Teaching with the Student Cases: A Note for Instructors

The student cases page describes one way to run the assignment—the way we run it in our own teaching. We wrote it up because it works for us, but it is far from the only option, and the right configuration depends a lot on your class: whether it is a large lecture course or a small seminar, whether you have teaching fellows, and how much time you can give the cases. This note describes what we do and why it works, some other configurations that can work too, and what we would keep under any of them.

What we do

In our teaching at Harvard, each section of the course works on one region as a “sustainability evaluation committee” of five to eight students, mirroring the real-world practice of outside evaluation panels. After students read the research guide and its linked sources, the teaching fellow chairs a strategy session in which the committee decides how to divide its research. Expert interviews are conducted by two or three members each, with notes shared to the whole committee. The work culminates in two products: an individual policy memo from each student, and a committee oral briefing delivered to the assembled class at the end of the term.

The individual memo keeps every student accountable for the full arc of analysis—no one can specialize their way out of thinking about the whole system. The group briefing rewards synthesis, forces the committee to reconcile its members’ divergent conclusions, and gives students practice defending recommendations in public.

Other configurations

Because the case pages address the individual student—”you” throughout—they work unchanged at any group size. A student working alone can complete everything, including the interviews. Pairs and trios work well where sections are small. Other structures we have seen or would happily try: staged memo drafts with structured peer review between them; two teams working the same region and debating their rival interventions before the class; a stakeholder panel in which committee members role-play the actors their research identified (a ministry official, a cooperative leader, a donor) while the rest question them; and, for independent learners, writing the memo for a real audience—a local organization, a blog, a policy competition—rather than an imagined one.

Whatever the configuration

Three things are worth keeping under any design. First, the outside-evaluator role with a defined audience: writing for someone is what turns research into analysis. Second, the expert interviews—at least two—which remain the part of the work that cannot be assembled from published sources. Third, the page limit: brevity is where students discover what they actually think.