Program Information

Harvard Business School
Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning
July 2005 – January 2009

The Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning (PCMPCL)is a two-part seminar designed by Harvard Business School (HBS) senior faculty members to meet the changing needs of teachers of management topics in Greater China and Singapore. The first part is 12 days in length, and is held on the HBS campus. The second part takes place in a city in Asia over the course of 4 days, and delves more deeply into PCMPCL topics. The seminar focuses on teaching, course development, and case writing—with a particular emphasis on the efforts required to introduce participant-centered learning methods into more conventionally taught curricula. In addition, the course will provide guidance on the creation, development, and tailoring of materials to reflect the specific management opportunities and challenges for the students taught at your institution. 

The Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning is designed for faculty members who will play major roles in leading curriculum development in their respective institutions over the next decade.

Learning Objectives

The learning objectives for the program were developed based on extensive discussions with the deans and rectors of leading business schools.

The objectives include:

• • Discussing the important issues related to teaching and course development methodologies;

• • Assisting academics in the process of updating curricula to accommodate participant-centered learning;

• • Providing experiences in translating the theoretical into practice-based learning within the region;

• • Helping to identify useful teaching, including the HBS syllabi and other resources;

• • Creating a self-help network among the HBS faculty and the faculty of other prestigious institutions to share “best practices” in participant-centered learning; and

• • Developing and strengthening case-writing and course development skills.

Program participants should expect to improve their skills in fostering participant-centered learning through teaching, course design, and case writing. In addition, they will gain a greater understanding of the resources available to assist them in these efforts.

Structure of the Program

The Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning is a full-time residential seminar, which consists of two parts. The first part, which is 12 days in length, takes place on the HBS campus. The second part is 4 days in length, and is going to be held in a city in Asia. Throughout the entire program, participants are expected to work 12 to 14 hours a day, and full participation in all activities is required. Participants must remain free of outside distractions and responsibilities throughout both parts of the program.

The seminar consists of core classroom sessions on teaching methods, case research, course design and development, and case writing. The topics will include:

• • Defining “professional education”;

• • Learning and developing as leaders and teachers;

• • How people learn and the qualities of a strong teacher;

• • The philosophy of discussion-based learning;

• • When the case method is, and is not, appropriate;

• • Teaching strategy: preparation and execution;

• • Developing teaching plans;

• • Learning contracts;

• • Questioning, listening, and offering feedback;

• • Developing a strong relationship with the class;

• • Effective course development;

• • Case writing and editing;

• • Field research and teaching;

• • Integrating economics, ethics, and the institution; and

• • Strategies for introducing participant-centered learning, including support requirements and political responses.

The sessions will consist of case-based discussion, as well as lectures and computer simulations. A workshop on case writing and one on course design also will be offered. All sessions will be conducted in English.

Extending the Learning

The Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning is designed as a means to support Asian faculty and their institutions in case method teaching. In order to achieve this objective, HBS Publishing also is implementing casebook publishing and a case customer support center. HBS Publishing entered into an agreement with China Renmin University Press to publish 10 MBA casebooks—in both English and Chinese—which were first available in the fall of 2005. This project is supported by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People’s Republic of China, other MOEs throughout Greater China, and the Chinese MBA Education Steering Committee. Upon completion of the program, ongoing support in both teaching materials and follow-up services will be offered in the region.

Faculty

The Program on Case Method and Participant-Centered Learning will be taught by a team of faculty members whose field-based research, industry involvement, and teaching interests keep them on the cutting edge in their areas of specialization. The program design team is led by Paul W. Marshall, MBA Class of 1960 Professor of Management Practice.

Campus Facilities

All seminar sessions during the initial block of the program will take place in amphitheater classrooms on the Harvard Business School campus in Boston. Participants will be housed in private rooms, and meals will be provided at Kresge Hall throughout their stay.

Participants will have full use of Shad Hall, the School’s athletic facility and fitness center, which provides basketball, racquetball, and squash courts; an indoor track; outdoor tennis courts; and a full range of conditioning equipment. 

The follow-on program will take place in a similar amphitheater classroom on the campus of a local business school in China. Participants will be housed in a local hotel close to campus, and meals will be provided at the hotel and at the local hosting school.

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Making the Journey

Syming Hwang Professor of Business School
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Speech on May 26th, 2006 at PCMPCL Conference

Dear Prof. Wheelwright, Prof. Marshall, Prof. Oberholzer-Gee, Mr. Wan, Mr. Chen, and my fellow classmates of PCMPCL; Good evening and welcome to Taipei:

It is a great honor to be asked to share my experiences of the past year with you tonight. About one year ago, I was planning for my sabbatical year starting in the summer. I planned to stay with my son in San Francisco. He has called me his “part-time dad” for as long as I can remember. So I decided to stay with him full-time until he got tired of me and asked me to leave. I was kind of curious as to how long that would take.

Shortly thereafter I received this email from the Dean’s Office with the words “PCMPCL”, “HBS” and “Boston”. My first thoughts were: not a bad idea, I can relax for 10 days in Boston. Everyone knows how beautiful Boston is in the summer time, and also how expensive. I figured, if the School would pay me to be there, that would suit me just fine. Especially since to us business school professors, HBS is like Fenway Park for a Red Sox fan. You cannot afford to go there often, but you have to have been there at least once in your lifetime. Most importantly, it was my chance to finally meet Prof. Warren McFarlan. I have been using his textbook for the past 20 years. Being a big fan of him, I submitted my application forms right away. Fortunately, there were only 4 applicants for 5 available slots. I called to my son to postpone my arrival time. So… Boston, here I come.

The next 10 days were unforgettable. We did see Boston, but only for one day. But I saw whales for the first time in my life that day that brought me 10 days of satisfaction. For the rest of the time we stayed inside HBS, amazed by its size and its resources. However, the most exciting part was that we attended Prof. McFarlan’s classes. Seeing a 70-year-old guy dancing and flying through a classroom, playing a different role with every different tune was amazing. I was stunned and I realized that this was a teaching spirit I had never known before. After the class I had a chat with him and even had a picture taken with him…a perfect ending to a most satisfying pilgrimage.

I left Boston for S.F. feeling excited and at the same time a bit puzzled. Why was HBS so unique? Why did they all teach in the same way, in that so-called Harvard Case Method? Why was every professor we met so excited about teaching? Could we do the same in Taiwan? Why should we? …etc. So many questions were mulling around in my head that my son soon decided I really was not a full-time dad even when I was there full time. Getting his understanding and seeing disappointment in his eyes, I left him for answers.

I went to Rome to visit the real Amphitheater — the Colosseo. I stayed for many hours inside the Colosseo each day for a week, trying to make connections between what happened inside this arena in the past two millennia and what happened in the HBS classroom with the case teaching method.

One dizzy afternoon, getting baked by the sun for a long time, my mind wandering… suddenly I heard the low roar of a lion, “Will you step down?” The words were sharp and cutting, and came from a giant Emperor looking down upon me. I saw lions running towards me, ready to make me their next meal. “No, it’s you Tom! No, not you Tom DeLong, the other Tom, Tom Tierney, it is he that must step down!” I saw the Emperor raising his eyebrows; the lions came closer and closer. “My performance has been much better than yours for the past years. For the good of the company, it is not I that should step down now.” The words flew from my mouth like thunder, like a fiery sword being brandished by my hand on its own volition. A bright light shone in my face, and the Emperor and lions were gone.

With a shock I awakened, and I remembered Prof. DeLong’s class with the Tom Tierney at Bain & Company case. We were asked to play the role of Granville Harris. After class Prof. DeLong came to me and said “You were good”. It made me feel like I never felt before. It was a feeling that came from the very depths of my soul. I wondered, was that the exciting experiences any student would have with the case method? Inside the Colosseo I went into deep thinking. Emperor and lions, warriors and swords, life and death battles, instinctive responses, real business situations, simulated environments, a learned/developed instinct with sound theories …and on and on. Starting from Bain & Company, I went through every case in PCMPCL, and carefully analyzed and compared them one by one. Many ideas kept running inside my head. Not sure I was any closer to an answer, or more confused than before I started, I returned to Taipei.

Taking advantage of my sabbatical leave, I designated myself the full-time designer of a case method experiment in Taiwan. Being aware of the great divide between HBS and business schools in Taiwan, I planned it carefully. After 3 months of intensive work, I was fortunate in being able to convince a group of professors to join the experiment. With the help of many enthusiastic people, the experimental plan was passed by a review committee of the Ministry of Education last November with the name “MOE Case Project”.

Under the sponsorship of MOE and with the help of Mr. John Chen, five professors in the project attended CWCD in Shanghai and PCMPCL II in Boston. By December 2005, we were ready to kick off the project. However, life is full of unexpected turns. On Christmas Eve, I was informed that I had Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC), a cancer deep inside my nose.

This time my life had turned into a real life or death struggle. This was not a simulated case. This monstrous shadow of the cancer cloud kept hanging over me. I trembled from fatigue; I could not sleep at night. With my educated instinct, I cancelled all my regular activities including the MOE Case Project. I needed all the energy I could muster to fight my battle. NPC reads like No Project Case to me.

At the time I was hospitalized for detailed examination and diagnosis, my son came back to me. It rekindled the fire deep inside me. Like a ray of sunshine piercing through a thundercloud, so did the smile come back in my eyes. “Let’s do it as a project”, I told my son. He began to collect every possible piece of information on NPC and cancer, he helped me to analyze and compare. By the time the doctors had set up my treatment plan, we also had the recovery plan ready. I went into treatment with little fear.

The chemotherapy and radiotherapy were awfully painful. However, the time, almost 2 months, I spent in the hospital ward was one of the best periods in my life. I interacted with my son and we had real father and son conversations, and I truly enjoyed the feeling of being a full-time father, or more precise, being the father of a full-time son.

The MOE Case Project continues to go on without me. This is by far the largest scale Harvard Case Method implementation in Asia. We set up 8 classes in 8 different universities teaching a course with the same syllabus. The course is in the area of supply chain management. Seven professors participate in the teaching of the course. They are Prof. Shu-Hsing Li of PCMPCL I, and professors Hong-Gee Chen,; Ming-Kuen Chen,; Kuang-Hui Chu,; Cheng-Kiang Farn,; Jrjung Lyu ; and Li-Chi Wang, of PCMPCL II. The original plan there included an eighth one, which was me. But, I was asked not to bother until I was fully recovered.

There was a Course Development Workshop in January, right after they came back from Boston. Fourteen cases were selected, 6 of them are Harvard cases and 8 are cases written by the above course-teaching professors in the past 2 years. The original plan was to use entirely Harvard cases; however, there were some obstacles exporting the Chinese version of Harvard Casebooks from Beijing to Taipei. After exhausting all possibilities, we settled for 8 local cases.

Each professor is responsible for 2 cases. He was asked to develop a teaching plan and a board plan and to do the rehearsals in front of the other professors. Each professor is asked to teach their 2 cases in 8 universities. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect, therefore 8 practices in a semester should make them an effective teacher of their 2 cases.

In the workshop they have also set up a class session plan. Two professors will run a session. The host-professor will warm up the class in the first 35 minutes, which is usually the administrative stuff, answering questions of the previous cases and on-site group discussions of the coming case. After a 5-minute break, the case-teaching-professor will start the 80-minute case session using the Harvard Case Method. Following a 20 minute break, the host-professor will play the video and hand out the assignment for next week’s case. Since the participating professor needs to stay in his own class as a host-professor and travel to other universities as a case-teaching-professor, he has more than double the workload for this course.

The participants in 8 classes vary. Two classes are EMBA, the rest are MBA with a mix of EMBA, Ph.D. students and upper division undergraduates. Due to the name of Harvard Case Method, there are many professors sitting in as observers, and they participate in class discussions. The 14 case sessions are divided into 2 runs. The first run was completed in the middle of April, and every professor has taught his first case in 8 universities. With reviews and adjustments, the class is in the middle of its second run and is going well. Prof. Kuang-Hui Chu’s office is in charge of all the arrangements. All credits belong to him.

Teaching courses mimicking the Harvard Case Method is one of the three main tasks in the MOE Case Project. It is the most important one and lays the foundation for the other two; which are Evaluation of Case Teaching Effects and Development of Teaching Cases. As far as I know, many of us have taught cases before. However, we taught with our own methods which were far different from those of the Harvard Case Method. For the past 20 years I have used 6-9 cases from McFarlan’s textbook each year. They are Harvard cases with teaching notes. However, with heavy workloads and the low frequency (once a year) of teaching a particular case, it is difficult to do the teaching plan, the board plan and the rehearsals for all the cases. We all have our own way of teaching cases. But the thing we do not know is: Is there a better way?

The major goal of the MOE Case Project is to design a case teaching method that is workable in a limited teaching resources environment such as Taiwan, yet remains in line with the spirit of the Harvard Case Method. Therefore, the Evaluation of the Case Teaching Effects of the current ongoing 8 classes is vital to our goal. We have set many items as variables, such as class size, student body, case type, repetition of teaching…etc. to be collected and analyzed. Prof. Jrjung Lyu is in charge of this task.

Many of us have written cases. Over the past few years I have written more than 10. I find it much more difficult than I thought after CWCD. Designing and setting up a common platform so that case-teaching professors can produce teachable cases is another goal of this Project. Prof. Cheng-Kiang Farn, is working on it.

Life is full of surprises. I surprised my doctors with the fast recovery from the treatment effects. I told my son: “We will have to start the recovery process before the treatments”. We developed quite a complicated recovery plan and have implemented it step by step. I was called the happiest patient in the hospital. John surprised me when he asked me to give this talk. Tonight I may have surprised you with such a design and implementation of the Harvard Case Method. I hope that next year we will all be surprised by the widespread and deep rooted Harvard Case Method here in Asia. Thank for your attention. May you all have a very healthy life!

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PCMPCL Participating Schools
(2005 – 2009)

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