Playful Problem Solving: Positive Approaches to Learning on Sesame Street

• In Event: Leveraging mass media for playful learning: The development and evaluation of Sesame Street’s playful problem-solving curriculum

Abstract

Through extensive research with early childhood educators, Sesame Workshop identified a critical educational need, as today’s preschoolers commonly lack curiosity, creativity, and perseverance in the face of challenges – an issue that impacts their ability to navigate obstacles at school and in life. Children quickly grow frustrated and often give up when their initial solution to a problem fails, rather than embracing the process of trial and error as they think of creative solutions for solving problems. To address this educational need, Sesame Street dedicated a 2-year curriculum focus to foster curiosity, critical thinking skills and creativity, and perseverance which are the foundation skills to instill a positive approach to learning (Head Start (ECLKC), 2020; Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). In support of these curriculum goals, the characters modeled curiosity, creative thinking, and task persistence. In addition, a consistent narrative structure, a first in the history of Sesame Street, was developed with three attempts to solve the problem. For each problem-solving moment, the characters chanted: “when there’s a problem, what do we say?: “I wonder....”; “what if...?”; Let’s try!” each marked by a physical gesture to highlight each phrase.

Following the Sesame Workshop Model (Fisch & Truglio, 2001), formative research played a critical role in story development, especially with a new curriculum focus that involved a composite of skills. We conducted formative research, in schools (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic) and virtually (during the COVID-19 pandemic), wherein children aged 3-4 watched a rough draft version of an in-progress script (a “storymatic”) and then were asked questions by a researcher to assess their understanding of the overall plot of the stories as well as their understanding of key messaging about Approaches to Learning. We hoped to see children recall of a developmentally appropriate articulation of metacognition: that asking questions, trying new ideas, and persisting through failure are necessary skills for problem solving. To support this, characters demonstrated their thinking processes by looking around their environment for ideas, reflecting on past experience/failures, or visualizing a thought bubble. In the second year, we used rewinds to explore even further what did not work to spark new ideas.

To assess children’s understanding, we asked questions to learn what children could articulate about the problem(s) characters faced, the attempts to solve those problems, and the process through which characters defined success and explained their thinking. We found that when the “I wonder, what if, let’s try” chant and gestures were embedded in a story featuring one familiar, real-life problem with clearly differentiated attempts to solve it, children were better able to recall the problems and attempted solutions. Children struggled most to articulate the “how” of these stories— how characters got their ideas and how characters learned from their failures— but the script elements previously mentioned, clear visual demonstrations of thinking processes, and purposefully scaffolded attempts helped children to more easily articulate this tricky “how.”

Authors

• Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop
  Presenting Author

• Becca Seibert Nast, Sesame Workshop