Dr. Rosemarie Truglio has been contributing to the development of Sesame Street for eighteen years.In her current role as Vice President of Education and Research at Sesame Workshop, she helps oversee the development of the show's curriculum each season.Recently, she stopped by ideastream's studios and chatted with the StateImpact team about the current season.
Truglio poses with ideastream's President and CEO Jerry Wareham, along with United Way of Greater Cleveland's Bill Kitson.
Q: You're part of a team that helps develop the focus of each season. This season is looking at school readiness skills. Why is that important now?
A: Sesame Street has often been referred to as the letter and number show, but we’re so much more than teaching letters and numbers. A lot of what we do has to do with developing social emotional development. Yes, they need to know their basics, their letters and their numbers, but they need to know how to regulate their emotions. At the core of self regulation is what we’re calling executive function, and what I mean by that is the conscious control of thoughts, feelings, and actions.
So, when a child goes to school and they have to raise their hand instead of blurting out an answer, that takes control. A child who has to wait in line and follow directions, take turns, take on the perspective of someone else in terms of role play or even problem solving, these are what we call executive function, cognitive skills, that enable the child to behave in an appropriate way.
If you don’t have these executive function skills and self regulation skills, its hard for [children] to learn the academic basics. There’s a real attention now being placed on putting these skills at the core of what we’re calling school readiness skills.
It’s during the preschool years that you see the most rapid increase in brain development that is controlling these kinds of behaviors. Children are not born with these skills, they have to be learned, and how you learn them is to model them. And that’s where Sesame comes in, because Sesame is about teaching those foundational skills so that we can show what these behaviors look like, and more importantly, give children a range of strategies so they can adopt these executive function skills.
Q: The show has been on for 45 seasons. In a changing media landscape, how does the program stay relevant, successful, and unique as an educational tool?
A: The secret to our success is we’re constantly evolving, including the curriculum.
When I took over the job 18 years ago, I was surprised. I thought, “it’s a preschool curriculum, it’s a whole child curriculum, how much is it going to change?” I quickly realized that if you want to create content for the current needs of children, you have to change the curriculum, and you have to figure out what is known through the research.
An example is Cookie Monster. Now that we’re focusing on self regulation and delayed gratification, I worked with advisers who are doing research with preschoolers today, so we’re getting the current thinking so we can model it on the show.
We’re always changing formats. I think that’s what's wonderful, that Sesame isn’t a show that’s limited by a formula. Many other shows, it’s a formula, and they don’t deviate from the formula. Sesame Street is a street, and it’s inhabited by monsters and people, and so we can be very current and we can be very flexible and we can swap things in and out.
Q: The show also appears in various versions all over the world. How does that development process change when it comes to create Sesame Street programming for international students?
A: What’s wonderful about our international co-productions is it’s another kind of partnership. It’s not just taking our show and giving it to another country. It’s about finding out the needs of that particular country, working with their educators and their ministries of education, to figure out what is their curriculum. It’s going to be a whole child curriculum, but what do they want to emphasize.
So, in Egypt, and in Bangladesh, and in Afghanistan, [the focus] is to show girls getting an education and seeing these girls be supported by their family members in getting an education. In South Africa, because of the AIDS crisis, many children were orphaned and also carry the HIV virus. How do we deal with that and remove that stigma?
It’s not just the curriculum, but it’s also what do they sort of want their “street” to look like? Is it a park, is it a street, and who’s going to inhabit it? You want to have the characters be relevant to the children in that country, too.
And of course we’re a partner, so we’re there to train and to monitor and to guide and be there when needed, but we want each country to own their production.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.