As case studies are important pedagogical tools, clarity is important. We need to be able to reconstruct what happened during the lesson. We need to understand what and why you were doing what you describe as well as how your student was reacting. We also need clear descriptions of your internal processes (perceptions, thought processes).

What did your student say and do? What did you say? What did you see (find)? What were your impressions, and how did these transform into hypotheses for further testing, and then lead to action? What were the functional threads? What were the most important pedagogical elements? What were the important 'decision nodes' or turning points in the lesson, and in the series of lessons? What did you do when a process or processes did not go as you had expected?

We rely on the case studies to give us insights into how an applicant thinks; a case study is a representation of your ways of seeing, thinking, feeling and doing, and gives us important information about what it means for you to create a learning environment using the Feldenkrais Method.

Perhaps it is something like the skill of storytelling. It may not yet be clear to you at first when you sit down to write a case study; but it ought to become clearer as you work which details of the story really make a difference to tell us about and which details do not. Even though some degree of detail is needed, there still needs to be a clear thread which emerges through the "story."

We recommend that you read case studies that have already been published. The IFF Journal, Number 3 (1996), (<iff@peak.org>), was exclusively case studies, and case studies often appear in The Feldenkrais Journal of the FGNA (<bookstore@feldenkrais.com>), as well as in feldenkraiszeit - Journal für somatisches Lernen, (Erscheinungsweise: jährlich, von Loeper Literaturverlag im Ariadne Buchdienst, Kiefernweg 13, D-76149 Karlsruhe, tel. 07 21 - 70 67 55).

If you are interested in reading more widely, we can suggest the case studies of Oliver Sacks (already popular in the Feldenkrais world), and those of Alexander Luria. Luria's case studies, Sacks suggested, represented a type of "romantic science", in which detailed (scientific) data about an individual are presented by employing strongly novelistic (or narrative) forms.

There are many ways of writing up a case study for publication, many of them good ones, which serve the needs of the author and the publication's audience. But not all of these ways would be good choices for presenting yourself to a TAB as a candidate for assistant trainer certification.

We suggest, then, that you use the case studies which you read to help you think about what kind of style and content is best suited to your individual needs as someone who is engaged in the process of learning to be a educator of Feldenkrais teachers. And how you can use your case studies to produce documents which can be tools for learning.* In other words, please think about the audience for which you are writing and how you would like to present yourself to us.

We strongly recommend that your write about cases involving lessons which you have given since having decided to write your application. Making that decision and reflecting on the information you need to include in the case study will change to some extent what you notice during the lessons and how you write up your notes.

And we recommend that you get some colleagues, people already working as part of the educational team in trainings, to read your case studies and to offer you their thinking. This could also be an productive project for a local study group to do with each other, perhaps also as one focus of an advanced training group--also for those who will never submit an application for assistant trainer certification.

We hope that this information has been useful for you, and look forward to hearing any feedback which you may care to give us.