At American Leadership Academy, ‘leadership” is not just a nice idea we put into our name. It is not just a character development program with a few lessons we teach now and then across the year. At ALA, leadership is a part of everything we do. In fact, teaching leadership is so important to us that we take the first full week of school and devote it to creating a culture of leadership on each of our campuses.
During that first week, the students will be busy with such tasks as:
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Getting to know one another and participating in Team Building exercises
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Learning the high expectations of the school and their class
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Working together to create common “ground rules” by which they will operate in class
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Setting personal and class-wide WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) for which they will strive during the year
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Putting together their Data Notebook, where they will keep track of their goals, and with which they will lead their own Parent-Teacher Conferences
- Discuss and create meaningful leadership roles that they will take on, within each classroom and across the school and, of course,
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Have many experiences from which they will learn about Covey’s 7 Habits and ALA’s 7 Core Values
At ALA, we take leadership very seriously, not because every student is going to find themselves as the CEO of some Fortune 500 company some day (although some might), but because every person is, at very least, the leader of himself or herself.