Lesson Plan for Writing an Essay Responding to Non-fiction Texts

Charles Perkins

In 2014, our students will have to take a different HSE exam from the current GED.  One of the significant differences in the new exam is the essay.  The GED requires a narrative essay in response to a broadly worded question with little or no critical analysis and no hard data.  Students can pass the essay section of the GED by providing a coherent thesis sentence in response to the prompt, and supporting that thesis with three organized paragraphs containing some relevant supporting details. 

The new HSE exam, the TASC, will demand a significantly higher level of response.  Students will be given two, presumably contrasting, expository texts and be asked to write an essay on the ideas contained in these texts.  The essay will ask students to compare aspects of the texts and comment critically on the relative merits of each. 

The challenge of this new essay is threefold.  First, the student will have to read the two passages and absorb the salient arguments in each.  This additional reading exercise embedded in the essay has to be performed with minimum added time.  The GED essay is 45 minutes, while the HSE essay must be completed in 50.  Five minutes more, only, for the reading of the two texts means students will have to be reading more effectively.  Second, the essay will require a more complex thinking process consisting of critical comparison of ideas.  It will not be enough for a student to simply describe events, emotions or personal experiences; the habit of breaking down ideas, thinking about these ideas in light of a range of relevant circumstances, and weighing competing ideas to reach an independent judgment will be essential.  Third, in this weighing of ideas, a persuasive logic will have to be evident.

While we need to help our students learn how to respond to all these new challenges, this lesson addresses the second challenge, learning how to think about competing claims in non-fiction literature and develop responses to these claims that can be substantiated persuasively.

Objective: To help students learn how to identify claims in non-fiction literature and thus begin to frame persuasive arguments in response to these claims.

Materials: Two short passages relating to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas.  

The lesson is designed to be used with a class that has already done basic essay-writing exercises, such as paragraphing, framing a thesis statement and writing an introduction.

The times listed for each step need not be exactly adhered to. 

Step one: Write “The Discovery of America by Columbus; A Positive or Negative Event?” on the board.  Brainstorm with the entire class everything we know about Columbus and the discovery of the Americas.  Teacher should encourage students to share any facts, ideas, or opinions that come to mind.  The items generated in the brainstorming should be written on the board, (students should be asked to take notes.) 

                                                                                                                        20 minutes

Step two: Ask the students to work in pairs to identify the positive and negative items generated in the brainstorm.  Have students write these items in PRO and CON columns. 

                                                                                                                        20 minutes

Step three: Share with the class answers from each of the groups, with items being written on the board in PRO or CON columns. (If the class provides only positive or negative ideas for one side of the argument, the teacher should provide an opposing idea/s.)

                                                                                                                        25-30 minutes

The first stage of the exercise should be completed here. 

Step four: The students go back to working in pairs. Ask the students in half the class to write counterarguments to the PRO side.  Ask the other half of the class to provide counterarguments to the CON side.  Each counterargument must have a compelling and factually supported claim. When the pairs have written their counterarguments, have them write these on the board.  (It would be a good time to have these arguments written on large paper so that they can be shared and displayed again after the essays are written.)  During this portion of the exercise, the teacher should be circulating, pressing each pair of students to develop strong counterarguments.

                                                                                                                        20-30 minutes.

Step five: Share a summary of the arguments and counterarguments.

                                                                                                                        10 minutes

Step six: Ask the class to review the arguments, one by one, and encourage additional points to each argument.  The objective here is to demonstrate how to stretch ideas of an argument beyond the initial, often incomplete idea. 

                                                                                                                        15-30 minutes

End the exercise for the day by announcing that the class will write an essay in the next class.

Step seven: Assign the following in-class essay;

            The discovery of Columbus had a profound effect on the peoples of America and Europe, and on world history.  The passages below represent different opinions about this effect and whether it was a positive, or a negative effect.  Read the passages and write an essay supporting the opinion you think is stronger.  In you essay, you must… 1. clearly state which passage you are supporting, 2. cite specific points the author makes, 3. as thoroughly as possible support the claim/s of the passage you are supporting, adding additional details.  Time permitting you should address any weakness you find in the passage you are opposing.

                                                                                                                        60 minutes

Step eight: Essays should be read to with special attention to the depth and logic students use to support their claims.  In response to a first draft, teachers should push students to further develop the claims, to add another element, another point to each argument they make in support of a thesis.  Second drafts can be assigned to address organization, syntax or other issues.

This process should be repeated.  Another set of passages, on the minimum-wage debate, is included in this lesson plan. 

Assessment: We are looking for evidence of a student’s ability to identify competing ideas, parse out the elements of these ideas and present a coherent, persuasive response to these ideas.  Evidence of the development of these skills, and of the habit of using these skills, should be evident over the cycle of several essays.  The specific qualities we hope to see emerge in students’ writing include evidence of independent thinking and the habit of applying a critical analysis to judging ideas.  For example, an independent thinker might respond to the Columbus essay prompt by saying there were both positive and negative effects of Columbus’ discovery. 


First set of essay passages.

Unequal Exchange: Food for Disease

Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Columbian Exchange Timeline of Important Dates." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008.

Columbus's ships, and those of the innumerable Europeans who followed him to America, short-circuited millions of years of divergent evolution in the two hemispheres by rapidly introducing Old World plants, animals, and micro-organisms into New World environments, and vice versa. This manmade reunion of the ecologies of the hemispheres—dubbed "The Columbian Exchange" by historian Alfred Crosby—had dramatically asymmetric consequences for the peoples of the Old World and the New.

The New World happened to be much a healthier place than the Old before 1492, hosting few or none of the devastating diseases that continuously plagued the populations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Thus, when Europeans arrived, they generally found life in the Americas to be at least as healthy as back home. By contrast, American Indians—never before exposed to vicious Old World pathogens like smallpox and thus lacking any immunities to them—began dying at apocalyptic rates. Many historians now believe that new diseases introduced after Columbus's arrival killed off as much as 90% or more of the indigenous population of the Americas.

The Indians' "Great Dying"—which may have killed as many as one out of every five humans alive worldwide in the sixteenth century—ravaged not only Indian bodies but entire Indian societies and cultures. The traumatized survivors were often left unable to mount any effective resistance against the incursions of the European colonists.

The Columbian Exchange became even more unbalanced with Europe's successful appropriation of New World staple crops originally developed by Indians. The adoption of efficient, carbohydrate-rich American crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava allowed Europeans and Africans to overcome chronic food shortages. Thus, even while Native American populations were decimated by Old World diseases, European and African populations swelled as American crops helped to overcome Old World famine.

The Christopher Columbus Controversy
By Michael S. Berliner Los Angeles Times, Dec. 30, 1991
Did Columbus "discover" America? Yes--in every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., to the growing, scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus' discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded--and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed.
Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand-to-mouth and from day-to-day. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.
Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real goal is to denigrate the values of Western civilization and to glorify the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians. They decry the glorification of the West as "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim, replace our reverence for Western civilization with multi-culturalism, which regards all cultures as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.

Second set of passages.

Two Reasons Not to Raise the Minimum Wage

By Evan Soltas           Jan 3, 2013 11:43                    Bloomberg.com

Should the federal minimum wage go up by more than $2?

U.S. Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, has proposed that it climb to $9.80 over the next two years, having stood at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Harkin's proposal would give a minimum-wage worker the greatest purchasing power he or she has seen since the late 1960s. Harkin intends to submit legislation in the next Congress.

He is not the only Democrat who has expressed support for a minimum-wage increase. It was part of the Democratic Party platform in 2008 and 2012. A higher minimum wage, Democrats argue, would support low-wage workers by reducing income inequality and stimulating the economy.

The evidence for their first claim is reasonably strong. An increase in the minimum wage would reduce inequality by pushing up the incomes of the poor, a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found this year. A 2008 paper by economists Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker also found that minimum wages have significant empirical impacts on income inequality.

It is less clear, though, that a higher minimum wage would do anything to boost economic activity. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago did find that it would increase consumption: For every $1 increase in the minimum wage, households with minimum-wage workers increased spending by $800 per year. Almost all of these gains, however, come from the interaction of income redistribution with savings rates. Since high-income households save more of their income than low-income households, income redistribution tends to shift savings into consumption. That has ambiguous effects on economic growth.

Myths about the Minimum Wage

by Mike Flynn             10 Mar 2013                Breitbart.com

Myth 1: Hiking wages for those at the lowest rung of the job market will boost the economy. 
The truth is, there simply aren't that many people earning the minimum wage. In 1979, almost 14% of hourly-paid workers earned the federal minimum wage. Today, according to the BLS, just around 4% of hourly-paid workers earn it. Among all wage and salary employees, only a little over 2% earn the minimum wage. Among the entire labor force, the number is even smaller. In 2012, just 1.6 million employees were paid the minimum wage. 
Myth 2: Minimum Wage Workers Are Poor
Even if the number of minimum wage workers is small, at least a mandated wage hike would boost the fortunes of the lowest-income Americans, it is argued. The problem with this argument is that most minimum wage workers aren't poor. 
A recent study looked at those who would benefit from an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50, comparable to the level proposed by President Obama. Just over 11% of workers who would gain from an increase live in poor households. Over 63% of the workers who would gain are second or third earners in families making well over the federal poverty line. 43% of workers who would benefit live in households with income over $50,000 a year. 
The simple truth is that most minimum wage workers are teens, young adults just starting in the labor force and spouses providing a second income to a household. In fact, as federal minimum wages increase, these workers become a larger share of the minimum wage workforce as they crowd out those workers with fewer skills. 
Myth 3: Minimum Wage Workers Are Supporting a Family
The most emotional appeal for increasing the minimum wage is the picture of a family struggling to get by on a minimum wage job. It seems inconceivable to many Americans that someone would be able to raise a family on just a minimum wage job. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans earning the minimum wage aren't trying to raise a family. 
According to BLS, about half of those earning the minimum wage are under 25. A recent study by Dr. Bradley Schiller, professor emeritus at American University, found that among families where an adult was earning the minimum wage, 94% had a spouse who was also employed, often far above the minimum wage. In almost half of these families, the spouse was earning over $40,000 a year. That small subset of adults trying to raise a family on a minimum wage job have very low skill levels. Unfortunately, it is these workers most vulnerable to any contraction in employment caused by a minimum wage hike. 

The Business of the Minimum Wage

By CHRISTINA D. ROMER                      Published: March 2, 2013                           New York Times

An important issue is who benefits. When the minimum wage rises, is income redistributed primarily to poor families, or do many families higher up the income ladder benefit as well?
It is true, as conservative commentators often point out, that some minimum-wage workers are middle-class teenagers or secondary earners in fairly well-off households. But the available data suggest that roughly half the workers likely to be affected by the $9-an-hour level proposed by the president are in families earning less than $40,000 a year. So while raising the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour may not be particularly well targeted as an anti-poverty proposal, it’s not badly targeted, either.
A related issue is whether some low-income workers will lose their jobs when businesses have to pay a higher minimum wage. There’s been a tremendous amount of research on this topic, and the bulk of the empirical analysis finds that the overall adverse employment effects are small.
Some evidence suggests that employment doesn’t fall much because the higher minimum wage lowers labor turnover, which raises productivity and labor demand. But it’s possible that productivity also rises because the higher minimum attracts more efficient workers to the labor pool. If these new workers are typically more affluent — perhaps middle-income spouses or retirees — and end up taking some jobs held by poorer workers, a higher minimum could harm the truly disadvantaged.
Another reason that employment may not fall is that businesses pass along some of the cost of a higher minimum wage to consumers through higher prices. Often, the customers paying those prices — including some of the diners at McDonald’s and the shoppers at Walmart — have very low family incomes. Thus this price effect may harm the very people whom a minimum wage is supposed to help.

Viktoriia Dudar R/W Lesson: Using Specific Details to Show

LESSON: USING SPECIFIC DETAILS TO SHOW

Guiding Question: How to write using specific details to show?  

Lesson Description: This lesson can serve as an introduction to the series of lessons about developing strong paragraphs. During this lesson, students start with describing pictures in detail. After sharing their descriptions, students discuss the importance of being specific in oral and written communication. Then, students work in small groups to analyze a sample paragraph from the book Critical Care and discuss the important components of an effective paragraph. Finally, they work individually to compose a paragraph and share it out with the class.

Learning Objectives:

·   Learn how to support ideas with details and examples

 Materials:

·   Lesson handouts

Lesson Steps:

1.      Distribute Picture 1 to approximately half the class and Picture 2 to the rest of the class. Very important: do not let students know that they will work with different pictures! Invite students to describe each picture in detail (the first question). (5 min.)

2.      Project Picture 3 and ask students to spend a few minutes describing the projected picture (the second question). Invite volunteers to share out their descriptions of the projected picture. Students’ descriptions may vary drastically because the projected picture is a visual puzzle (there are both the young and the old lady on the projected picture). Typically, if the first picture students described was the young lady, they will see the young lady in the projected picture. If the first picture they described was the old lady, most likely students will see the old lady projected on the board. While reading their descriptions, students will notice the differences and start discussing them. Allow students to clarify their ideas. (5 min.)

3.      Invite students to answer the third question individually and discuss students’ answers as a class. Emphasize the importance of being specific and using details to make one’s writing well-developed. (5 min.)

4.      Invite students to work in pairs. Ask students to analyze a paragraph from Chapter 2 of Critical Care. Encourage students to use labels provided to them to mark parts of the paragraph. Project the paragraph and invite volunteers to share out their work. Use color markers to show different details used in the paragraph. (20 min.)

5.      Invite students to compose a paragraph about the happiest moment in their life. Encourage students to use details such as quotes, words which evoke feelings, references to movies, books, articles, etc., and comparisons. (20 min.) 

6.      Ask a few students to share out their paragraphs. Encourages the rest of the class to take notes and share out what they liked about each other’s writing. After sharing, ask students to write about what makes an effective paragraph and shortly discuss it as a class. (10 min.) 

Assessment: Collect students’ writing and comment on their paragraphs.

What Do You See?

Picture 1

Part 1: Warm Up

1.      Please take a look at the picture above and carefully describe what you see.

2.      Please take a look at the picture projected on the board and describe it in detail. How is this picture similar or different from the one above?

3.      How could you change or improve your description of the picture?

What Do You See?

Picture 2

Part 1: Warm Up

1.      Please take a look at the picture above and carefully describe what you see.

2.      Please take a look at the picture projected on the board and describe it in detail. How is this picture similar or different from the one above?

3.      How could you change or improve your description of the picture?

What Do You See?

Picture 3

Paragraph Analysis

Part 2: Pair Work

I wasn’t the only one disturbed, either. For days afterward Penny said, “Let’s not have any backs split open today, OK?” What happened to Jim would be unsurprising on a surgical floor, but for most of us, even people in health care, it violates our sense of the normal, takes us into the realm of horror movies or science fiction. The bizarre ripping noise, the sudden spread of fluid just dark enough to possibly be blood, the puddle of water next to the patient, and the gaping opening itself makes one look to see Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street flexing his deadly fingernails, when in reality Jim’s body did this to itself. A seroma results from the healing process going awry, and even then some seromas will drain back into the body on their own. Unfortunately for Jim, his did not (Brown, p. 17). 

Please read the paragraph above and identify the following elements. Mark each element using labels introduced below:

·         Topic sentence (a sentence that introduces the paragraph), TS

·         Quotes, Q

·         Words and phrases which appeal to feelings and senses, FS

·         Comparisons and Contrasts, CC

·         Medical Terms, MT

·         References to Other Works, OW

Part 3: Individual Work

1.      Compose a paragraph about the happiest moment in your life. Explain what made you happy and how you felt emotionally and physically. Organize your paragraph following the example we analyzed as a class.

Topic Sentence (the main idea of your paragraph)
Examples and Explanations
Concluding/ Transition Sentence

Part 4: Reflection Questions

1. As your classmates read their paragraphs, record below what you liked about their work. Explain why you liked it.

2.      Explain how you can write a paragraph showing the reader what is happening rather than just telling. Include some specific examples from your work or the work of your classmates.

Jason Guzman: R/W Lesson: Using Evidence to Support a Claim

Using Evidence to Support a Claim

Guiding Questions:

What is leadership?

Description:

This lesson is taught to help students to discuss an issue by summarizing important information related to the issue, making a claim about the issue and finally by supporting the claim through evidence.

Warm-Up

In this section of the lesson students will be asked to choose a quote about leadership from a list that they think is a good definition of leadership.

Group Work

Students read an article about leadership and find support in the article for the claim they made during the warm-up activity.

Assessment

Students will write an argumentative essay about leadership by making a claim and supporting it.

Learning Objectives/Competencies:

Literacy

·         Summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting

·         Annotating a text

·         Interpret and analyze texts

·         Stating and supporting a claim

Materials:

·         Lesson handouts and instructions

·         Chart paper, markers

Warm-up: 10 minutes

1.    Students given a list of quotes about leadership and ask to choose one that they think is a good explanation of leadership. Students will then summarize the quote.

2.    The instructor will ask students to share their summaries and make a list of qualities of a good leader on the board.

Lesson

3.    Explain to students that they will read an article that contains examples of leadership in it. They will be asked to support the claim that they made about leadership using evidence from the article and then explain the connection between their claims and the article.

4.    The instructor can use an analogy to help students conceptualize the idea of supporting a claim with evidence and model an example of a claim and evidence that supports it. The instructor may also choose to front load vocabulary related to making a claim and connecting it to supporting evidence.

Group Work: 30 minutes

5.    Ask students to read the article “Leadership Lessons from the Shackleton Expedition” and annotate information they find about leadership.

6.    Ask students to on “Supporting and Explaining Your Claim” worksheet in groups and put their work on chart paper

Gallery Walk & Class Discussion: 50 minutes

1.    Ask students to circulate the classroom and find one example of a claim they liked, one example of a piece of evidence supporting a claim they liked and a connection between a claim and a piece of evidence they liked. (You may want to model this step when giving these instructions before the gallery walk).

1.    Ask each group to share their work and their observations from the gallery walk.

Assessment:

2.    Students will be asked to write a TASC style essay drawing from the skills they learned during this lesson

                       

1. Warm-Up: Choose one of the quotes below and explain its meaning in your own words.

   A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. —Lao Tzu
2. Where there is no vision, the people perish. —Proverbs 29:18
3. The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant. —Max DePree
4. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. —Warren Bennis
5. A leader is a dealer in hope. —Napoleon Bonaparte
6. A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. —John Maxwell
7. My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence. —General Montgomery
8. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. —Peter Drucker
9. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead
10. To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less. —Andre Malraux
11. He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. —Aristotle
12. Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes. —Peter Drucker
13. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
14. The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. —Theodore Roosevelt
15. You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case. —Ken Kesey
16. The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes. —Tony Blair
17. The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet. —Reverend Theodore Hesburgh
18. The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority. —Kenneth Blanchard
19. A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position. —John Maxwell
20. A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. —Rosalynn Carter
21. Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. —Sam Walton
22. A ruler should be slow to punish and swift to reward. —Ovid
23. Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. —General Dwight Eisenhower
24. The leader has to be practical and a realist yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist. —Eric Hoffer
25. A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. —Max Lucado
26. As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. —Bill Gates
27. All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. —John Kenneth Galbraith
28. Do what you feel in your heart to be right–for you’ll be criticized anyway. —Eleanor Roosevelt
29. Don’t necessarily avoid sharp edges. Occasionally they are necessary to leadership. —Donald Rumsfeld
30. Education is the mother of leadership. —Wendell Willkie
31. Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out. —Stephen Covey
32. Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths. —John Zenger
33. Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them. —John C. Maxwell
34. Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. —John F. Kennedy
35. Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day. —Jesse Jackson
36. Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. —Woodrow Wilson
37. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. —Norman Schwarzkopf
38. Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership. —Colin Powell
39. Leadership is the key to 99 percent of all successful efforts. —Erskine Bowles
40. Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better. —Bill Bradley
41. Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing. —Tom Peters
42. Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall. —Stephen Covey
43. Never give an order that can’t be obeyed. —General Douglas MacArthur
44. No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. —Abraham Lincoln
45. What you do has far greater impact than what you say. —Stephen Covey
46. Not the cry, but the flight of a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow. —Chinese Proverb
47. One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency. —Arnold Glasow
48. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on. —Walter Lippman
49. The greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision. —Ken Blanchard
50. The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. —Harvey Firestone
51. To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Claim about leadership	Evidence that supports the claim	Explain the connection between your claim and your evidence. (How and why does this evidence support your claim?)

Gallery Walk

Supporting and Explaining Your Claim

Example of a claim about leadership	Example of evidence that supports the claim	Example of an explanation of the connection between a claim and evidence.

Writing an Essay: Make a Claim and Support it

Leadership is described and defined in many ways. Different people have different ideas about what makes a good leader. What do you think makes a good leader?

Weigh the claims on both sides, and then write an argumentative essay supporting your claim about what makes a good leader.  Be sure to use information from both texts in your argumentative essay.

·         Acknowledge and address alternate or opposing claims.

·         Organize the reasons and evidence logically.

·         Use words and  phrases  to connect your ideas and to clarify the relationships among claims, counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.

·         Establish and maintain a formal style.

·         Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.

Leadership Lessons from the Shackleton Expedition

By NANCY F. KOEHN

Ernest Shackleton's failed quest to reach the South Pole is still a management tutorial in how to face repeated crises. The crew of his ship, the Endurance, was photographed in July 1915 while trapped by an ice floe.

But The Shackleton expedition, from 1914 to 1916, is a compelling story of leadership when disaster strikes again and again. Consider just a handful of recent events: the financial crisis of 2008; the gulf oil spill of 2010; and the Japanese nuclear disaster, the debt-ceiling debacle and euro crisis this year. Constant turbulence seems to be the new normal, and effective leadership is crucial in containing it.

Real leaders, wrote the novelist David Foster Wallace, are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

When the Endurance set sail in August 1914, Shackleton had a bold, potentially history-making goal: he and his team would be the first to walk across the continent, starting from the coast of the Weddell Sea, traversing the South Pole and ending up at the Ross Sea.

But from the beginning, the expedition encountered unfamiliar challenges. In late 1914, the ship arrived at a whaling settlement on South Georgia Island, the last southern port of call before the Antarctic Circle. Local seamen urged Shackleton to postpone his venture because of unusually thick pack ice that could trap the ship if the wind and temperatures shifted suddenly.

Impatient to get moving, Shackleton commanded the ship to continue south, navigating through the icy jigsaw puzzle. In January 1915, the vessel came within sight of the Antarctic mainland. But harsh winds and cold temperatures descended quickly, and the pack ice trapped the ship, just as the South Georgia seamen had warned.

The Endurance was immobilized, held hostage to the drifting ice floes. Shackleton realized that his men would have to wait out the coming winter in the ship’s cramped quarters until summer’s thaw.

Shackleton feared the potential effects of idleness, ennui and dissidence among his men more than he did the ice and cold. He required that each man maintain his ordinary duties as closely as possible. Sailors swabbed decks; scientists collected specimens from the ice; others were assigned to hunt for seals and penguins when fresh meat, a protection against scurvy, ran low.

He also kept a strict routine for meals and insisted that the men socialize after dinner, as a tonic for declining morale. Still, collective disappointment, and tempers, flared.

Through the routines, order and interaction, Shackleton managed the collective fear that threatened to take hold when the trip didn’t go as planned.  He knew that in this environment, without traditional benchmarks and supports, his greatest enemies were high levels of anxiety and disengagement, as well as a slow-burning pessimism. 

Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and still the ice held the ship. By June 1915 — the thick of winter in the Southern Hemisphere — the ship’s timbers were weakening under the pressure created by the ice, and in October water started pouring into the Endurance.

 Shackleton ordered the crew to abandon the sinking ship and make camp on a nearby ice floe. The next morning, he announced a new goal: “Ship and stores have gone — so now we’ll go home.”

A day later, in the privacy of his diary, he was more candid about the gauntlet in front of him. “A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground,” he wrote. “I pray God, I can manage to get the whole party to civilization.”

After the Endurance sank, leaving the men stranded on the ice with three small lifeboats, several tents and supplies, Shackleton realized that he himself had to embody the new survival mission — not only in what he said and did, but also in his physical bearing and the energy he exuded.

He knew that each day, his presence had huge impact on the men’s mind-sets. He managed his own emotional intelligence — to use a modern term — to keep his own courage and confidence high; when these flagged, he never let his men know.

Just as important, Shackleton kept his men’s focus on the future. The ship was gone; previous plans were irrelevant. Now his goal was to bring the team home safely, and he improvised, adapted and used every resource at hand to achieve it.

When a few men expressed skepticism about his plans, he acted quickly to contain their opposition and negativity by trying to win them over and keeping close watch on them. He assigned several potential troublemakers to his own tent on the ice, proving the value of the saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

By April 1916, the ice began breaking up, and Shackleton ordered the men to the lifeboats, hoping to reach land along the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. After a week of stormy seas, they arrived at the deserted Elephant Island. They were exhausted, seasick and dehydrated. But they took “childish joy,” one scientist wrote in his diary, “in looking at the black rocks and picking up the stones, for we had stepped on no land since Dec. 5, 1914.”

Almost immediately, Shackleton began planning his next move. Along with five other men, he managed to guide a 22-foot lifeboat to South George Island; from there, a smaller party reached a whaling station and help. After a meal, a bath and a change of clothes, Shackleton said, “we had ceased to be savages and had become civilized men again.”

Then he began looking for a vessel capable of rescuing the rest of his crew. During the next several months, he set sail in three different ships, but none could cut through the pack ice surrounding Elephant Island. Finally, on Aug. 30, 1916, aboard the Yelcho, a Chilean steamer, Shackleton sailed within sight of the island and rescued the 22 remaining men. “I have done it,” he wrote his wife, Emily. “Not a life lost, and we have been through hell.”

What Makes Steve Jobs Great

By JOE NOCERA

Published: August 26, 2011

 “I think I have five more great products in me,” Steve Jobs said a very long time ago.

He was 31 at the time and barreling up Route 101 in Silicon Valley, en route to a meeting in San Francisco. Having been kicked out of Apple, which he’d co-founded a decade before, Jobs was wholly engaged in the act of starting up a new company, which he had named — of course! — NeXT.

As it happens, I was in the passenger seat, interviewing him for Esquire magazine. I was never one of the journalists who was close to Jobs. But that long-ago assignment came at a time in his life when he must have wanted to unburden himself.

For nearly a week, he allowed me to sit in on meetings and engaged in long, introspective conversations over dinner. And he took me to his house, where we leafed through a photo album with pictures of the team that created the Macintosh computer, his last big accomplishment before his exile from Apple.

Wednesday’s sad, but unsurprising, news that Jobs was resigning as Apple’s chief executive — presumably because of his deteriorating health — got me thinking about that old encounter. The businessman I met 25 years ago violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: I watched him eviscerate staff members for their “bozo ideas.”

The Steve Jobs I watched that week was arrogant, sarcastic, thoughtful, learned, paranoid and “insanely” (to use one of his favorite words) charismatic.

The Steve Jobs the rest of the world has gotten to know in the nearly 15 years since he returned to Apple is no different. He never mellowed, never let up on Apple employees, never stopped relying on his singular instincts in making decisions about how Apple products should look and how they should work. Just a few months ago, Fortune published an article about life inside Apple; it opened with an anecdote in which Jobs cut his staff to ribbons for putting out a product that failed to meet his standards. But his instincts have been so unerringly good — and his charisma so powerful — that Apple employees were willing to follow him wherever he led. Apple will miss those instincts.

Most of the articles written in the past few days about Jobs’s resignation have tended to focus on the iPhone and the iPad. But if you take the long view, they’re just the icing on the cake.

Have we forgotten already that Jobs virtually invented the personal computer, with the introduction of the Apple II, when he was barely 21? That a few years later he saved Apple from near-disaster by creating the Macintosh — the first commercially successful machine with a mouse and windows, and all the other features we associate with modern computing? That the NeXT operating system was critical to the next generation of Macintosh computers after Jobs returned from a 12-year exile in 1997? And, yes, then came the iPod, the iPhone and iPad — all of them so elegant in their look and feel that they became more than devices. They were objects of lust.

There’s more, of course. Steve Jobs persuaded the recording industry to use his iTunes to give consumers an easy alternative to stealing music online. The iPhone completely upended two industries: computing and cellphones. The iPad is in the process of doing the same to the written word. And let’s not forget Pixar, which Jobs bought at the same time he was starting NeXT, and which has become the greatest maker of animated films in modern times, steeped in Jobs’s aesthetic and attention to detail.

Five more great products, he said 25 years ago? When you look at the list, you realize that he sold himself short. It is almost not believable that one person could have affected such a large swath of American culture and industry.

In recent days, Jobs has been routinely called a business genius, and who can disagree? I’ve been a critic at times of some of Apple’s practices, starting with its excessive secrecy, but there is no denying that Jobs is on a very short list of greatest American businessmen ever.

In many of the recent articles, he’s been mentioned as a modern-day Henry Ford, who, of course, built the first automobile the middle class could afford. On that ride to San Francisco all those years ago, Jobs himself compared the still-young computer industry to Henry Ford’s automobile industry, when anything still seemed possible. “It must have been the most incredible feeling to know that this was going to change America,” he said. “And it did!”

As he steps down as Apple’s leader, at the too-young age of 56, Steve Jobs has known that feeling more than anyone else alive.

From Calm Leadership, Lasting Change

By NANCY F. KOEHN

SHE was a slight, soft-spoken woman who preferred walking the Maine shoreline to stalking the corridors of power. And yet Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” played a central role in starting the environmental movement, by forcing government and business to confront the dangers of pesticides.

Carson was a scientist with a lyrical bent, who saw it as her mission to share her observations with a wider audience. In the course of her work, she also felt called upon to become a leader — and was no less powerful for being a reluctant one.

She was a classic introvert who exhibited few of the typical qualities associate with leadership, like charisma and aggressiveness. But as people like Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” have pointed out, leadership can come in less obvious forms.

The natural world had fascinated Carson since she was a young girl growing up near Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania College for Women, later Chatham College, she majored in biology and earned her master’s degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins.

In the 1930s, there were few professional opportunities for women in the sciences. But in 1935, she found a job writing radio scripts about the ocean for what would become the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Within four years, she was editor in chief of all the agency’s publications, a position that connected her with researchers, conservationists and government officials.

IN early 1958, she began working intently on “Silent Spring” while serving as both a breadwinner and a caregiver. The previous year, her niece died after an illness and she adopted her 5-year-old grandnephew. Unmarried and living in Silver Spring, Md., she also cared for and financially supported her ailing mother.

For the next four years, she gave all the time and energy she could spare to researching and writing “Silent Spring.” A diligent investigator, she reached out to a network of scientists, physicians, librarians, conservationists and government officials. She found colleagues, clerks, whistle-blowers and others who had studied pesticide use and were willing to share their knowledge.

As she researched her book, Carson knew she was playing with fire. Still, she realized she had to bring her findings to a large audience. “Knowing what I do,” she wrote to a close friend in 1958, “there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.”

In early 1960, medical problems interrupted Carson’s work again. She learned that she had cancer, and that it had metastasized to her lymph nodes. In early 1961, she began radiation treatment, which sapped her strength. A staph infection, a flare-up of her ulcer and the onset of phlebitis in her legs added to her problems, leaving her too debilitated to work. At times, she despaired over “the complete and devastating wreckage” of her writing schedule and the “nearly complete loss of any creative feeling or desire.”

Throughout, she was determined to keep her medical condition private, fearful that readers would question the objectivity of her findings, particularly her chapters about links between pesticides and cancer.

By late spring, Carson returned to her book. She made progress for six months, until an eye inflammation left her virtually sightless for several weeks. Her assistant read chapters aloud to her for correction, but she was intensely frustrated. “Such a catalog of illnesses!” she confided to a friend. “If one were superstitious it would be easy to believe in some malevolent force at work, determined by some means to keep the book from being finished.”

EARLY in 1962, Carson sent most of the manuscript to her publisher and The New Yorker. The end in sight, she took stock of her motivation for the book. As quoted in Ms. Lear’s book, she wrote to the conservationist and author Lois Crisler: “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind — that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”

Carson’s grace and fervor struck a powerful chord in June when The New Yorker began serializing “Silent Spring.” In a focused, persuasive way, she had thrown down a moral gauntlet, asking readers to reconsider the consequences of rapid technological progress. “How could intelligent beings,” she asked early in the book, “seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?”

She argued that synthetic pesticides like DDT and heptachlor were being applied in profligate quantities without regard to their effect on human health, animals and the environment. She predicted grave consequences for man and the larger natural world if their use continued to grow. (The title “Silent Spring” refers to a future season when singing birds and other animals have been wiped out by insecticides.)

The book, combined with the New Yorker serialization, created a sensation. In summer 1962, President John F. Kennedy, citing the book, appointed a committee to study pesticide use. During the next two years, various government units called for increased oversight of and reductions of pesticides.

Small wonder that chemical makers counterattacked. A biochemist with American Cyanamid called Carson “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” Invoking cold-war language, the general counsel for another chemical company suggested that Carson was a front for “sinister influences” intent on restricting pesticide use in order to reduce American food supplies to the levels of the Eastern bloc.

In the 18 months after “Silent Spring” was published, Carson worked to outrun the aggressive cancer attacking her body. She guarded her strength, choosing to make public appearances where she believed she could make the most difference. She offered Congressional testimony on pesticide use and made a rare television appearance with Eric Sevareid of CBS. But in 1964, the disease and its complications caught up. She died on April 14 at age 56.

RACHEL CARSON’S story offers many leadership lessons, including the importance of persistence in pursuing an objective. When I discuss her with business executives, many are struck by her ability to stay focused on goals in the face of obstacles including severe illness.

Another lesson involves the importance of doing thorough research and taking the long view. A sense of context based on hard facts, along with a knowledge of history, is essential to understanding what’s at stake in difficult and uncertain situations. It also confers a sense of authority on the person who has acquired this knowledge.

A third insight concerns the juggling of personal demands and professional ambitions. Carson understood the challenge — and satisfaction — of dealing with our obligations to others even as we follow our professional drive. And she saw that this can rarely be navigated smoothly. For her, and for many executives with whom I have worked, times of great productivity were followed by fallow periods when ambitions had to be put aside for personal reasons.

There continues to be debate about the use of DDT and its relation to Carson’s conclusions. Regardless, her story underscores the power of calling others to thoughtful action. At a time when Americans’ confidence in their business and government leaders is low, her journey offers a forceful example of one person’s ability to incite positive change.