Page 170 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Practice, Practice, Practice 151

Downtown School. Jan Drees told us, “Focus is on classroom implementa-
tion. We all know that the ‘gold star’ approach to classroom management
does not motivate learning. When students develop their own goals and take
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accountability for accomplishing them, true learning takes place.” There
are currently 18 teachers enrolled in the Drake School of Education special
master’s degree program. Another valuable partner is Simpson College,
which provides as many as eight student teachers to the Downtown School
each year. These undergraduate students spend most of the school year
student teaching rather than just the typical six to nine weeks required in
traditional school systems.
The traditional school system is not only failing our students, it is fail-
ing our teachers as well. The New Iowa School Development Corporation
reports that in Iowa nearly 18 percent of new teachers leave the teaching
profession after their first year, 28 percent within three years, and 50 percent
within the first seven years of their careers. Educational Leadership magazine
reports that 40 to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five
years. Judi Cunningham, executive director of elementary and early child-
hood programs for the Des Moines Public Schools, admitted, “There’s prob-
ably nothing more important in the field of education now than professional
development. So, if this new center can help the teachers of Des Moines and
Iowa, that would be fantastic. We talk a lot about changing teachers, but we
have to provide them with some structure and some expectations and some
ways to do it. This will be another learning opportunity in addition to the
university setting, and it will be a wonderful combination of coursework and
teaching. I don’t know how many times teachers have told me, ‘I learned
much more in my 6 or 18 weeks of student teaching than I learned in four
years of college.’”
In this chapter, we will help you distinguish between training that is
purely perfunctory and the kind that will enable your employees to perform
at their peaks.

Training—Whose Responsibility Is It?
Only two days after Disneyland opened on July 13, 1955, Walt Disney
called the vice president of casting into his office. Normally the calmest of
individuals, Disney was so upset over a situation at Tom Sawyer’s Island that
he shooed everyone but the casting executive out of his office and closed the
door, an uncharacteristic act for Walt Disney.