Prepared Case Studies
There are really two categories of case studies: those that are prepared by others and adapted to your course and those that are prepared specifically by you or your students for a particular course. In the first situation, Harvard Business School Press publishes a large quantity of cases along with advice on how to use them. Other colleges and universities also publish prepared cases, and many publishers have excellent books of case studies. Most often, these cases are management focused and written in such a way that they encourage students to use a specified set of questions. The following list from Cengage Learning Systems illustrates the areas that students are often expected to analyze:

1. The history, development and growth of the company over time
2. The identification of the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses
3. The nature of the external environment surrounding the company
4. A SWOT analysis
5. The kind of corporate-level strategy pursued by the company
6. The nature of the company's business-level strategy
7. The company's structure and control systems and how they match its strategy
8. Recommendations

While these topics are useful in management courses, they might not be appropriate for your culinary classes or introductory courses that have a different focus.

Case Studies You Create
For these situations, it can be very helpful to build on the concepts you have been teaching and write your own case studies focused on the topics of your course. You have the knowledge and expertise, you know what the students can do, and you can tailor the cases to their skill levels. The cases that you write do not have to be long and complicated; often, the best ones are relatively short and focus on particular problems such as what to do about a food poisoning situation, how to orient a new cook to the kitchen layout and meal preparation system, how to organize a dining room for a large banquet, which items to add to a menu, or how to price a wedding. These challenges are real in the industry, and they lend themselves to faculty--developed cases. Writing them is not difficult, and they can transform student learning.

I have written case studies for specific issues and found them very productive in encouraging student problem-solving and in forcing them to review what they have read in order to be able to defend their answers to the case. The other option is to have students create cases.

Student-Written Case Studies
Assigning students to write cases can be a great activity. They can be asked to identify situations they have faced or might face in the industry and prepare a well-focused, two-page description of the situation, complete with details and complexity. Their assignment is to create the case; you can evaluate their assignment in terms of the focus, coherence, depth and complexity of the case. This assignment forces them to analyze situations and add enough information to make the case intellectually challenging.

A different approach involves assigning students the task of analyzing some aspect of the operation of a restaurant, kitchen or hotel. As part of a course on Customer Relationship Management, I have given students the assignment to prepare a case study on a hotel or restaurant. While I have chosen the company in order to arrange its willingness to participate, the students conduct the interviews, observe practices, analyze documents and research customer comments to analyze the policies and practices of customer-relationship management at the companies selected. In this way, they get to apply what they have learned in the course to real-life situations.

Some Caveats
For faculty members new to using cases, there is a lot of preparation in finding the right case, deciding how to use it in your course, and adapting it. Often the hardest part is preparing the students to analyze case studies. They like to retell the story, but are often reluctant to provide recommendations for actions or are not able to support their recommendations with references to the key principles covered in the reading or class discussion.

Summary
Thank you for reading this column about using case studies. Next month, we will discuss evaluating student papers, a task we all face, but one that can become easier and less arbitrary. If you have comments about using case studies or suggestions for others, send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will include them in future Mayo’s Clinics.

Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, is a clinical professor at New York University and a frequent presenter at CAFÉ events nationwide.