This is awesome! I love Cornally’s frankness and his perspective. I feel lucky to have someone working on Standards Based Grading in a way that I expect will one day be super-useful for my culinary arts students, as well. I am saddened by the fact that I haven’t been able to find someone in the Career Technical Ed field who is looking at assessments and grading in a similar way. This seems ironic considering how long CTE has been competency based, but perhaps the real issue has been an inability to co-ordinate Vocational’s standards based approach with a regular school assessment system. I started learning about SBG this last summer because I wanted to have one gradebook instead of two. Perhaps with the help of the SBG twitter posse @ThinkThankThunk, @ActiveGrade, @dandersod, @rileylark, @ddmeyer, @fnoschese, @sarcasymptote,@cheesemonkeysf, @mathhombrethis will become a reality one day.
Back in my day, we didn’t have any dag-blasted, high-falooltin’ word banks. We called ‘em cheat sheets, by dingy!
I had actually never heard of such a thing until I handed out my first smallwares quiz. I stood dumbfounded as my students explained what one was and why I was a scoundrel for not having one at hand.
Turns out, my students loooooove word banks. They long for them like an addiction. This semester we’ve finally come to an arrangement and it came like a bolt from the blue (or at least from the same part of my brain that the lazier parts of my emergency substitute teacher lesson plans come from): crosswords! I make a crossword : http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/CrissCrossSetupForm.asp (it took about 10 minutes yesterday) and all the ‘tarned word bank words are in the puzzle! I used this for my Herb/Spice ID test yesterday and I think it was a good compromise as evidenced by the feebler groans it evoked as I handed it out. What I like about this puzzle maker is it’s super straightforward and I can use the same mnemonics I presented in class as the clues in the puzzle. herb word bank It also avoided the probably ineffective ‘Last Minute Review’ trope as the cram-session was the puzzle. To avoid frustration and just because I’m in favor of the skill, I allowed them to collaborate on creating their own ‘cheat sheet’.
I’m sure someone thought of this many years ago, but I’m hoping to pass it along as another Pedagogical Cruyff Turn!
I had a brain shower the other day and came up with a plan to create an online cookbook to house my students final project recipes. It was inspired by Ferran Adria‘s book, “Family Meal” and I want to format it in such a way that recipes can be printed out or surfed through a browser. This website also promises that we should be able to turn it into an app!
The elegance of communication and organization in this cookbook will be the guiding principles of our own publication. I want to integrate photos and the step by step storyboard nature of the recipes from “Family Meals” with the more traditional ‘print this page’ style of most online cookbooks.
The storyboard is a natural and incredibly efficient means of communicating a procedure.
For this semester, since our classes are in the middle school I’ve made the actual production of the students’ final project optional, but with bonus points if they make it at home and document their process. I hope to be able to use these photos in a way similar to Adria, but perhaps in a full blown comic book format. I think this would be more appealing or at least engaging for my students. We’ll see. I have hopes of including some professional recipes as well and the comic book format might be off-putting to some potential contributors. We’ll see. I do think this presentation style would be very useful in an e-book and would like to offer it as an app as well. That’s why I have high hopes for Conduit Mobile. I’ll keep posting our progress as we get some but for now, wish us well!
A reasonable perspective that once again proves moderation to be the best course. It isn’t the meat that’s bad, it’s the pursuit of the lowest costs that causes the ethical problem. If you buy the food that’s raised ethically, you keep the good guys in business, sometimes at the expense of the bad guys…
Interesting analysis of generational impacts on education. Seems a little simplistic, but reasonable. I don’t have time to follow the embedded links, so more on this later, but I enjoy thinking about articles like this one.
Why am I creating yet another web log to clog the arteries of the internets? Let me provide an illustrative anecdote. I enjoy watching and playing soccer, although I am unschooled in either pursuit. The other day, while I was flailing away at a very casual pick-up game, I had a moment of joy and managed to skitter the ball around a much younger and much more skilled player. The soccer-wizened guy who was playing next to me said: ”Did you do that on purpose? Do you know what you did?” While I thought I had cleverly improvised, he pointed out that I had just done this:
A Cruyff Turn
I was both proud and gobsmacked. Johan Cruyff is a hero of mine for many reasons, but primarily for his jazz musician-like, logical yet improvisational approach to the game. This was a guy who applied his very powerful noggin to some truly thoughtful, groundbreaking, avant-garde soccer that changed how things were done. Suddenly, in the middle of a nobody-bothers-to-keep-score pick-up game, I realized I had lived the perfect metaphor for my entire teaching career: re-inventing the Cruyff Turn. Every day I have been improvising, brainstorming and trying to develop engaging ways to get information into the heads of my aspiring culinarians. Lost in the Career Tech Ed wilderness, I know there must be resources, but I haven’t been able to find any high school culinary arts Cruyffs who’ve figured out all the cool ways to do stuff. This summer while investigating Standards Based Grading (thanks to Shawn Cornally and friends Think Thank Thunk: BlueHarvest), I discovered the amazing world of edu-blogging and edu-twitter. Perhaps through the astonishing power of the PLN I can discover some virtual shoulders to stand on.
My hopes are two fold:
1) To place before the interweb community some pertinent details of how I’m currently doing things, resources and materials I enjoy, my personal brand of edu-guerilla tactics/techniques and some stuff that just seems amusing. This will be both a record for me and I hope a resource for others.
2) To seek the freshest advices of other educators, culinarians, footballers, fencers, SBGeeks, physics mavens, math fans and the rest, all here on this Gilligan’s Island of the World Wide Web. Criticisms, witticisms, politely phrased of course, are welcome.
In my travels through the ether, I have found the online voice of CTE to be very elusive and difficult to track down. With that in mind, I’m going to curate as much meaningful and useful CTE content as I can. If you or anyone you know in vocational education, especially culinary arts, has an online presence, please post any info here and I will do my best to follow-up.
Thanks for playing and I look forward to your comments.
RT @TimMorehouse: Congrats to Mariel Zagunis on another Gold Medal and all of Team USA Women's Saber on top-16! Daria Hyla... http://t.c ... 1 week ago
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