Many HBS faculty members make it look easy. But anyone who has ever tried to lead a discussion among eighty students will quickly realize that case-method teaching is an art. It is an art that requires a tremendous amount of training, practice, mentoring, and continual refinement.

A new HBS center will help strengthen the School’s long tradition of world-class teaching. The C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, scheduled to open this fall, will augment the already established HBS system of faculty-to-faculty mentoring by providing more programs, resources, and tools to help improve teaching across the faculty.

The center is named after C. Roland (“Chris”) Christensen (MBA 3/’43, DCS ’53), a much-loved HBS faculty member who had a powerful impact on HBS students and faculty as well as educators around the world during his years at the School from 1946 until his death in 1999. (See sidebar.)

“Since its founding, HBS has been committed to case-method teaching,” observes HBS professor David A. Garvin, who will be the faculty director of the new center. “Teaching is a vital part of our culture here. The Christensen Center will complement and enhance our current faculty development efforts.”

Garvin worked closely with HBS professors Dwight B. Crane, Thomas J. DeLong, and Janice H. Hammond and Executive Director of the Division of Research and Faculty Development Valerie Porciello (PMD 77, 2002) in designing the center. The group’s research included visiting Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (where Chris Christensen remains a revered figure); interviewing directors of teaching and learning centers around the country; and consulting with HBS faculty on what services are most needed.

The center will focus first and foremost on providing faculty members with observations about and feedback on their teaching. “We’ll have the capacity to create and cut together videotapes of people teaching so that they can see themselves,” notes Garvin. “It’s one thing to hear, ‘You seem to lean toward the left side of the room when calling on people,’ it’s another to see it.”

The center will also present seminars and programs about case-method teaching to various members of the HBS, Harvard, and other communities. The School’s well-established Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning, a program for senior professors and deans from business schools in Latin America, China, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe, will be included in this area, as will new programs for HBS doctoral students, MBA Ed Reps, and faculty members from other professional schools at Harvard.

Center staff will create video vignettes of best practices in the classroom, using a variety of examples that showcase a teaching element that is particularly successful — how to begin a discussion or encourage student-to-student dialogue, for example. This area, notes Garvin, has the potential to be coupled with more in-depth research on effective teaching. The center will also help faculty in their efforts to develop case-writing skills and design new courses.

As part of its capital campaign, the School is in the process of building an endowment for the center. A number of important gifts have been received, and the center is well on its way to being fully funded. Given the increasing number of new professors from diverse backgrounds, some of whom are not experienced with case-method teaching, the center will play an important role in training the next generation of HBS faculty.

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