The Entrepreneurial Academy

One of the things I’m most excited to be working on this year is the development of the Lincoln School Entrepreneurial Academy. As you may know, we’ve invested a great deal of energy over the past few years in developing a culture of entrepreneurial learning and doing with our students, faculty, and community. We’ve developed a series of discreet courses in entrepreneurship, held professional development sessions on entrepreneurial thinking in the classroom, partnered with Babson College to work with our faculty and families, created a summer camp, and are even developing an international entrepreneurship competition to be launched later this year. For us, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking isn’t about building businesses but about finding creative ways to add value to our communities. That might include building a business, but it also could be centered in the arts, service, the environment, or really any other aspect of our day-to-day lives.

The Entrepreneurial Academy at Lincoln School will offer our high school students a matriculation pathway that is tailor-made to their college and career interests. Currently, our graduating 12^th-grade students have the opportunity to earn up to three separate high school diplomas, one from MEP, one from Cognia, and one from the IBO. In general, they follow one of two pathways to those diplomas. Those who are attempting the IB Diploma follow a course sequence that looks something like this:

While those that are not seeking the IB Diploma follow a course sequence that looks more like this:

As you can see, students attempting the IB Diploma do not have room in their 11^th and 12^th grade schedules to attempt additional electives, while those not attempting the IB Diploma have room for quite a few. Our Entrepreneurial Academy will take advantage of those spaces in students’ schedules to offer discreet courses in entrepreneurship, leadership, and project management while also offering them space to develop their own projects and eventually even internships and work-study. Additionally, our counselors will work with students to fill out the rest of their schedules with specific courses aligned to their college and career plans. An Entrepreneurial Academy student’s schedule will look something like this:

Just what are those pathway courses? Well, we’ve been studying our students’ historical interests and speaking with several universities to determine the types of courses we need to offer. Over the past several years, our graduates have sought admission into a few common programs, most notably business, engineering, and medicine. The data looks something like this:

With that information, and `with some of the feedback we’ve gotten from universities popular with our students (in Costa Rica and abroad) we’ve been developing additional courses we might offer based on students’ interest in the future. We’ve also been talking with an international university about the possibility of offering college courses to our students that will earn them both high school and college credit aligned with their fields of interest. We’re not ready to unveil the name of that university yet, but we are excited about the very real possibility that our future graduates will leave Lincoln School with anywhere from a semester to two-years‘ worth of college credit already on their resume. Here’s an example of what that might look like for one of our students. In this example, the courses in red represent college courses, each worth three college credits:

As you can see, this student would earn up to 21 college credits directly from a major university, with up to another 15 college credits earned from IBDP courses depending on their final score and the policies of the university they attend. They would also have room in their schedule to work on a passion project related to their interests and maybe even participate in an internship with that time as we develop those relationships. This represents a unique opportunity for our students to study topics directly relevant to their college and career interests while simultaneously improving their resume and preparing themselves for university study.

We will be officially enrolling students in our Entrepreneurial Academy later this year to begin with the 2023-2024 school year. We re hopeful that this will represent an exciting opportunity for our students and their families, and we expect that ultimately about half of our students will continue to choose the IBDP pathway while the other half choose to follow the Entrepreneurial pathway. We expect that this will, in turn, create an opportunity for us to develop new courses directly related to students’ interests (Biomedical Technology, etc.) and have impacts we haven’t even thought of yet. In way, that’s one of the most exciting aspects of this process: we’re being entrepreneurial in our creation of the Entrepreneurial Academy. We’re ideating, iterating, reflecting, and refining as we go, all in the name of offering our students relevant and exciting academic opportunities here at Lincoln School.