Leadership Toolkit

ASSESSMENT: Assessing students' awareness and development of leadership

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Assessing students' awareness and development of leadership

Analytical essays

When students are set an analytical essay, they should take the topic, issue or problem apart, think about the why's and wherefore's and reassemble the component parts into a coherent whole, with evidence of their thought processes and conclusions. Each of the three examples that follow offers a different way to assess students' analytical essays.

Students designing their own assessment criteria: Students enjoy being responsible for this and provided those criteria are relevant and academically rigorous, the group process can result in high quality written work. Some lecturers use tutorials to involve students in a group discussion of the main qualities, outcomes and/or processes of leadership they would want an ideal leader to meet. They can then write an analytical essay evaluating the leadership of a well-known community leader against those criteria. Students can then peer-review their essays before re-writing and submitting for assessment.

For suggestions on the peer-review process and possible criteria to use when assessing students' written essays see:

Written Communication Toolkit: http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/gihe/griffith_graduate/toolkit/index.htm

Analysing a leader's performance: Alternatively, you could ask students to complete the following assignment which requires them to justify their analysis of a leader's performance. Ask your students to:

focus on a leader [one they know personally, or a well-known community leader] whom they consider to be 'effective' and one whom they would 'follow'; or
focus and reflect on their own behaviour as a leader.

Give students the table below, and ask them to complete it in relation to their chosen subject by awarding a rating out of 10 on each of the criteria. They should submit their ratings, together with a 2000 word analytical essay which explores the reasons they awarded those ratings, and comments reflectively on the resulting outcomes from that person's leadership. Students should set the parameters that they use in their analysis and these should form part of the assessment criteria. This assessment task will assist students to understand the relationships between leadership and a number of different graduate skills and can be used as the basis of a subsequent analytical essay in which the behaviour and impact of two different leaders are compared and contrasted.

Rating scale:

As a leader, X ......	Rating out of 10 (where 10 = Always and 1 = Never)	Underlying reasons	Resulting outcomes
... sets a reasonable limit on how long they stay on as leader
... shares power with others
... believes their own 'hype'
... is a realist
... compensates for their own weaknesses by drawing on others' expertise
... stays balanced
... remembers the mission
... stays healthy
... develops a personal support system
... is creative
...knows and controls their appetite (e.g., for power, success, kudos, etc.)
.. is reflective

Adapted from: Kellerman, B. (2004). Bad Leadership: what it is, how it happens, why it matters. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 233-235.

Other useful resources

For suggestions on assessing written essays, see:
Written Communication and Critical Evaluation Toolkits:
http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/gihe/griffith_graduate/toolkit/index.htm

Peer assessment and peer evaluation:
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 30 October, 2006:
http://www.foundationcoalition.org/publications/brochures/2002peer_assessment.pdf

Assessing students' reflections on team process

Refer students to Tuckman's (1965) model of the four stages of team formation. Design an assignment that requires students to reflect on these four stages and write an analytical essay on how the leader and each member of their team contributed to the team's progression through the stages in the model. In this assessment item, ask them to provide concrete examples of incidents that happened, observations they made, or experiences they had as substantiating evidence.

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