Les Lynn is the founder and chief of Argument-Centered Education, established in 2013.  ACE is working with the Chicago Public Schools Office of Teaching and Learning, helping it “debatify” its curricular offerings to its more than 600 schools.  ACE is also working in an intensive, school-embedded way with more than 300 teachers from fourteen middle and high schools in Chicago and its suburbs, Northwest Indiana, and New York City.

Mr. Lynn has 27 years of experience as a leader in public education.  In 1997 he became the founding executive director of the Chicago Debate League. The CDL has taught thousands of public school students to debate and has professionalized hundreds of teachers and coaches of competitive debate.  Mr. Lynn developed the CDL into the largest and most educationally robust urban debate league in the country.  There are now 80+ schools in the CDL and about 1,750 students who participate in 34 debate tournaments and nearly 200 hours of training and professional development each school year.

The Chicago Debate League served as a model for the 19-city urban debate network, of which Les Lynn has been a leading architect.  In 2002 Mr. Lynn was named founding executive director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, where he developed the urban debate league model that is now in use in cities across the country.  In his work with the NAUDL, Mr. Lynn designed professional development resources, manuals and curriculum on argument pedagogy, and conducted or managed hundreds of professional development workshops and courses, for nine of the nation’s largest urban school systems, in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, and five other cities.  In all, Mr. Lynn has taught and trained more than 3,000 high school and middle school educators in the use of debate and argumentation over a 20-year period.

Les Lynn has also been a leader in the movement to apply to the regular classroom the principles and elements that make academic debating so rigorous, a project he has called “debatifying” curriculum and “argumentalizing” instruction.  Chicago Public Schools has employed Mr. Lynn as an advisor on their teacher training and professional development since 2009, which time he has worked with hundreds of teachers to incorporate evidence-based argumentation, refutation, and critical thinking skills into their instructional practices.

Prior to founding the Chicago Debate League and the NAUDL, Mr. Lynn was an English teacher at Whitney Young Magnet H.S., where he won numerous fellowships and teaching awards, from Mellon, Oppenheimer, the NEH, and others.  He completed a Master’s and doctoral coursework in English Literature at the University of Chicago and received his B.A. in Communications and English from Northwestern University.