Teach: Accountability Tools

The tools on this page can be used to teach accountability, duty, honor, or responsibility.
• Request tools created by the Project on Positive Leadership
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• If you have tools you like to use and are willing to share them with us, let us know

Irresponsibility, Accountability, and Obsessiveness Stories

Free tool available upon request from the Project on Positive Leadership.

  • Publisher: University of Louisville College of Business
    • Author: Ryan Quinn
    • Date: 2020
    • Series: Virtues and Vices
    • Pages: 7
  • Summary: This is one of the tools that makes up the Project on Positive Leadership’s “Virtues and Vices” series of instructional tools. It contains four stories of accountability, irresponsibility, or obsessiveness. A tool with multiple stories enables students to examine what is required to exhibit ideal accountability across different settings, and to account for the differing perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Each story includes carefully-crafted reflection questions to provoke the students’ learning, to prepare them for class, to prepare themselves to practice accountability, and to motivate them to be more mindful about their approach to leadership.

Job Design Interview Protocol

Free tool available upon request from the Project on Positive Leadership.

  • Publisher: University of Louisville Project on Positive Leadership
    • Author: Ryan Quinn
    • Date: 2021
    • Pages: 3
  • Summary: The job design interview protocol is an interactive learning tool for learning accountability and job design. Turning a lesson on job design into an interactive activity makes the concepts more engaging to participants, requires them to go beyond learning concepts to thinking through how to apply concepts in practical situations, and also makes the stakeholders of job design more salient, so that it is easier for participants to think about the people to whom they are accountable and why.

Managing a Security Response to the Ebola Epidemic in Liberia

  • Case study
    • Price: $4.25
    • By Margaret Bourdeaux and Juliette Kayyem
    • Harvard Kennedy School
    • Date of Publication: 2020
  • Summary: This case is recommended to teach accountability by considering it from multiple viewpoints. Students might need to get clear about what a person can be accountable for in an epidemic. Students can discuss how accountable each major person or group was, from the perspective of the other group, and what effect accountability has. It is also useful to discuss why some people are able to step up and take accountability while others are not. The epilogue can be an inspiring way to end, when the people of West Point take accountability for their own handling of the epidemic.

For the Sake of the Children: The Social Organization of Responsibility in the Hospital and the Home

  • Book
    • Price: $34.00
    • By Carol A. Heimer and Lisa R. Staffen
    • The University of Chicago Press
    • Date of Publication: 1998
  • Summary: This book can be gripping because of the context in which it occurs, and should be nice for spurring discussion as a result. The focus of the book, however, is on the sociological construction of responsibility, more than on the ethics of responsibility, so focusing on the ethics of responsibility during a class discussion can be a powerful complement. This is pretty advanced reading, though, and probably suitable for more advanced classes.