Inquiry 2022 - Year 9 Food Tech - Trying to get engagement - Take 2

 At the beginning of the month, I started trying to get more engagement from my Year 9 Food Tech class by giving them choice of what to cook. Blog post here

To be honest, this did not really work very well.  They were still floating around the kitchen being annoying and generally getting in trouble.

The next thing that I have tried is making laminated recipe cards for each kitchen so they don't have to have their chrome books in the kitchen to be able to see the recipe. So far I have made ones for burgers where I included pictures of the equipment on the back and Mac n Cheese, with the method on the back.

This week, I tried to get the students to make them selves job lists using the method. They have three people in their teams on the kitchen so they had to write three lists of jobs on Friday ready for the practical lesson making brownies today. This was not much of a success. There was not enough detail in their lists as they did not break down the method into small enough steps. I decided to make their recipe cards for this week with an example job list on the back so they can see how much detail is needed.

What I also did differently today was show them the WHOLE process at the start instead of calling them back for each step. When I have done it step by step previously, this class has been difficult to focus on what I was telling them and not all of them could come round as they were in the middle of something. It caused more trouble than it solved to be honest.  Today, I had them all together focussing on the whole process and they then went away with their job lists and got on with it. The talk was really good, very work related and the team work in the kitchen was MUCH better. They all knew what to do and what each team member needed to do while other things were going on.

We shall see if this continues to work as a process with this class but I was very pleased with them today.