Using case studies as a teaching method started way back in the 19th century in law, quickly adopted by Harvard Business School, and by the mid-20th century already became one of the most dominant teaching approaches used by business schools in the United States. But in the rest of the world, things are slightly different.
While workshop participants all note that they all experienced the case study method already as students and are all now using case studies regularly in their classes as teachers, they normally do not have much experience with writing cases and preparing teaching notes for cases to be used in classrooms.
This creates a problem as prof. Dominika Latusek, author of the book Case Studies as a Teaching Tool in Management Education and one of the lecturers at the workshop reminded us that Europe and especially the CEE region is severely missing local cases.
Or as one of the members of the CEEMAN community, prof. Zoltan Buzady interestingly noted: “A Good Case is when a student tells me: "Your case study for today is perfect, except one minor detail: I think the team leader should not be called 'Andrew Smith', but 'László Kovács'. I am saying this, because what you described are exactly the mistakes MY own team leader is making!"
Worksop participants had an opportunity to learn from experienced case writers and other experts like editors, but also to work on their own cases and improved them with the help of experts and perhaps even more importantly, their peers.
Cases produced at the workshop will be published in a special CEEMAN case study collection, while we will also present guidelines and recommendations on how to stimulate case writing and raise quality of cases in CEE and other dynamic societies, so make sure to visit our April conference in Budapest and especially our final project conference which will take place on 15th and 16th of June in Bled.