AUSSIE

Blog entry posted January 27th, 2010 by Jeff Vohden

How important are passion, innovation, and creativity to being an effective teacher? To hear Ron Clark speak, as I did last week at the National Title I Conference in Washington, D.C., they are critical—and he has the results to prove it.

Ron’s story is fascinating. After graduating from college, he became a teacher in a rural disadvantaged North Carolina school where he used his own nontraditional innovative approach to teaching to make a tremendous impact on his students. Test scores soared. His real-world applications caught the eye of everyone from his local town to the White House. Four years later he turned his attention to working with low-income students in Harlem and was named the Disney American Teacher of the Year in 2000. He started the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta in 2007. To say that Ron is “high energy” would be an understatement. If you ever heard him speak, you know how contagious his enthusiasm is. He bounces around the stage and draws you into his story. You imagine what it would be like to have had him as your teacher. You walk away charged up and ready to tackle any challenge.

There is no denying the impact Ron has had on his students. But as I listened to Ron tell his story I couldn’t help but wonder how “passion, innovation, and creativity” rank compared to other attributes of effective teachers—things like content knowledge, an understanding of educational theory, and being able to monitor learning through the use of data. Are they the basis of all effective teaching? Can a teacher be effective without them? And since so much about Ron’s approach is wrapped up in his personality, I wondered if Ron’s style of “passion, innovation, and creativity” could be passed on to others outside of his school. Can you bottle his style? Could it be the basis of a new educational reform movement? Or, to put another way, can you separate Ron Clark from his methodology?