Lincoln Leadership Academy is a charter school located in Allentown, PA that prepares children and youth to become critical thinkers, socially capable, spiritually sensitive and culturally competent leaders equipped with the essential skills needed to compete in the world of work and become productive, purpose-driven citizens of character and integrity. The school believes that every child is precious and created with a purpose. The objective is to provide “at promise” children the tools needed to live and achieve their full potential in an “at-risk” world. Further information about LLA can be found on their website at http://www.llacslv.com.
Charter Partners Institute (CPI) and Lincoln Leadership Academy (LLA) are partnering to incorporate advanced 21st Century leadership skills within the education of all graduates. Leveraging CPI’s experience, the learning follows the non-linear, intuitive process practiced by creative entrepreneurs (think Steve Jobs) rather than traditional structured improvement processes. Students will develop the understanding of themselves, the confidence, and the skills to identify and initiate opportunity without direction, communicate the essence effectively, co-create better solutions with collaboration, act in the face of ambiguity, learn from failure, and rapidly adapt toward a practical solution. These and all the other 21st Century skills in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework are included, as well as related Pennsylvania standards.
The initial pilot is occurring during the 2011-2012 school year (Sept 2011 through Aug 2012). It involves all the 11th graders at Lincoln Leadership (the oldest class at present, approximately 60 students). The majority of the learning for the pilot is fit into a regular, required 45 minute class entitled Junior Seminar, with approximately 50% of the class time devoted to this leadership program and the remainder to related college and career development skills. The primary learning activity is a project where the students identify a complex issue in the school or community for which no good answers or even directions exist, form teams, and develop and implement innovative solutions for the rest of the year and continuing as their senior graduation project.
Anyone who is interested can follow the progress of the pilot in the accompanying web pages. Look under “Project Descriptions” for a brief summary of each project. Look under “Project Updates” for blogs written by the student teams which trace the progress on their projects. For more information about the learning techniques, please review the CPI website.
A white paper describing this partnership can be downloaded from the following link: