#  Student case pedagogy: Learning from their own experience 

 



   ![Ron Heifetz](/sites/g/files/omnuum12666/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/vpl/files/10.16.15adaptiveleadership142_heifetz_cropped.jpg?itok=vPoKStvc) 

 

**Ronald Heifetz, Co-Founder of the Center for Public Leadership and King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer of Public Leadership**, uses experiential teaching methods like student case analysis—where students collaboratively develop and analyze cases drawn from their own work experiences—to promote deeper engagement and stronger retention of leadership concepts.

### The benefits

Teaching leadership as practice in the Harvard Kennedy School’s [*MLD 201 Exercising Leadership: The Politics of Change*](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/degrees/teaching-courses/course-listing/mld-201-a) and [*MLD 364 Leadership from the Inside Out: The Personal Capacity to Lead and Stay Alive*](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/degrees/teaching-courses/course-listing/mld-364) requires not only learning a complex conceptual framework, according to Heifetz, but also the development of skills, temperament, and values. Analyzing a personal experience makes the lessons come alive for students, builds reflective practice, and teaches them to examine a problem, despite emotional ties.

### The challenges

Outside of regular full class meetings, students meet weekly in small consultation groups to analyze each other’s cases, rotating chair and presenter roles. Heifetz relies heavily on teaching staff, meeting as a team before and after each class to discuss student progress (tracked via weekly written work) and determine response. This adaptive approach can be particularly challenging for less experienced teaching assistants, though a significant professional development experience.



 

##  Takeaways and best practices 

 



 ### Don’t be afraid to focus on failure. 

Students select a failure experience rather than a success story because Heifetz believes the exercise desensitizes them to failure itself, teaches them to take corrective action more quickly and persevere, and increases their learning retention: “People lose sleep around their failures because those experiences have high emotional valence. The odds, therefore, go way up that they will carry those lessons into their own future behavior.”



 

 ### Incorporate creative elements for additional practice. 

Leadership is an improvisational art, and so Heifetz structures exercises where students read poetry and improvise song to illustrate key relational dimensions of leadership (e.g., listening, creativity, inspiration). Students learn to listen to and analyze emotional content, and to connect with an audience non-defensively.



 

 ### Provide a framework, but resist the temptation to jump in and direct. 

Having [employed experiential teaching methods for over 30 years](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3324950.pdf), Heifetz can see themes emerging quickly, and realizes he is sometimes prone to react and instruct, not ideal for students to learn from and teach one another. He depends on his teaching assistants to speak up in class, interpret the dynamic, and help him step back and resist the urge to restore class discussion equilibrium unnecessarily.



 

  

 

 

 

### Bottom line

Heifetz believes that teaching practice is enhanced by using specific, illustrative cases that lead to generalizable concepts. “Rather than doing it with prepared cases at a distance from students’ experience, I’m doing it with their own cases. Many of them return years later and say, ‘I think about this every day.’”



 

##  Related Research 

 



  [### Effective virtual patient simulators for medical communication training: A systematic review

 ](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/medu.14152?casa_token=TFRZ1cP5n-EAAAAA%3AvzmO1nOc62SOiKmfrRSbYgBTJ895xOCjWRFt_DRUiB91PiORM8mjk8XNBxfXkEnLm-VwMjHyHODGbec) A key message from this review study of usi ng virtual patient simulators for effective medical communication training is that sound pedagogy elements around teaching with advanced technology are essential in inducing the best learning outcomes. 

 

 

   [### Research: Using the case method in teaching education: The role of discussion and experience in teachers' thinking about cases

 ](https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/B_Levin_Using_1995.pdf) A study tested the use of case studies with and without follow-up discussion, finding that the discussion group’s social interaction and sharing of conflicting ideas were the source of changes in thinking. 

 

 

  

 

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##  Related Resource 

 



  [### With Politics Front and Center: New tools to help educators support students in controversial scenarios (Usable Knowledge)

 ](http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/01/politics-front-and-center) Professor Levinson and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education published new case studies earlier this semester addressing civic ethical dilemmas that they anticipate educators will face in the current political climate. 

 

 

   [### A Master Class: Monica Higgins and the use of the case method in education

 ](http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/14/10/master-class) Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Monica Higgins taught a Master Class on “Learning to Lead through Case Discussion.” 

 

 

  

 

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 See also:- [ HKS ](/featured-faculty/hks)
- [ Into Practice Issues ](/practice-categories/practice-issues)
- [ Case-based Learning ](/case)
- [ Leadership ](/topics/leadership)