Do better

There is always room for improvement.

10 July 2024

Image credit Colleen Farris

 At the end of last school year, I repeatedly observed students doing things in the kitchen that did not reflect what they had learned in the classroom. I could not figure out why they were not applying what they had been taught. So, I set a goal to do better next year. I struggled to identify what I needed to change until I started doing the coursework for the Mindsets for Innovation course. That is when ideas about the stickiness of preexisting knowledge, the need to replace it, and what is required to make learning transferable became clear to me (Bransford, 2000).

The readings in How People Learn (Bransford, 2000), revealed that I need to check in with my students to discover their existing understandings and detect their misconceptions about topics before I begin teaching. In addition, I need to provide more evidence of my expert metacognitive process and model the framework I use to store and retrieve my expert knowledge. Finally, I need to explicitly demonstrate how I recognize and select what I already know to solve new problems and gain new knowledge. 

I also need to spend more time understanding the cultural and contextual differences related to food and cooking that exist between myself and my students (Coughlin, 2014). Many of my students come from cultures very different from my own. Some do not have a chef’s knife or even an oven at home. These tools are central to the Western European culinary tradition. I have always had them, so it is easy to forget that they are not part of every culinary tradition. 

Of the several aspects of teaching that I need to hone next year, I believe improving students’ ability to transfer knowledge will be the most exciting. I plan to employ the techniques of the Right Question Institute in this effort. By helping students learn to ask better questions, refine them, prioritize them, and act on them, I believe students will begin to construct the kind of flexible, adaptive knowledge they need to be successful in the kitchen, the classroom, and life.

References

Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2014). Critical constructivism. In The Sage Encyclopedia of Action Research (Vol. 2, pp. 204-206). Sage Publications.

http://doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.

How people learn : Brain, mind, experience, and school: expanded edition. (2000). National Academies Press.

Right Question Institute. (2024, June 6). Home. Right Question Institute. https://rightquestion.org/