Home › Our Mission
Mission
The Case Method Institute for Education and Democracy (CMI) brings a proven approach to developing critical thinking — the case method — to high school classrooms throughout the United States. Our aims are twofold: to strengthen American education and to better prepare young people for democratic citizenship.
Incubated at Harvard Business School, which helped to build the case method, CMI is now an independent nonprofit organization that is completely nonpartisan. CMI offers high school teachers professional development, full access to Harvard's “History of American Democracy” curriculum, and ongoing support — at no charge to teachers or schools.
Origins of the Case Method
Disrupting convention with a time-honored tradition.
In 1870, Christopher Langdell introduced the case method at Harvard Law School. Rather than lecturing from treatises, he required students to read real legal cases and then questioned them rigorously — in the tradition of Socrates — about what they had read. Most students initially found the approach baffling. According to accounts written later, Langdell's first attempt was characterized by observers as an “abomination.”
But word spread that something special was happening in Langdell’s classroom. Enrollment grew. Other faculty adopted Langdell's method of combining case readings with Socratic questioning. Within two decades, it began spreading to law schools across the country. Students trained by the case method were demonstrably better prepared, and the legal community noticed.
Starting in the 1920s, the case method was adapted for business education at Harvard Business School, where it became the institution's defining teaching strategy. Business cases were written from scratch — narrative documents, rich in facts, centered on real decisions with genuine uncertainty. The method transformed business education just as it had transformed legal education.
For over a century, the case method proved remarkably effective wherever it was used — in law, business, and eventually medicine. Students consistently reported that it taught them to think. But it remained almost entirely confined to professional schools, widely assumed to be a special-purpose method of limited application.
That assumption was wrong.
The breakthrough
From Harvard College to high schools across America.
In 2013, Professor David Moss created the History of American Democracy course at Harvard College — a fully case-based course on the history of democratic governance in the United States. It became one of the highest-rated courses at Harvard.
Undergraduates in the course began recommending the cases to their former high school teachers. And so, unexpectedly, the case method began spreading to high schools. A pilot program (the Case Method Project) was launched at Harvard Business School in 2015 with 21 teachers. By 2020, nearly 600 teachers at 389 high schools across 45 states had joined, bringing the cases to approximately 35,000 students.
The results were striking. Teachers reported higher engagement, stronger critical thinking, and improved academic performance from their students. Teachers even reported that they felt greater job satisfaction and professional growth. Statistical analyses showed that closer adherence to the core teaching principles predicted better student evaluations. Rigorous comparison-group experiments measuring student change over time showed greater growth in civic commitment among students who used the case method — including greater likelihood of considering democracy “absolutely important” and expressing strong interest in running for office.
In 2020, the initiative became the Case Method Institute for Education and Democracy — an independent nonprofit dedicated to bringing the case method to every high school history, government, and civics teacher in America, at no cost.
Where we are today
Since its founding, CMI has increased the reach of the program by approximately 500 percent, training more than 3,000 teachers who have brought the case method to an estimated 350,000 students across all 50 states, D.C., and several U.S. territories.
The positive impacts documented early on have remained both remarkable and remarkably consistent, even as the program has scaled, and even in the face of unprecedented disruptions to education.
Thousands of teachers have already proven that the case method can work in every kind of high school, for every kind of student, from the most challenged to the most privileged. To all the rest who have not yet tried — the invitation is open, and we would be excited to work with you.
3,000+
Partner teachers trained
2,500+
High schools
350,000+
Students reached
50 states
Plus D.C. & territories
The material in the preceding sections draws from Professor David Moss' forthcoming book, Exercising the Mind.
Leadership and Team
David Moss
Founder and President
Paul Whiton Cherington Professor, Harvard Business School
David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he has taught since 1993. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of economic policy and democratic governance, including Democracy: A Case Study (2017). In 2013, he created the History of American Democracy course at Harvard College, which quickly became one of the university’s highest-rated courses. He founded the Case Method Project at HBS in 2015 and established CMI as an independent nonprofit in 2020.
Walter Friedman
Senior Advisor
Lecturer, Harvard Business School
Rachel Crocker Ford
Managing Director
Tim Lambert
Director of Research
Joanna Beinhorn
Operations Manager
Team
Lisa Chaderjian
Program Coordinator
Peyton Coel
Program Coordinator
Tenzin Dadak
Chief of Staff to the Founder
Emma Harlan
Program Coordinator
Jack Lichtenberger
Chief of Staff to the Managing Director
Vinh Trinh
Database Manager
Kellie Willhite
Program Coordinator
Ready to bring the case method to your classroom?
Everything is free — professional development, cases, teaching materials, and ongoing one-on-one support.
Get Started — It's Free