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
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Annotating
a text
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Interpret
and analyze texts
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Stating
and supporting a claim
Materials:
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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
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Warm-Up:
Choose
one of the quotes below and explain its meaning in your own words.
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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
- Where there is no vision, the
people perish. —Proverbs 29:18
- 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
- Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
—Warren Bennis
- A leader is a dealer in hope.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
- A leader is one who knows the
way, goes the way, and shows the way. —John Maxwell
- 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
- 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
- Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change world. Indeed it is the only
thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead
- To command is to serve, nothing
more and nothing less. —Andre Malraux
- He who has never learned to
obey cannot be a good commander. —Aristotle
- Effective leadership is not
about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not
attributes. —Peter Drucker
- A great person attracts great
people and knows how to hold them together. —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
- 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
- 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
- The art of leadership is saying
no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes. —Tony Blair
- 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
- The key to successful
leadership today is influence, not authority. —Kenneth Blanchard
- A great leader’s courage to
fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position. —John Maxwell
- 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
- 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
- A ruler should be slow to
punish and swift to reward. —Ovid
- Leadership is the art of
getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do
it. —General Dwight Eisenhower
- The leader has to be practical
and a realist yet must talk the language of the visionary and the
idealist. —Eric Hoffer
- A man who wants to lead the
orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. —Max Lucado
- As we look ahead into the next
century, leaders will be those who empower others. —Bill
Gates
- 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
- Do what you feel in your heart
to be right–for you’ll be criticized anyway. —Eleanor Roosevelt
- Don’t necessarily avoid sharp
edges. Occasionally they are necessary to leadership. —Donald Rumsfeld
- Education is the mother of leadership. —Wendell Willkie
- Effective leadership is putting
first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
—Stephen Covey
- Great leaders are not defined
by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.
—John Zenger
- Leaders must be close enough to
relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them. —John C. Maxwell
- Leadership and learning are
indispensable to each other. —John F. Kennedy
- Leadership cannot just go along
to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day. —Jesse
Jackson
- Leadership does not always wear
the harness of compromise. —Woodrow Wilson
- Leadership is a potent
combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be
without the strategy. —Norman Schwarzkopf
- 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
- Leadership is the key to 99
percent of all successful efforts. —Erskine Bowles
- Leadership is unlocking
people’s potential to become better. —Bill Bradley
- Management is about arranging
and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing. —Tom Peters
- Management is efficiency in
climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder
is leaning against the right wall. —Stephen Covey
- Never give an order that can’t
be obeyed. —General Douglas MacArthur
- No man is good enough to govern
another man without that other’s consent. —Abraham Lincoln
- What you do has far greater
impact than what you say. —Stephen Covey
- Not the cry, but the flight of
a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow. —Chinese Proverb
- One of the tests of leadership
is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.
—Arnold Glasow
- 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
- The greatest leaders mobilize
others by coalescing people around a shared vision. —Ken Blanchard
- The growth and development of
people is the highest calling of leadership. —Harvey Firestone
- To do great things is
difficult; but to command great things is more difficult. —Friedrich
Nietzsche
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Claim about leadership
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Evidence that supports the
claim
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Explain the connection
between your claim and your evidence. (How and why does this evidence support
your claim?)
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Supporting and Explaining Your Claim
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Example of a claim
about leadership
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Example of evidence
that supports the claim
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Example of an
explanation of the connection between a claim and evidence.
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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
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.
