What Happened to Mister Rogers

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• What Happened to Mister Rogers Neighborhood?
• Thomas R. Rosebrough, Ph.D.

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Introduction

• What if someone allowed you to have an hour of
  television every day? Wouldnt you want to fill
  it up with something of value?
• Fred
  Rogers

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Safety and Stability

• Yet Fred Rogers offered more than an alternate
  universe of safety and stability. He allowed his
  learners to inhabit a cognitive landscape
  designed to confront reality. Yes, his puppets
  and props engaged children in a world of fantasy,
  but he always brought them back to reality on the
  trolley car. Mister Rogers dealt with the death
  of pets, with divorce, and counseled parents on
  how to talk with their children about war. His
  reality was soft and sensitive, and it always
  seemed to end on a note of emphasis of
  individuality There is no one exactly like YOU,
  never has been, never will be.

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Vygotsky

• Children must be allowed to learn in
  communities where the environments are
  intentionally supportive. The developmental
  psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1978), saw clearly
  that a gap existed between what teachers know and
  what learners know. He termed this gap the Zone
  of Proximal Development, and asserted that only
  the social support of others could allow children
  to reach their potential in learning.

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Information to Transformation

• Graduation Rates
• TN 75
• MS 74
• AR 72
• Memphis City 67
• Natl Average 73
• Highest is WS 88, Lowest is NV 56

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Informational Teaching

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Transformational Teaching

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The Transformational Teacher
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Relaters Social and Spiritual

• Teachers are relaters when they care about the
  teacher-student dynamic, when they model an
  authority of moral values, when they are
  committed to the idea that learning and life at
  their deepest levels are relational, and when
  they invest themselves in a worldview that
  defines human reality as spiritual rather than
  material entity.

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Relationships

• Relationships are important. In America and
  surely around the world, educators feel the
  increasing effect of the disintegrating family.
  Teaching, more than any profession, absorbs the
  day-to-day impact of societal dysfunction.

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Theories of Mind

• How conceptual frameworks have been built into
  teachers consciousness about what constitutes
  human beings affects teacher behavior and
  attitude in schooling. The building of these
  conceptual frameworks has been named theories of
  mind or a way of mentalizing others behavior
  (Premack Woodruff, 1978). It is how human
  beings understand each other and thus themselves.
  It certainly includes the world of intentions,
  desires, and beliefs.

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Spiritual Goals

• What teachers as relaters believe is from the
  unseen world of spiritual goals, and it makes a
  difference in practice. The teacher-student
  dynamic is the focal point because it constitutes
  a relationship. Lack of practice or application
  of a belief system can constitute disbelief in a
  spiritual goal structure. The spiritual has been
  separated from the social because of disbelief in
  spiritual ends. Beliefs can be sociocultural or
  theological in the realm of spiritual goals.

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Sociocultural Beliefs

• Sociocultural beliefs occupy a spiritual realm
  because they are assumptions that influence the
  way we think and feel, assumptions that are
  unseen but powerful attitudinal qualities and
  motivations, assumptions that impact human
  behavior. Such beliefs can be as simple as a
  teachers touch on a students shoulder, eye
  contact, and smile. Or, they can be as profound
  as a change in how teachers perceive and
  understand their students.

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Carl Rogers

• It was Rogers who introduced facilitator of
  learning into the educational lexicon. He was
  seeking a term other than teacher that would
  match with his conception of a teacher who had no
  intention of making anyone to know anything, a
  teacher who held three dispositions he saw as
  vital to great teaching realness, empathy, and
  prizing.

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How We Think About Students

• American education is currently engaged in a
  battle for the minds of disadvantaged students,
  hence the nationally-concerted effort to leave no
  learners behind. Ladson-Billings (2006) reminds
  us that the problem at the classroom level that
  teachers must confront in teaching disadvantaged
  students of color is not about what to teach. It
  is primarily about how we thinkabout the social
  contexts, about the students, about the
  curriculum, and about instruction. (p. 30).

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Theological Beliefs in Teaching

• Sociocultural and theological beliefs can find
  common ground as part of a spiritual goal
  structure, but they are different in conception.
  Anthropologists and sociologists define core
  values like equal respect and honesty as behavior
  patterns accepted by the dominant group of the
  culture (Pai et al., 2006, Spindler Spindler,
  1990). Theological perspectives tend not to be so
  relative in definition, choosing instead to rely
  upon the authority of the Bible or the Church.

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Hunter Lewis

• Six ethical modes or ways of knowing
• Authority
• Logic
• Sense Experience
• Emotion
• Intuition
• Science

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Fruit in an Orchard

• Galatians 5 love, joy, peace, patience,
  kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and
  self-control
• Character dispositions for teachers

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Spirit or Soul

• Willard (1998) brings some theological clarity
  to this other dimension, this reality of the
  spiritual. He describes the spiritual as not
  something humans ought to be, but something they
  already are in ultimate nature and destiny. For
  Willard, it is not just something beyond human
  senses to be considered in a negative comparison,
  but a positive form of energy. It is what
  renowned environmental scientist John Houghton
  (2006) describes as the fifth dimension beyond
  space (length, width, depth) and time.

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A Model for Teaching
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Learning from Mister Rogers

• Be ourselves. Be real. Be the same genuine person
  every day, everywhere.
• Communicate that we care in small ways look
  children in the eyes, smile, talk softly. Prize
  children as though there is no one like them.
• Try to walk a mile in childrens shoeswe may
  need sneakersby empathizing emotionally with
  those we are charged to teach.

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Learning from Mister Rogers (2)

• Separate reality and fantasy for children.
  Electronic entertainment obscures the line for us
  as well as children, only more so for children.
  Be thoughtful in limiting childrens exposure to
  the Information Age.
• Use music to teach, to communicate, not to
  entertain.

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Finis

• Be firm in expecting responsible behavior. The
  neighborhood is dependent upon our teaching each
  generation anew.