I have found it effective to let students do the things they enjoy, to get their buy-in, but to have them do so in a structured manner. There are also things that they must do that may not be enjoyable, and doing pots and pans and cleaning up the kitchen is one of those! Students love music, and I have long played music while they clean up. This morphed into the tradition of a quick dance once the cleaning is complete. It is something the students look forward to, and it allows them to let off some steam after a challenging class session.
In my culinary classes we use practical hands-on work in order to teach the foundations of cooking. Students do the required reading and are expected to arrive in class knowing the recipes and have accompanying notes. I demonstrate the technique for them in class, and then the students prepare the item themselves. Repetition is key for knife skills, so we do drills every week to increase speed and dexterity with knives. Students taste the item I made, and then taste their own item. They compare and talk among themselves, and students note what they would have done differently or what they liked about their preparations.
I used Open Lab for the first time in International Cuisine for Fall 2014. I worked on perfecting a “food experience” assignment in my work with the Living Lab throughout the previous semester. The following is an example of one of the high impact practices we discussed.
Here is a sample of a student’s food experience assignment from 2019 Food Experience
Here is a sample of a student’s food experience assignment from 2017 Amish Country Delights
I long ago realized culinary students, along with the their fondness for posting video clips, also love to exchange photos of the food they are making and eating. After initially asking students to post content on Open Lab, I soon determined that my advanced cooking classes would include an assigned “blogger,” who would post photos within a predetermined structure. Here is a link to a blog from 2019. Week 12 Blog 2019
Below is a link to Open Lab with an example of a blog with my Culinary Improvisation class. The following week we went to the Museum of Modern Art and followed up with a lesson on composition and how it relates to plate presentation.https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/stewartculinaryimprovsp2015/2015/03/
In 2016 I was fortunate enough to take my Culinary Improvisation class on an urban foraging tour of Prospect Park. Here is my account of it along with screen shots of the student blog discussing their day. Foraging in Prospect Park 2016
We were able to do a similar tour of Central Park in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The 2020 trip was cancelled due to the pandemic. Here is a link to the class blogger’s record of a tour. https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/stewart4967spring2018/
In fall 2016 my International Cuisine class fell on Halloween. The menu for the evening was especially ambitious, and I was concerned several of the students would opt to not come to class. It occurred to me we could have our own Halloween celebration. We decorated the area in which the servers picked up food, and stationed a student chef to give out candy for Trick or Treaters (HMGT students in the hallways and in the Dining Room class). Much of the class dressed in costume, and we had spooky music playing in the kitchen. We were very busy that night, with complicated recipes and an a difficult menu. And yet, I feel it was a wonderful example of modeling management techniques to the class (how to motivate staff, how to avoid employee absenteeism, how to reward good performance).
