Information vs Reward and Punishment

John Wooden is considered by ESPN to be the greatest coach of all-timein any sport. To say that Wooden was a good coach is like sayingEinstein was good at science. He coached at UCLA for 12 years where hewon 10 NCAA titles (including 7 in a row!). In those 12 years he won664 games out of 826 opportunities (that’s a .804 winning percentage!),and during that time the UCLA Bruins ran the table with an 88 gamewinning streak that took place over almost three years (four perfect 30-0 seasons!).

If you were to go back in time and visit one of John Wooden’s practices,you might expect to see him as the ‘sage on the stage’, providing his

students with all of the knowledge they would need in his ‘chalk and talk’ lectures. You mightassume you’d see him praising the hard workers and punishing the lollygaggers. However, if youwere to make these assumptions, you’d be wrong. When Ron Gallimore and Roland Tharp, twoeducation psychologists, attended John Wooden’s practices for the first time (while conducting astudy of Wooden), they were shocked to see almost none of the above. When they observedWooden, they were at first quite perplexed because it appeared like he hardly coached at all. “Wethought we knew what coaching was ,” Gallimore said.

But upon closer inspection, they found that he used his time to observe a lot and make short andquick comments to his athletes while they were actually doing. Wooden didn’t give speeches. Hedidn’t dole out punishments, nor did he hand out rewards and praise. In fact, when Gallimore andRoland actually recorded and categorized 2,326 of Coach Wooden’s acts of teaching, they foundthat only 6.6 percent were acts of disapproval while 6.9 percent were acts of praise. That meansthat about 75 percent were statements of information.

If there was ever a coach who sports fans could agree should be given license to pass judgement,it would likely be John Wooden. But when given the choice, even Wooden would prefer to reservejudgment. This kind of teaching would have made Jerome Bruner proud when he said “studentsshould experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information.”

I’m not sure if Wooden and Bruner ever sat down over a beer to discuss pedagogy, but it wouldappear that Wooden was drinking what Bruner was pouring.