Ron Clark
Episode 37, Igniting the Classroom
How do you get kids excited about school? You rap grammar, sing math, and dance your way through literature. How do you help them succeed academically? You challenge them with high-level content and an equally high level of expectation for behavior. These are among the teaching methods and philosophies at the Ron Clark Academy, and students there are flourishing.
A Sonic Journey
I stood on the desk, rapped the lessons, anything to get the kids excited. If I built an environment with energy and passion, the kids wanted to be there. I could make it really hard, but if I made it fun, the kids would achieve great things.
Inspired by his grandmother’s codes of conduct and encouraged by Oprah Winfrey, Ron Clark published The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child. Other books followed: The Excellent 11, The End of Molasses Classes, and Move Your Bus which applies Ron Clark’s successful leadership principles to the business world. His rising fame has answered his journeyman spirit. Clark has traveled the world sharing his methodologies. However, his real passion still lies in the classroom. In 2004, he opened the doors to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta.
The highly-acclaimed, nonprofit middle school has received both national and international recognition for its success in creating a supportive, dynamic learning environment that promotes academic excellence and fosters leadership. The Academy is also a demonstration school where visiting educators can observe and learn to incorporate Clark’s methodologies into their own classrooms. “We have 85 thousand educators who have been trained here so far and now those 85 thousand teachers are around the world in classrooms making it harder, making it more fun, building better relationships with kids, and we’ve shown them how to handle (tough) situations.” When COVID-19 shuttered schools, the Ron Clark Academy pivoted quickly to online teaching and shared their new methods with other educators. Over 200,000 teachers logged into the online training.
The impact of Clark’s methods is clearly visible with his Atlanta students, and his pride is evident— “100% of our students for the last 13 years have graduated high school and 90% of our students are either in college or they’ve already graduated. They’re at some of the best colleges in the nation—Morehouse, Yale, Princeton, Spelman, Howard, Duke, Georgia Tech. We’ve had a great deal of success. We’ve shown our method works, and we share it with other people.”
Adds Clark, “What we do is magical. We can change a life if we don’t give up and we don’t stop.”
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What you’ll learn
- How Clark’s dreams of adventure evolved from travel to teaching (1:32)
- How Clark worked to excite and energize his students about learning (3:12)
- How Clark ended up teaching in a crowded Harlem school (3:47)
- Clark’s classroom methods that have worked so well (4:50)
- Ron Clark’s essential 55 rules of behavior (6:00)
- How the Ron Clark Academy became possible (7:10)
- Why every child can be a successful student (8:00)
- The success of students after attending the Ron Clark Academy (9:50)
- Why students need structure and rules for appropriate behavior (11:10)
- How Clark finds creative ways to teach (13:30)
- The danger of “wussification” or lack of expectation in American education (16:23)
- How parents not holding their children accountable can get in the way of preparing them for adulthood (20:17)
- The result of challenging children with high standards (24:18)
- How an uneducated population is too easily influenced (27:40)
- How Ron Clark’s book Move Your Bus applies his leadership principles to business (31:55)
- Why it’s important to nurture the “runners” in your organization or school (35:00)
- How to lead from the top (38:45)
- Why the Ron Clark Academy is focused on middle school education (44:00)
- How his students are succeeding (46:00)
- How he pivoted to online learning as COVID-19 closed schools (47:49)
- What it was like for Ron Clark being on the television series Survivor (50:00)
Resources
- The Ron Clark Academy
- The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child by Ron Clark
- Move Your Bus: An Extraordinary New Approach to Accelerating Success in Work and Life by Ron Clark
- The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Our Kids Unstuck–101 Extraordinary Solutions for Parents and Teachers by Ron Clark
- The Excellent 11: Qualities Teachers and Parents Use to Motivate, Inspire, and Educate Children by Ron Clark
- The Ron Clark Story
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