Karen Givven headshot

Karen Givvin bolsters TCL offerings with class on John Wooden

Professor Givvin brings new course on Wooden to Transformative Coaching and Leadership program

Dubbed the ‘Wizard of Westwood,’ legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden actually bemoaned the endearing moniker. 

“He hated it,” Transformative Coaching and Leadership Professor Karen Givvin says of the man who mentored 10 National Title-winning teams. “He said it suggested that what he did was magical.

“He believed that what he did was just really hard work, not magic.”

An adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology and now in the Department of Education, Givvin earned her Ph.D. from SEIS, studying goal orientation among adolescent elite swimmers, the topic of her dissertation. She then completed postdoctoral studies in the UCLA Psychology Department alongside Dr. Tara Scanlan, a sports psychologist for whom she TAed as a graduate student. Givvin has spent years investigating coaching practices while researching teaching and learning methods. 

With her combined interests in educational and sport psychology, the more time Givvin spent analyzing high-performance athletes, the more it made sense to probe the successful practices of the five-time AP College Coach of the Year. 

And, eventually, along with Scanlan, Givvin created a lecture series on the man.

Her new graduate-level TCL course, Coach John Wooden: Intersection of Practice and Theory, parallels classes she’s taught as part of UCLA’s Honors Collegium and Fiat Lux Undergraduate Seminar program. 

Her students examine Wooden’s memoirs before applying aspects of Coach’s teaching strategies to their own leadership endeavors. Along the way, Givvin weaves in supporting psychological research.

Teaching in the TCL program, however, has provided Givvin the opportunity to work with students who aren’t just interested in the success habits of winning athletes, but many of whom are elite athletes themselves, enrolled in the the School of Education and Information Studies Master of Education program. 

“It’s been interesting getting that student athlete perspective,” Givvin says. “They might say, ‘Hey, we do that in our sport,’ or ‘We absolutely don’t do that. And our coach does it very differently.’ 

John Wooden coaching basketball
Despite retiring nearly half a century ago, Coach John Wooden, seen here instructing Lew Alcindor, taught lessons that are still applicable to teachers and coaches today. Archival photo/UCLA Athletics

This year, Givvin’s class featured several players from the UCLA women’s basketball team, a program led by Wooden mentee and 12th year head coach Cori Close. 

“And from what the students describe,” Givvin says, “their team climate is very much what Wooden would’ve encouraged. And that’s kind of lovely to see.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bruin women are off to a 14-1 start this season. 

“Coach Wooden retired almost 50 years ago,” Givvin notes. “But what he did is still extremely relevant. The ideas that he espoused and the fact that he was very reflective about his own practices – I think that led him to some very profound discoveries that have since been supported by research.”

Wooden’s Pyramid along with his famous definition of success have fueled both students’ and academics’ interest in sports psychology research. Currently, Givvin and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Ron Gallimore are collaborating on a paper analyzing Coach Wooden’s successful use of repetition in practices. 

“He was a tough coach,” Givvin explains. “But he wasn’t a drill-and-kill-type of coach.

“He had a very specific way of repeating things: get instruction, execute, get instruction, execute, get instruction.”

Gallimore shadowed Wooden in 1975 as part of an investigation into inspirational teaching methods – much of what we now call Transformative Leadership. A year later, this led to the publication of the first academic study of Wooden’s coaching practices, “What a Coach can Teach a Teacher” (1976) co-authored with Roland Tharp, Gallimore’s colleague. Their studies on Coach proved incredibly valuable as at the conclusion of that year, to the surprise of many, Wooden announced his retirement from the UCLA sidelines.

Wooden died in 2010, surrounded by family at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center. Just hours after his passing, students assembled by the hundreds as part of a candlelight vigil in the street outside his hospital room, donning blue and gold to honor the man whose name Pauley Pavilion’s hardwood now bears. 

Wooden’s approach to leadership, however, along with his musings, live on. 

A double Bruin, Givvin earned a psychology degree from UCLA before completing her Masters in the Department of Education, Psychology, and Counseling at Cal State University, Northridge. She returned to UCLA to complete her Doctorate in Education. A specialist in pedagogical practices related to mathematics instruction, Givvin has also worked as an adjunct professor for Pepperdine University’s Sports Medicine program as well as Cal State Fullerton’s Department of Child and Adolescent Studies. 

Learn more about UCLA’s Transformative Coaching and Leadership Master of Education program.