Ron Clark is an American elementary school educator, who his story made in a movie to

inspire and educate others. In The Ron Clark’s Story, we can see some aspects of instructional
strategies, which I will be elaborating on using The ASSURE Model. The ASSURE Model has 6 steps.

First thing Mr. Clark did was to analyze learners: learning about their lives outside of the
school, their cultures, backgrounds, socio-economic status, and their parents. The more he met the
students’ parents, the more he realized the differences between his students. In my opinion, this step
is the most crucial step because without learning about students’ backgrounds and family structures
first, we may not be able to see the reasons behind their behaviors and to analyze their learning
styles.

Second step of The ASSURE Model is to state standards and objectives. In this story, Mr.
Clark’s objective was more or less like this: Sixth grade students (Audience) will value honesty and
discipline and score enough to pass (Degree) The State Exam (Behavior) on the exam day (Condition).
After he get to know the class, he decided his objective. He set some rules, which after he added
more with his students. The thing I love about this step is that he set his standards high, which other
teachers did not, and he never let others talk down on his students. He knew his students’ capacity
and what they are capable of doing.

Select strategies, Technology, Media, and Materials. In this step, choosing a strategy based on
learners’ needs and skills, deciding whether we will use the technology or not, and preparing
materials to achieve our objective are essential. What Mr. Clark chose as his strategy was
behaviorism. In the beginning of the movie, when I saw Mr. Clark’s approach to the students, I was
not sure if it would work or not, because in my opinion, when using behaviorism, we should be very
careful about how to encourage or punish students since this method can go in a wrong way very
fast. However, Mr. Clark handled the situation very well, for example, he taught grammar to the
students in a way that students enjoyed, he made deals with them which he learns something from
his students, and his students also learn something from him. He also punished his students, for
example, if one of the students refuse to make a line, nobody would get a lunch. This was useful
because after a while, without him doing anything, students begin to warn each other to behave
better.

The fourth step was to utilize technology, media, and materials. An example of this step could
be when Mr. Clark was sick and could not go to the school for two weeks. He recorded himself every
day, before the class, and taught the class. Another example is that Mr. Clark was preparing his
materials for the class before the class, or he was changing the classroom environment according to
his method or even that day’s topic or event.

require learner participation, I think Mr. Clark did a very good job. He got to know his
students beforehand -in the first step- and gained their attention in a way that his students wanted to
listen to him. For example, when one of his students did not face to the board, he did not interrupt
his speech or yelled at his student, he just lightly tapped student’s shoulder or took of his students’
hat in a jokingly/funny way. In my opinion, a better example of requiring participation from the
students was when he decided to change his teaching method. He realized that students were not
interested in what he was teaching, and they failed the test, so he decided to sing, rap, and dance the
information. After he changed his method, the whole class got good grades. We can see that this
method was very useful when the students were singing the song about USA’s presidents in the state
exam after months of learning about it.

The last example can be interpreted in the evaluate and revise step also. He did not get direct
feedback from the students; however, when he saw their reactions and their test results, he decided
to change his method. After changing method from writing information on the board and making his
students memorize it to singing the information and dancing, he saw that it was useful, and he
continued using this method.

The Ron Clark Story is a very inspirational story of a great teacher whose approaches are very
informative and useful. We can have a better understanding of his methods and ideas when we
arrange them using The ASSURE Model.