Page 140 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

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School, and I wonder if you can help me.” Jan held her ground. She had
always believed in her duty, and her true desire was to uphold the original
credo of Downtown School and the procedures that had been instituted
to insure the same socio-economic student mix as the Des Moines Schools.
She told the union official that she could not help him. Fortunately,
his granddaughter was admitted to Downtown School under normal
guidelines.
So what is this new way of teaching all about? When you walk into
a Downtown School classroom, there are no traditional rows of desks.
Instead, there is a “buzz” about the room, a clear sign that children are
alive and active. You may witness a group of students discussing a project,
or see a child stretched out on the floor reading, or yet another making a
presentation to classmates using histograms and flipcharts—or the class-
room may be completely empty. The reason is that all of downtown Des
Moines is the classroom. So, if you walk into the local bank, you may see
students learning firsthand about business, or they may be doing research
at the public library.
Is it working? Tracy Donovan, a Downtown School teacher says,
“It’s 100 times harder, but 100 times better than the traditional classroom
approach. It’s just a better way to teach. The students love coming to school
and love to learn.” Tracy spent her first years out of college in a traditional
classroom. When asked if she could ever go back to the traditional teaching
process, her answer was an emphatic “No.” 42
The next piece of the partnership model at Downtown School is the
partnership between the teacher and the student. You won’t find any tra-
ditional textbooks in the classrooms. The learning process is built around
classroom projects. As Tracy explains, “We start by brainstorming the
project with the whole class. Students have ownership in the project.”
A recent project was “the changing landscape of Iowa.” Some students
became interested in what the land was like in prehistoric times, millions
of years ago; others were interested in learning about the first settlers in
Iowa hundreds of years ago. One nine-year-old girl became interested in
soil. She enthusiastically read everything that Tracy could find on the
topic. This was the little girl’s first year at Downtown School, having
transferred from a traditional school. One day, she asked Tracy if she
could go to the public library and do some additional research on soil.
She told Tracy that she wanted to check to be sure that this would not be
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