Photographed by Webb Chappell

In March 2010, the 1787 drafting of the United States Constitution became breaking news. The members of the Texas State Board of Education had convened in Austin to review the state’s history and other social studies curricula. A battle had been brewing for months between the board’s conservative Republicans, who perceived a liberal bias in the curriculum, and its more moderate Republicans and Democrats. For three days, the board held contentious open meetings, arguing issues centuries old—Were the Founding Fathers guided primarily by Christian principles? Is there a constitutional basis for the legal doctrine of separation of church and state?—in an effort to craft a list of the people, places, and events students need to know to understand American history.

When revised American history textbooks, incorporating the ideas of the board’s conservative majority, arrived in Texas classrooms last fall, a new round of fiery rhetoric erupted. And while the Texas curriculum fight may have been the loudest, similar battles have played out in California, Colorado, and Oklahoma, as each state debated guidelines to define history for public school teachers, standardized test writers, textbook publishers, and students.

But lost in these debates is a much more fundamental question: Is history just a series of dates and events? While the debate rages over what to teach students about American history, Harvard Business School Professor David Moss is considering a different issue. How should we be teaching that history—and why?

David Moss teaches history in the present tense. On a blackboard in an Aldrich classroom, the professor scrawls, “The federal government is insolvent!” He sets the scene for the class, an unusual mix of Harvard undergraduates and MBAs. “I want you to imagine: You just fought in the American Revolution,” he says. “The federal government—which is part of what you fought to create—the federal government can’t pay you.” That is just one of the issues facing the country as the Constitutional Convention gathers. It may be 2015 as Moss begins this class, but for the next 90 minutes, we are in the critical period of the mid-1780s, between the end of the American Revolution and the election of the country’s first president, when the nation was governed by the Articles of Confederation. To understand that document’s successor, the US Constitution, you need to understand the time period from which it emerged, Moss argues, and the problems and personalities that shaped it. Today’s case protagonist is Founding Father James Madison; the question he faces is the debate over the “federal negative,” his plan to give Congress veto power over state laws.

You may have learned about the federal negative in an 11th-grade American history survey course that careened from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War in just 180 days. But it’s unlikely you learned about it or any other American history topic the way Moss teaches it in his History of American Democracy course. “We’re looking at history as not just a series of things that happened, but as a series of things that are about to happen,” says Moss. That means considering the choices the individuals—real human beings, not the one-dimensional heroes or villains we commonly encounter in history textbooks—faced and the circumstances, public and private, that influenced their decisions. This is not how the 51-year-old professor was taught American history when he was growing up in upstate New York. But the approach is immediately familiar to any HBS student: It is the hallmark of the case method.

In the overcapacity classroom, Moss draws from the students some of the other issues that face the young country in the critical period. Students forced by lack of space during the “shopping period” to sit on the staircases hold their name cards over their heads to join the conversation as Moss asks the class to consider possible solutions to these problems. “What does James Madison think?” he asks, reminding the class that this is 1787. This isn’t a question of what a student thinks, from her Skydeck vantage point 228 years later, and it’s not a question of what Moss thinks; his own opinions are hidden behind a scholarly calm and the quiet joy he takes at playing devil’s advocate. This is a question of what the historical record—here, the case, filled with exhibits on war expenditures, currency fluctuations, and American imports and exports—tells us. And students can’t simply rely on their modern-day political views; the Democratic and Republican parties didn’t even exist yet, and the political challenges they will learn about don’t map neatly onto today’s battles of blue versus red.

One popular case puts students in the shoes of founding father James Madison at the Constitutional Convention, a scene imagined here by early 20th century artist Howard Chandler Christy. (GraphicaArtis/Corbis)

The blackboard fills up with proposed remedies to the country’s ills in 1787, and with more exclamation points, underlines, asterisks, bullets, check marks, Xs, and arrows in every direction. “What you are doing is writing the Constitution—specifically Article 1, Section 8,” Moss tells the class. It’s no idle practice; Harvard University claims eight United States presidents among its alumni.

The Madison case under vigorous discussion grew out of the first case Moss, who came to HBS with a background and degrees in both history and economics, wrote in 1994: “Constructing a Nation: The United States and Their Constitution, 1763–1792.” His experience teaching that case suggested that the same method HBS pioneered to impart business principles might be well suited for the study of history. In 2006 he began developing the elective Creating the Modern Financial System, to examine the intersection of the financial sector and government in shaping financial history through a series of cases on topics such as the rise of the world’s first futures market in early 18th-century Japan, Wall Street’s first financial panic in 1792, and the Federal Reserve’s highly controversial response to the global financial turmoil of 1931. The course debuted in the spring 2008 term; six weeks later Bear Sterns collapsed, underlining Moss’s thesis. The students’ enthusiasm for the course may have been motivated in part by current events: The first year there were 30 students; a year later, after receiving a top student rating, Moss faced significant overenrollment. But Moss’s enthusiasm was for the method as much as the subject and its sudden relevance to global financial events. His first course-length experiment had been a success. He saw the case method bring history—which many students thought of as a dull procession of inevitable events—to life. Character, narrative, and tension gave an urgency to topics such as the French pension system and the rise of German universal banking, and placing students in the decision-making role made them reconsider the myths that often surround historical figures.

Moss’s History of American Democracy course began, in part, as another test of the utility of the case method—could it work for a younger undergraduate audience, unfamiliar with the case method, and for a broader historical topic? Now in its third year, the hybrid undergraduate-MBA course—covering historical moments that are well known (secession, Selma), less well known (Harvard graduate Thomas Dorr’s 1842 rebel government in Rhode Island, a study of suffrage), and recent (Citizens United, Prop 8)—is consistently oversubscribed.

Now as Moss explores the federal negative, a handful of observers are wedged in the back of the crowded classroom, including a Harvard graduate student and former high-school teacher who was the course’s head teaching fellow last year; a historian who has coauthored some of the course’s 24 new cases; and a member of the Executive Education group. The trio is part of a small team Moss has formed to conduct his boldest experiment yet: taking the case method into high-school classrooms to revolutionize how we teach teenagers about American democracy.

This past fall, Moss and his team launched the case method in 11 public, charter, and private high schools in Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington, DC. As part of the small pilot program, 23 history and civics teachers introduced several of the cases Moss uses in History of American Democracy into their curricula. The teachers were provided with cases—the Madison case was among the most popular, because it is a topic commonly covered in high-school history classes—as well as worksheets, assignment questions, and teaching plans. They also visited the HBS campus in September for a two-day master class on both the method and the cases themselves.

“I thought I was teaching by the case method,” Eleanor Cannon said after attending the workshop. Cannon and two of her colleagues, Bailey Duncan and Jack Soliman, pioneered the case method in their classrooms at St. John’s School, an elite private school in Houston. What she meant is that her small history classes aren’t all lecture; she expects class participation and encourages questions and debate. But what she saw during the on-campus workshop was something different.

Moss and his team have spent a great deal of time considering exactly what it is about the case method that makes it a different and effective tool for teaching history. There’s one thing Moss knows for sure: There is no case method without the case itself. “It’s like trying to do an anatomy class without the cadaver.”

The teachers and students in the pilot program, who provide feedback on each case, are helping Moss envision what the case method could look like in high schools: How do you fit a case discussion into the confines of a high-school schedule? How do you record the information when you aren’t blessed with HBS’s abundance of blackboards? Can the case method incorporate the type of “active learning” popular in high schools—for instance, students moving around the classroom to vote on issues or work in small groups?

Moss isn’t talking about the essence of the case method as he explains the importance of teaching civics as a dynamic and engaging topic, but he could be: “The three branches of government are extremely important, the checks and balances are extremely important, the Bill of Rights is extremely important,” he says. “But if you stop there, you miss almost the whole thing. Those are crucial pieces, to be sure, but by themselves they’re not enough. Much more is needed for a successful democracy. We know this because if you try to export just those pieces, including the blueprint, the Constitution, to another country you don’t get a working democracy.”

Eleanor Cannon’s sunny, spacious classroom at St. John’s School in Houston is well appointed, with bright white dry-erase boards covering two walls and a computer screen in place of a blackboard. She has set up the seating to mimic what she saw a month earlier at the HBS workshop: two concentric horseshoes shaped by white tables and blue chairs. Without prompting, the 11th-grade students—dressed in khaki shorts or plaid skirts, each with a different style and color of sneaker—fill the seats the same way MBA students do. The first to arrive take the seats in back; the students who slip in just as class begins are relegated to the equivalent of the Worm Deck.

This is the second of three 40-minute periods Cannon will spend with these 11 students on “The Struggle over Public Education,” one of six cases they will read over the course of the year. Each day the students read a portion of the same case used in Moss’s HBS classroom, nine pages in preparation for the first class, just four or five on the subsequent days. Part of learning by the case method is learning the case method itself: the level of preparation and participation the cases require and the etiquette of building on, or disagreeing with, a classmate’s comments. Already, the students have adapted to the format; one student has prepared a comment that refers to the case’s footnotes.

Cannon is an energetic teacher, her presentations filled with motion and funny sound effects, and the students reflect that enthusiasm back to her. The case is complex in its details—focusing on the legislative and judicial machinations over New York State’s 1849 Free School Law—but the underlying themes are readily accessible to the students: Who should go to school? Who should decide what is taught in school? Who should pay for school? Within these debates are questions of immigration, industrialization, taxation, and, of course, democracy.

On the first day of the case discussion, Cannon set the stage, using the case to explore the state of education in the mid-19th century and the vision of public education proposed by educational reformer Horace Mann, the first secretary of Massachusetts’s state board of education. Today, she guides the class through the historical context that gave rise to the common school movement. “Let’s look for evidence,” she says, drawing them back to the document each has in hand. She’s hoping they’ll discover the statistics in Exhibit 4 showing the divide between New York’s rural and urban communities. One student suggests, correctly, that the growth of factories was a motivation for the common school movement in urban settings. Cannon sees an opportunity.

“What skills do you need to work in a factory?” she asks.

“None!” the students chorus.

Slowly, though, they concede that basic reading and math skills could be important, as well as interpersonal skills. Showing up to work on time, following orders, working quietly—“School is like a factory!” one student, Alex, interrupts. That’s the connection Cannon wanted her to make. Cannon didn’t have to tell her why 19th-century factory owners might support common schools, the evidence was there in the case. “That’s actually horrible,” Alex adds.

In a conversation over lunch, Cannon and her colleagues Bailey Duncan and Jack Soliman discuss the day’s classes. Just this morning they had presented their experience with the case method pilot program before a faculty meeting, explaining the benefits they’ve seen already in student retention and engagement; students are making connections between the case material and previous lessons, and some who were reluctant to speak up earlier in the semester are now joining the class conversation.

“We haven’t given anything up,” says Cannon; in previous years the teachers taught the antebellum era the students are now debating via an 80-slide PowerPoint deck. “We’ve gained,” adds Duncan. “In this method you see the human element. Will they remember Horace Mann if he is a 30-second definition, or will they remember him if they have a sense of who he was and how he made a mark on their world today?”

And there’s the question of how to teach history, in Texas or anywhere. The strictures of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills concern themselves with 30- second definitions. At a private school not bound by the state guidelines, the teachers can concern themselves with something else. “In education in the United States, you have two very different ideas,” says Soliman. “One is about indoctrination. The other is about helping kids become independent thinkers. ‘This is what you should think’ versus ‘What do you think?’ ” For these St. John’s teachers, the case method is an effective new tool to teach their students not what to think but how.

In Duncan’s classroom, another group of 11th-grade students gather in pairs and trios to review the assignment questions. “You’re training your minds for this discussion,” Duncan tells the lively group. He is a playful teacher—it’s Throwback Thursday, so he gamely displays a childhood photo—who takes a slightly different approach to teaching the case. In his class, the day’s topic is outlines on the board in advance: “What were the most and least compelling parts of Mann’s vision? Why?” “Why was New York a much different story than Massachusetts regarding education reform?” “Which common school reform motivations were good in your opinion? Bad?” There’s also a mystery question; one student, Ellie, covers her face with her sweatshirt in mock dread before rejoining her group’s conversation with a sudden insight that encapsulates the takeaway from the case as aptly as it does David Moss’s mission:

“Oh! Oh! Now that people are more involved in the democracy, the government wants them to be better educated!”

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