You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices

In You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices, authors Swen Nater and Ronald Gallimore have written a short, easily read, deceptively simple book that draws essential lessons on pedagogy from arguably the greatest college basketball coach of all time for application in the general education classroom.

From 1970 to 1973, Swen Nater was a bench player on two NCAA champion basketball teams at University of California, Los Angeles at a time when UCLA was in the midst of an unprecedented run of 10 national championships in 12 years. In addition to what he was learning in the classroom at Westwood, Nater was learning basketball lessons daily as the backup center and practice fodder for Bill Walton, the team's three-time college player of the year and a future National Basketball Association star. (Nater went on to a lengthy and successful professional career himself.) Nater later came to realize he had learned as much from coach John Wooden about the practice of teaching as he had about the playing of basketball.

About that same time, Ronald Gallimore and Roland Tharp were young university psychologists who thought there might be lessons for all educators from the success Wooden was having as a coach. Tharp and Gallimore formally studied Wooden's coaching and teaching during the 1974-75 season, arriving empirically at many of the same conclusions that Nater was drawing from his firsthand experience (Tharp & Gallimore, 1976; Gallimore & Tharp, 2004). Are there lessons to be learned from Nater and Gallimore's collaboration for today's classroom teacher?

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Books:

You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices

Rousing Minds to Life

Related previous post: John Wooden: Coaching for people, not points