Bridging the gap between traditional education and life skills
We all know that the traditional educational model is flawed. While we do a good job in theoretical training, we do very poorly when it comes to teaching our students about dealing with real life situations.
At the eCenter at LindenPointe, we recently completed the 3rd year of a program called Entrepreneurship Academy that allows high school seniors (12th graders) to spend 3 hours every day for the entire academic year, learning the entrepreneurial mindset. This includes four pillars:
- Entrepreneurial Curriculum — The core value of the eAcademy is a lean methodology-based curriculum, as well a road map and detailed instructions on classroom activities. The curriculum is a combination of nationally-acclaimed programs, publications, and lessons that are specifically tailored for a high school student.
- Business Creation — Students form teams and work on a business idea (product or service), develop a business plan and create a working prototype. Training also includes additive manufacturing (3D Printing), website creation, etc. The student teams pitch their final businesses in a Y-combinator-style “Demo Day” to investors and the community.
- Real-world Experiences — Students participate in field trips to small, medium and large businesses in diverse predetermined fields that are local to the region. Speakers with diverse backgrounds and skill sets are also invited to engage with the students to impart real life lessons, and to provide an opportunity to work on actual projects within their organizations, either in the form of internships or as seed ideas for business creation.
- Life Skills — Key life and career skills such as leadership, conflict resolution, communication, ethics, etc. are integrated into each aspect of the four pillars.
The Entrepreneurship Academy was created with the knowledge that a small city in rural Pennsylvania would have to reinvent itself if it needed to keep up with changes times. The partnership between the City leadership, local high schools, and the community partners took several years, and truly embodies the quote,
“It takes a village to raise a child.”
Students who are accepted into the program are not necessarily the 4.0 students; in fact, a lot of emphasis is placed on those students who seem to not fit into our typical classroom model, with input from their academic guidance counselors. The class itself draws from several sources for its curriculum, but the most important aspect is its freeform nature. Students are given broad guidelines for developing their own ideas by the instructor, but the majority of decision-making is done by the student teams. And students from the same high school are specifically put different teams. Starting next year, some teams will be incubating at our business incubator for a few months to implement their ideas in the “real-world,” so to speak.
Students read world news at the beginning of every session, and often tend to draw inspiration for their ideas from here.
What we have realized in the past few years of running this program is that we are not just making our students entrepreneurial in class. Their entrepreneurial mindset is translated to all walks of their lives — whether it is their confidence in taking up new initiatives, their poise in presenting their ideas to experienced individuals, their ability to express themselves or their understanding of success and failure. These students truly mature into young adults and feel empowered to take charge of their lives.
Our plan now is to package our educational model and test it out as a pilot in other regions. Because when it comes to economic development, our program is meeting and exceeding all expectations, and there are several regions in our country and the world that could benefit from our outcomes. Almost all alumni have applied to, or are currently attending, college or trade schools — a decision they chose to make themselves. Some students have started their own businesses, either full-time or part-time. And while one might argue that only time can tell whether these students will be “successful” in their professions, I can bet that the lessons they’ve learned during their year in our program will serve them well in the journey of life.
As the Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
