What we do as educators is paramount to building foundations and setting the stage for skill development, understanding the why and how, and developing a deep understanding of process. All these educational elements will fall short without experiences to bring everything into perspective. An important part of our work is to weave experiences into these foundations, making them real, and leading students to a deeper level of real understanding. Of course, every program includes experiences of some type, but are they front and center? Are experiences viewed as essential to learning and how integrated are they throughout every aspect of a curriculum? Let’s look at the breadth of possibilities:

Storytelling – a path to understanding
Novels and movies play an important part in our lives as do those generational stories passed down from great grandparents to you. People love a good story and there are limitless ones from the archives of chefs and restaurateurs. Bring them into your classroom to emphasize the importance of a style of cooking, creation of a restaurant concept, or to reiterate how teams work toward a common goal. As psychologist Jerome Bruner stated, “People remember stories 22 times better than facts alone.” Stories are a path toward understanding. Click here for a previous Think Tank article discussing how storytelling builds a learning environment. 

Share your personal experiences
Your credibility in the classroom and your real value to the learning experience is most apparent when you share how a topic impacted your life, work and success. Make it real by sharing what you have experienced.

Bring in case studies
As promoted through the Harvard Business School method – case studies provide a means of bringing the experiences of others to the table for us to dissect, assess and learn from. Study other restaurants, companies, chefs, managers, and leaders for examples that can vividly portray the topic being addressed in your class.

Create scenarios
Case studies can lead to “what If” scenarios and problem solving. Scenario planning is one of the best ways to teach Murphy’s Law, if something is left to go wrong, it likely will. Preparing for the unknown can bring comfort and confidence with the knowledge that an obstacle can be viewed as an opportunity.

Force problem-solving
Another way to bring experiences to the classroom is to force challenges to help keep students focused and ready to find solutions. It may seem cruel, but I have walked through the kitchen turning up ovens or shutting them off to force students to always pay attention to the tools they use. Plan a menu for your student-run restaurant and at the last minute remove an essential ingredient from the mix to see how they respond. Pull a member away from a student team and force them to communicate and find a way to reach the expected outcomes.

Essential field trips
Whenever you can make students’ learning processes real, take the opportunity to do so. Visit farms and have students spend a few hours working in the fields, tour a meat processing plant to help them appreciate the animal and its sacrifice, visit a prime vendors distribution center, spend time at the docks watching fishermen bring in their catch, or visit busy restaurants and arrange for observation of the meal service orchestration on the line.

Daily repetition – create a live kitchen environment
Find ways in the curriculum to make it real. A student will never learn how to properly make a stock unless a stock is made every day they are in the kitchen. They will never grasp how to fabricate a chicken or fillet a round or flat fish unless they are able to do this multiple times. Knife cuts only become second nature when the student is charged with dicing 50# of onions or turning 200 perfect tourne potatoes. Work with your college foodservice to provide cut vegetables or break down whole chickens for one of their entrees. There is always a way to build repetition into your lessons.

Bring the industry to the student
Invite guest chefs for talks and demonstrations. Ask the chefs to work alongside students in a lab to offer their input and advice and show by example how they would expect them to work.

Bring the student to the industry
Plan for students (outside of internship or externship) to observe at quality restaurants or pitch in as a stagiaire just to get a feel for the way it works. Bring them outside the bubble of a classroom and give them a taste of how it works or sometimes doesn’t. Never allow a student to graduate and say, “I had no idea it would be like this.”

Create a sense of urgency
One of the points chefs make about culinary students is their lack of a sense of urgency. Time is money and there is never enough of either in the restaurant business. Cooks need to be accurate, consistent, and FAST. They need to be great at multi-tasking and this is developed when you create an experiential environment that demands it.

Let outcomes be the real test
Push aside the dependence on tests and quizzes to determine whether a student is learning. Let them SHOW you what they know, put pressure on them, have high expectations, don’t give in to excuses. They must be able to consistently produce high-quality results at reasonable speed and dexterity. You must establish this expectation in your classes. This is why they will be hired by quality restaurants and find a level of success throughout their careers. This is also how your program will be judged by future students, alumni, and the chefs who will hire them.

Internships/externships
This part of your curriculum is as important as anything else and thus requires serious effort on the part of the program administrator, experience coordinators, properties on your approved list, and students. Train the trainer is essential – don’t ever assume a restaurant or chef (regardless of their prominence and expertise) is able to complement your teaching. You need to show them how. Matching a student to a site should include aligning both with their specific needs. Thus, it is imperative the match be well thought out with objectives in mind. Finally, know every stakeholder should benefit from the internship/externship: the school, program, restaurant, restaurant chef, and student. Invest the time in doing it right and this can be the spark that starts a student’s career in the right direction.

This is food for thought as you close out another rewarding year and begin the process of planning for the fall.

PLAN BETTER – TRAIN HARDER

Paul Sorgule, MS, AAC, president of Harvest America Ventures, a mobile restaurant incubator based in Saranac Lake, N.Y., is the former vice president of New England Culinary Institute and a former dean at Paul Smith’s College. Contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..