Teaching notes of the cases: to have them or not, that is the question

A question we asked ourselves during the conception of the ADM Casoteca was: does every case need teaching grades?

To answer this and other questions that allowed us to prototype the ADM Casoteca, we made a broad benchmarking . We realized that some databases we analyzed bring them, others do not. Those that offer this resource usually create mechanisms so that students do not have access to these materials, giving exclusivity to teachers.

The advantage of the note is that the author of that case can better guide the teachers who wish to use it, suggesting complementary references, ways of conducting the discussion in the classroom, questions and important points of the debate. The notes also bring references to be used and the learning objectives. All these aspects are very fundamental.

On the other hand, the disadvantage is that, sometimes, the teaching grades end up occupying a place of "feedback", either for the teacher or for the class participant.

Weighing pros and cons, we chose not to have teaching grades at Casoteca ADM - at least so far. And this was not by chance. Still, I need to clarify: we do not have the teaching notes as separate materials, but we do have the relevant information inserted in our cases. Many of them are in the summary (learning objectives, central theme), others are in the development (such as the references, which are always contextualized) or until the end, in the session we call "Questions for debate".

This conception, I must say, was fed by lessons learned from the course by Professor Richard Elmore of Harvard University that I highly recommend: Leaders of Learning (you can sign up here ). This course provoked me to think about our roles in the learning process and to prototype ideas for the future. There I learned that learning experiences are the result of a combination of more individual or more collective, more hierarchical or more distributive aspects.

The future of the learning experience will be increasingly focused on collective and more distributive aspects.

In this way, the ADM Casoteca was a platform designed to move towards becoming more multimedia and collaborative in the construction of cases and the way we will use them in pedagogical practices. To this end, we recently inaugurated a feature that allows interaction through comments in each case.

We understand that a case does not have just one way to be developed in the classroom and that it is not worth producing a document that only teachers have access to. For teaching cases, there are countless ways to analyze it (I don't really like the idea of "solving" it that some people use) and many possible ways to link it to activities, readings, etc.

Just as there are countless ways to analyze it, there are also countless ways to conduct it.

For each group, and each teacher, there will be a way (or perhaps even several ways) to continue with the dynamics made possible by the case. In our vision of the future, we see a platform so collaborative that the teaching notes will be like a wiki, written by many hands that applied that case, whether they are teachers or students who participated in the process.

Let's move forward to build this learning experience of the future!