Washington, DC
Monday, June 18th

At this point I’m not really sure what direction to go with the blog. Tusky, I’m sure you have suggestions but none of them are printable. I do not want the posts to get redundant for those who kept up with Pete last year. What I mean by that is that since this is annual program the curriculum minus a few changes remains relatively consistent. So I’m going to try not to be too repetitive.

This morning we headed out to the Madeira School in McLean, VA for a ropes course team building activity. I thought it went very this year. The staff at the school did a much better job of facilitation this year and I think as result the students got more out it. From the activities some leaders emerged from the group. I was pleasantly surprised at foreign students’ language skills. They were some of the most active participants. The activity went well and because we were in the woods most of the morning the heat did not get to oppressive.

We returned to Albans for a quick lunch and to the first class of the program. The School of Public Service uses the cases studies and methods from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Here is a link to an excellent journal article about the history, use, and methods of case studies as an instructional tool in the classroom. Here is a link to the University of California, Santa Barbara web site about the use of the case study method in the classroom. (UCSB Website)

Last year all of my classroom teaching was going through preview or background material in advance of another class. This year I am adding the case studies. So the first class of the program was the first case study that I teaching. Here is an abstract of the case “Ethical Problems in Public Careers: Lying”. The case is actually 10 smaller vignettes of cases to discuss when, if ever it is okay for various public officials to lie. After walking them through the first couple scenarios I pretty much sat back and simply facilitated conversation among the group, we had broken the group of 22 in two separate groups. The students are all very bright and had a great deal to say. It is still early but judging from the discussion this should be a fun group to work with.

After the case study the students took a behind the scene tour of the National Cathedral. The students went up into the Bell tower and even got onto the roof of the Cathedral. After the tour the students had free time until the SPS board reception in the Commons room outside the Headmasters office. The students seem to enjoy themselves and make good small talk with the Board Members of SPS. There were also a number of alumni from previous years who also were in attendance. I good time was had by all.


Here is a link to some more photos of the reception. Link