Lasting Lessons
By Thomas Payzant, M.A.T.'63, C.A.S.'66, Ed.D.'68, who retired in June 2006 after serving as superintendent of Boston Public Schools for more than a decade. Payzant joined the faculty at the Ed School this past fall as a senior lecturer.
In the summer of 1965, my wife and I returned to Cambridge after two years of teaching in Tacoma, Washington, so that I could begin the Administrative Career Program, the HGSE doctoral program for those aspiring to leadership positions in education. Two new additions to the faculty, Robert "Bins" Binswanger, Ed.M.'59, C.A.S.'61, Ed.D.'64, a graduate of the program, and Joe Cronin, a Stanford Ph.D., taught a required core course for the program, Cases and Concepts. Joe was the expert on administration and organization theory and Bins loved to teach lessons learned from practice.
The Harvard Business School was already known for its case-based curriculum grounded in nonfiction content and challenging interactive pedagogy. Bins and Joe were pathfinders at the Ed School as they taught cases connected to both organizational theory and the practice of leadership and management. We learned from the cases how to use data, understand context, debate different solutions to problems, dissect the elements of leadership, and challenge each other about how leaders and managers must think before they act. We also learned how to make connections, putting together the pieces of the puzzles from the cases and often discovering there wasn't only one way to do so.
For several decades, the case method of instruction in leadership programs at HGSE lost its luster as the focus on research and policy trumped the interest in practice. It is an exciting time for me to return to HGSE, now as a teacher, to find the strong commitment to research, policy, and practice and the importance of learning how to connect the knowledge generated by each. And the case method of instruction is appearing in more courses.
In the 1960s, it was difficult for Joe and Bins to envision a time when faculty from the Ed School, Kennedy School, and Business School would be collaborating, as they are now, on the writing and teaching of cases which are helping to prepare their graduate students to serve in a variety of leadership roles. They made a positive difference in preparing me for leadership roles and I hope I will be able to do the same as I use cases to engage students in learning about leadership and management.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
photo by Mark Morelli
