But to most, John Wooden was respectfully known as coach. Most importantly, for all the educators and coaches of amateur athletics the man was an example of what we should all strive to be.

The Coach and Player

A talented basketball player in his own right, Wooden was a three-time college All-American guard. He earned the nickname the “Rubber Man’’ because of how quickly he would bounce back up from the floor.

But he is most well known for coaching accomplishments, achievements that defy description. Coach Wooden’s UCLA Bruins made 12 Final Four appearances and won 10 NCAA championships, including seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. All three of these accomplishments represent all-time NCAA records.

His 1971-72 team posted an average margin of victory of 30.3 points, also an all time NCAA record. He posted a career winning percentage of .813 and his teams went unbeaten four times. From 1971 to 1974, UCLA would win 88 games in succession.

Prior to his success on the national stage, he transformed the Bruins from an unknown to a conference power, winning five conference titles and taking UCLA to their first Final Four in 1962 where the team lost in the semifinals to Cincinnati, the eventual champion.

Amazingly, Coach Wooden was successful with teams with all types of players – those that featured a dominant post-player as well as guard-oriented teams that were devoid of size. He didn’t recruit players to fit a basketball style; instead he recruited individuals that he felt would fit into his belief of how the game should be played: a focus on “conditioning, fundamentals, and working together as a team.’’

He would be the first man to be named to the Naismith Hall of Fame as both player and coach. Only two other individuals in the history of basketball have matched that accomplishment.

John Wooden, Teacher

The former high school English teacher was actually best known by his players, not for the titles he helped them win, but for the life lessons he provided them. According to legend, Coach Wooden carried with him, at all times, a handwritten copy of his father’s credo:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.’’

Deeply religious, Wooden was known for being a man of principle and those principles never varied, no matter how important or talented the player. When one of his most gifted and free-spirited charges, Bill Walton, balked at getting his hair cut, Coach Wooden reportedly acknowledged his respect and even admiration for a young man who wanted to live by his own personal creed before stating:

“We’re going to miss you, Bill.”

For those in the education business, it is important to note that he insisted that there were four laws of learning: explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition. And for success in the most trying of times, i.e., for his basketball teams on the national stage, he insisted that “the goal is to create a correct habit that can be produced instinctively under great pressure.”

But as with most great teachers, his lessons were given by his actions. Bob Ryan, the great sportswriter for the Boston Globe referred to Wooden as “a 19th century man who somehow thrived in an otherwise alien culture.” It seems that when Wooden’s wife Nell Riley passed away on March 21, 1985, he continued to honor a lifelong commitment to his partner. On the 21st of each month, Coach Wooden would pay a visit to his wife’s grave and then sit down to write a love letter.

Not without flaws, Coach Wooden was known to tell a fib or two. As Ryan also wrote, the UCLA great always stood by those who had managed to handle his demands on the court. Apparently Wooden once expounded to Ryan on how much he had enjoyed coaching Sidney Wicks, a man pro coaches deemed uncoachable.

Though deeply religious, it is interesting to note that when his body failed him completely, he took a page from Scott Nearing and made the extraordinarily difficult conscious decision to end his own life. The general consensus is that when Wooden’s body had completely betrayed him he checked himself into a facility where he refused to eat and awaited the end.

“Death with dignity,” wrote Ryan, “is what he deserved and death with dignity is what he got.”

The Man and Father

A quiet, personally-reserved man, Coach Wooden was never one to sell the substance for the shadow. He hated flashiness both on and off the court.

He never swore at his players yet many would attest that he put enough venom into ‘Goodness gracious sakes alive!’ that he could make a Marine drill sergeant proud.

In a day and age when most men smoked Wooden did so himself though he would quit each season to ensure he was a proper role model to his players.

And his children, they had this to say of the man:

“We will miss him more than words can express,’’ his son, James, and daughter, Nancy Muehlhausen, said in a statement. “He has been, and always will be, the guiding light for our family. The love, guidance, and support he has given us will never be forgotten. Our peace of mind at this time is knowing that he has gone to be with our mother, whom he has continued to love and cherish.’’

Perhaps surprisingly, there are those who think he was a man that could not match his success in today’s world of college athletics. According to The New York Times::

“A dynasty like Wooden’s would be almost impossible now, because the best players seldom spend more than a year or two in college before turning professional. No N.C.A.A. men’s basketball coach has won more than four championships since Wooden retired.”

I beg to differ. Wooden was a teacher first and a coach second. He would recruit young men who understood the word commitment. And as a man who understood how to motivate and how to lead, I think he would still be the man everyone would be chasing.

As Mark Kriegel at FoxSports notes:

“This may be a cynical age, but no more distrustful than the ’60s and ’70s. Cities were burning. Many a campus found itself under siege. It was black against white, and young against old, (defined as anyone over 30).”

“…. it was the best work done by any American coach, in any sport.
The championship streak is wondrous enough. But the fact that those years — 1967 to 1974 — coincide with the most famously tumultuous stretch in youth culture, elevates the achievement. It wasn’t a sporting accomplishment so much as a societal one.”

In a day and age when we spend as much time talking about ineligible players and team’s being sanctioned for breaking rules, Wooden would represent a return to the spirit of college athletics, where winning was secondary to developing character.

In life and in death the man was ever the teacher and coach. The great ones are great for a reason, they understand and function at a different level.

Such was the case with the wondrous husband and father as well as the greatest teacher and coach ever to walk the planet.

Covey’s seven principles are universal, with the first two leading the way for any walk of life: a) take personal responsibility and initiative and b) be clear about what’s important to you and setting goals. In this writer’s eyes, these two elements represent the foundation for being successful, whether it is training for the world of pro sports or inspiring a classroom full of students.

Some educators may be surprised to learn that these seven habits once served to revitalize A.B. Combs Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina. Principal Muriel Summers transformed the poor performing school with low teacher morale into a model program by applying Covey’s seven principles to the school setting.

Implementing an inside-out approach, i.e. having the teachers and administrators learning, living and modeling the principles themselves first, Summers led a process that resulted in the principles of effectiveness being woven into every subject — math, science, social studies, art, etc.

Encouraged to Be Leaders

Dubbed The Leader in Me process, the seven habits educational approach has now been adopted in over 200 schools around the world. While every school is unique in its own way, these 200 all share a common mission statement: “Developing Leaders, One Child at a Time.”

Covey notes that many folks question the fundamental notion that every child can be a leader. But in the ‘Knowledge Worker Age,’ he insists that leadership is a life choice as opposed to a position that is assigned to people.

The Leader in Me process is not about the small number of people who will end up in significant leadership positions. Instead, it is about leading one’s life and being a leader among one’s friends and one’s family.

Covey considers this emphasis on leadership as the ‘highest of all the arts,’ and that by communicating to people their worth and potential they ultimately come to see it in themselves.

A Program Worth Considering

Perhaps it is Covey’s humility that makes his work so enticing. The man behind the seven principles does not take credit for what he calls the ‘set of universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society, organization, or family.’ Instead, according to his own assessment, he ‘simply organized, sequenced and articulated them.’

But for this educator, it is the fact that Covey reverts to the very fundamentals of education in the Leader in Me program that is significant. The focus on students and not curricula, on character and not subjects, and most importantly, ‘doing the right thing even when no one is looking’ is one every school should take notice of.

Indeed, education has been and will always be about relationships. Covey’s focus on developing leadership features this fundamental prominently.

Educators interested in greater student achievement would do well to review the principles featured in The Leader in Me. Though a complete school approach would no doubt produce greater impact, teacher’s who implement these principles into their classroom will find students taking greater ownership in their learning.

And such ownership is at the heart of greater levels of student achievement.

Having begun teaching in the 1970’s at the high school level, my approach in the early years was very traditional. My classroom would have been best described as teacher-centered and my organizational skills combined with my ability to relate to students created a room that earned me high marks from my administrators.

In the early nineties though, it became increasingly clear that my methods were growing less popular with students. In addition, I found myself less and less successful on the most important element, student achievement. My classroom was well-managed and discipline issues seldom arose, but my students seemed to be losing interest in the subjects that I taught.

As I slowly tried to adjust, most of my colleagues initially insisted that I was wrong to make changes. Instead, they were firm in their resolve that the students needed to be held accountable. Most importantly, they insisted that if these students were one day to move on to post-secondary levels of education, they would find that college professors seldom featured anything but the teacher-centered model.

It was in the September 1996 issue of Educational Leadership that Alfie Kohn turned my thoughts full circle. It was at that time he released his version of “What to Look for in a Classroom.”

His summary was truly transformational for me and it has stood the test of time as the definitive model for those classrooms where teachers excel. Frequently appearing in a simple chart format, “What to Look for in a Classroom” features two contrasting columns: the ‘Good Signs’ versus ‘Possible Reasons to Worry.’

Parents and traditional educators will find a disturbing trend – to this day, most of the practices employed at the high school level fall into Kohn’s reasons to worry category.

The Traditional/Negative Approach

Under the possible reasons to worry, Kohn took exception to longstanding educational traditions. In simplest terms, Kohn insisted it was time to destroy the teacher-centered, control model that focused on classroom management and replace it with a version that is often equated with what one sees in elementary school, particularly at the youngest levels.

For example, under his possible reasons to worry, he offered the following:

• Chairs all facing forward and worse yet, desks in rows.
• Packaged instructional materials orderly and prominently displayed.
• Classroom visuals featuring commercial posters, lists of rules, sticker and star charts or samples of flawless student work posted only from the best youngsters.
• Periods of silence interrupted by only the voice of the teacher.
• An in-control, authoritative and highly visible teacher typically front and center.
• Students waiting quietly for the next set of teacher-initiated activities, responding to teacher-directed questioning.
• All students focused on the same activity working on their individual skills.

The Modern/Positive Approach

In the Kohn classroom, the teacher is no longer the focus – instead everything centers upon the students and what it is they need to learn:

• Multiple activity centers featuring various classroom structures including open spaces and large tables for group work.
• Room overflowing with a variety of materials, apparatus and supplies.
• Displays of student projects demonstrating student collaboration or personal memos initiated by the students.
• A buzz or low-level hum of activity featuring students exchanging ideas.
• A warm, respectful teacher mingling with students.
• Students eager and excited about learning as they actively question one another.
• Multiple activities taking place simultaneously with students working in pairs or groups.

Elementary vs. Secondary

As noted earlier, Kohn’s approach was far more consistent with that employed by elementary school teachers. It also features a significant change in focus for those administrators observing a classroom – instead of an emphasis on what it is that the teacher is doing, the shift is to assessing what it is that the students are doing. Most importantly, it is a shift from a quiet, well-managed classroom to one that is lively and features an emphasis on student learning.

It is interesting to note that for many children, middle school and high school becomes the place where school is no longer enjoyable. It is, of course, at that time that students traditionally have been subject to a shift from student-centered classroom to a teacher-centered, content-driven academic approach.

The result is that school, instead of being a place where students look forward to going each day because it features an exciting atmosphere where learning new things is enjoyable, becomes a chore at best, a problem at worst. At the very age when students most resist compliance and teacher-centered approaches, too many teachers, and, by default, too many schools insist on employing such a format.

Because of the sophistication needed educationally, there is no doubt that 21st century classrooms demand a shift from the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide on the side’ approach. That move is a requirement to produce the type of student that will excel in the creative, technologically-rich world we face.

But while technology demands such a shift and the student of the 21st century needs such a classroom to learn the skills needed for future employment, it is now clear that the Kohn approach is one that should have been employed long ago for a different reason.

It is, and in fact has always been, a better way for teachers to do business. And it has always been the model I associate with the true professionals I have had the good fortune to observe.

Being a teacher, no story ever resonated more strongly than that of the inspirational Jaime Escalante.

None.

“Can we talk about sex?”

No doubt my feelings were due in great part to the fact that I too once taught the great subject of calculus. That I too have faced an uninspired group of students desperately wondering how I might reach them.

But my odds were infinitesimal compared to the ones he faced, making his tale an extraordinary story. The passion and ability to inspire some of the most underprivileged students in East L.A. to achieve at a level they could never have imagined possible is and was a story I have never grown tired of.

The movie is a must see for anyone who aspires to teach – heck it ought to be requirement that every high school teacher view the flick a day or two before the start of every school year.

Because this inspirational tale reminds us that it is amazing what one dedicated teacher can do, what a difference one educator can make in the lives of the individuals who arrive in his or her classroom.

As teachers, we all have an amazing opportunity, a chance, every single day, to stand and deliver. And if we do so with unbridled passion, then we can be the ones to truly “pay it forward.”