classes as a learning lab and listen to the feedback from your students. They will tell you if the case was too easy, too hard or in some cases, if they make no sense to them. When that happens, I own that. I only release a teaching case into the world if I have used it in various forms 3-4 times. Then I improve it as I need to.

Start off low stakes: Until you have tested your teaching cases and know where they are strong and weak, use low stakes evaluation approaches until you have refined them and extended their complexity. As complexity and length increases, so does the challenge the students face and assessment can become more demanding.

Know your content: When you write a case, you need to think from both sides, yours and that of your students. The case must allow the students to call upon the prior knowledge they have learned in your course and any other information sources pertinent to the case by which they are challenged. You write a case with boundaries implied and the content you want the students to retrieve is contained inside the boundaries of the narrative. Therefore you must know what you have taught and what the reasonable relationships between variables might be between different units of knowledge. For example, if you write a teaching case with the title “Jimmy’s battle with concentration” and it is part of a section you are teaching on mental skills training, your reader would expect the emphasis of the case to be focused on the concept of concentration and might expect to have questions focused on mental skills training. This is reasonable for the reader to anticipate. If this case is being used as a demonstration of application by the students at the end of the learning module, it is reasonable for the students to surmise they will apply the knowledge they have learned about mental skills training to this case and present their process, findings, and decision.

Structure the use of the teaching case: I use teaching cases at the end of learning modules. For example, in a class I teach on the psychology of injury (I use the Psychology of Sport Injury and Rehabilitation by Arvinen-Barrow and Walker (2013)), I teach 3 x 5 week learning modules comprised of 10 x 75 minute learning sessions. Luckily, the course text has short case studies focused on the chapter content that I use to introduce the concept of cases, which scaffolds the learning module; then I provide a take home teaching case for each student to review (direct case method). The third step is to have the students return, first pair up and share their views, and then join up together to make a foursome and discuss their findings. Then the class (average size 28-32) comes together and I facilitate the case using the facilitation skills I outlined above. I allow the entire class period (75 minutes) for this process to occur.

Do Teaching Cases Work?
It depends on who you ask and whose teaching scholarship and opinions you read. If you ask faculty and students to report the quality and value of the learning and their satisfaction and enjoyment with teaching cases, the responses are very positive. But if you want empirical positivistic experimentally-derived findings that teaching cases are better than other methods, I will not lie, the jury is out on that finding. Even though evidence is not equivocal on this point, I prefer this approach to teaching and learning than others because students can make up their own mind about what facts matter to them and how they decide to use them. I can be the guide on the side and I get to demonstrate my own expertise through this role. I become a learner when I hear the views of my students when they generate an approach to the case I had not considered. I found that using the teaching case method is a powerful approach with which to engage my students; they get more out of the course and I enjoy teaching even more.

Acknowledgement

Thanks for feedback during the writing process to Amber Shipherd, Ph.D, CC-AASP, Assistant Professor and Performance Psychology Program Coordinator at Texas A&M University – Kingsville, who co-chairs the AASP Teaching Special Interest Group with me.

References

Abell, D. (1997). What makes a good case? ECCH AUTUMN/FALL.

Arvinen-Barrow, M., & Walker, N. (2013). The psychology of sport injury and rehabilitation. New York, NY: Routledge.

Herreid, C. F. (2011). Case study teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2011(128), 31-40.

Gallucci, N. T. (2014). Sport psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Hemmings, B., & Holder, T. (2013). Applied sport psychology: A case-based approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Hollander, J. A. (2002). Learning to discuss: Strategies for improving the quality of class discussion. Teaching Sociology, 30(3), 317-327.

Murphy, S. M. (1995). Sport psychology interventions. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2014). Foundations of sport and exercise psychology (6th ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

White, J. W. (2011). Resistance to classroom participation: Minority students, academic discourse, cultural conflicts, and issues of representation in whole class discussions. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 10(4), 250-265.