Disney Professional Development Weekend

Steve White and I taught our first combined business and instructor Special Emphasis seminar at Disney World last weekend. Steve ran the Friday evening session and covered marketing principles, along with studio statistics, and developing an overall plan for your business. The session closed out with some social time with the Disney people providing refreshments. It was a chance for many of the participants to get to know each other, since we had five states represented and not only kenpo, but TKD and kung-fu people.

Saturday started at 9am, with the rest of the attendees checking in and renewing old acquaintances as well as meeting some new friends. The morning topics covered basics and forms but were related to the Laws of Learning and Levels of Learning, information that instructors should know. Lunch was arranged for us in the next room and was excellent.
The afternoon sessions topics were self-defense and the freestyle techniques, using a "model explosion" concept and demonstrating how to graft the freestyle techniques onto the standard techniques in the street freestyle section. Theories of retention and forgetting were introduced as well.
Every Professional Development student receives handouts in every PDS I hold and the end of class survey showed that they were useful, easy to use, and well received. In fact, one respondent called the seminar "very much above" others they had attended. See my website for other comments, http://www.leewedlake.com/index.asp?PageID=7.
At days end, verbal comments were that the event was very positive and opened a lot of doors. One person said they were going back home and immediately implementing what they learned about running their classes.
Some promotions were made. Bruce Meyer of Columbia, SC went to 5th black and his student, Jason Bright went to 4th. Other 4th degrees that day were all Florida people; Ed Cabrera, Mike Squatrito, and Kyle Zwarg. My fellow instructor, Steve White, was given a set of Mickey ears, see the photo below.



The prevalent comments were that the atmosphere was great, the people were friendly and good to work out with, the information was well laid out and the presentation was excellent. I'm looking forward to doing an expanded version of this later this year, again in the Orlando area. Steve and I enjoyed teaching it. We'll be teaching together again in California at Graham Lelliott's camp over Memorial Day weekend. His info is at www.glkenpo.com.