Fred Rogers, the Teaching Mentor

Dear colleague,

Fred Rogers did his job all wrong.

• While competitors ran animated features, Rogers stuck to physical sets and puppeteering.
• While “best practice” in children's television programming shifted to graphics and variety and speed and novelty, Rogers started every show walking onto the same old set and following the same old ritual: song, jacket, cardigan, shoes. His speech kept the same slow pace while the pace of the programs and commercials surrounding it sped up.
• While what was relevant in 1968 when the show started was war and division, Rogers created a consistently educative environment where children's hearts and minds fed on a rich and varied diet of knowledge, empathy, and make-believe.

As the 60s switched to the '70s then the '80s then the '90s, television programming changed. The world transformed. And yet Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood ended in 2001 almost exactly how it started in 1968. (Here's the intro to the first and last episodes.)

Here's my point:

Too often, what we call “best practice” is really just “new” or “popularly accepted” or “endorsed by a guru.”

The term “best practice” gets thrown around a lot, and it makes sense: we're all after “what's best for kids” and, therefore, we want to be doing the “best practices” possible for getting after that best.

The trouble with this term, however, is that it's become over-extended. It means too many things to too many people. As such, it's become one of those “right answer” words in education — if you say something's a best practice, folks can't question it.

You can attached “best practice” language to anything you want, but there's no escaping this reality: educators have got to have minds and hearts and souls that deeply understand how students work, how learning works, and how basic teacher moves can help students learn. With deep understanding in place, we're able to develop classrooms that look simple — even laughably so, like Rogers' — yet produce consistent and profound results.

I sometimes wish readers of this blog could teleport into my classroom on any given day in the school year. No matter which day they chose, there are only a few things they'd ever see: lots of knowledge-building, arguing, reading, writing, speaking, and listening. That's what These 6 Things is about — weaving these fundamentals into all that we do, whatever we teach. If you teleported in, you'd be disarmed by how few strategies I use to cultivate care in the hearts of students and guide them in developing their minds.

Good, timeless, well-founded practice > what passes as “best practice” these days

Rogers seems to have been an expert at the internal work of teaching. The learning, the understanding, the processing. His clarity of thought, his obvious goodness, his simplicity of practice, his deep humility: these were the natural results of discipline and reflection, not luck or genetics or talent.

He understood himself. He understood his neighbor. He was a student of what it means to be a human being. (And no, not everyone is.) Such apprenticeship must be first intended and then sought; you don't accidentally stumbled upon it.

Rogers knew he didn't control the circumstances of the world. He couldn't change the attention-hungry changes in children's programs. He just controlled his program, his teaching. He contented himself in that, worked at doing good through that for a full career, and his legacy speaks for itself.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

PS Have a good holiday break. I'll be enjoying time with family and friends and a book or two.

We'll talk more in the new year.