Training Chefs or Training Cooks: Thoughts on Professional Development
What is the difference between a cook and a chef? The dictionary defines a cook as “a person who prepares and cooks food, especially as a job or in a specified way.” A chef on the other hand, is someone that is “the chief cook, especially in a restaurant or hotel, usually responsible for planning menus, ordering foodstuffs, overseeing food preparation, and supervising the kitchen staff.” When I think of a chef I think of someone like this:
I see a chef as someone that understands how the flavors of food interact. How an entire meal, each part of it, from the beginning to end, becomes an experience. Which wine goes with which food, how flavors mingle. Someone who is paid to think of an entire menu from appetizer to dessert.
When I think of chefs I think of words like creativity, unique, inventive.
When I think of cooks, I think more of a technician, someone who puts together food that someone else has already figured out. Think of a cook at a place like Applebee’s or Denny’s: They don’t create new foods, they simply put together the food in order that someone else, a chef, at some corporate headquarters put together.
When I think of a cook, I think of someone like this:
When I think of a cook, I think of words like mechanical, automatic, robotic.
I was thinking about the differences between a chef and cook the other day when we were in a meeting discussing professional development for teachers. The discussion focused on what would make our district’s professional development more meaningful. Should it be more focused? Should it be more in depth? Should we follow the guidelines of the Learning Forward , an organization I have spoken of in previous entries.
Maybe I was hungry. Maybe my blood sugar was low. But I couldn’t help think that no matter how good the professional development is, if we are not making educational chefs out of our teachers, if we are just asking them to be educational cooks, then no amount or quality of inservice is going to be worthwhile.
Professional development has to be structured n such a way that educators at all levels begin to be chefs: innovative, inventive, creative, unique. Teach the teachers to be that way, and you will get students that are that way.
If our expectation is that teachers will merely be technicians of teaching that they are mechanical, automatic, robotic then we will get mechanical, automatic, robotic students, something that is totally out of synch now with what we want from our 21st Century learners.
EdSurge recent reported on “How Teachers are Learning: Professional Development Remix. That report, which highlighted several important new PD tools that are available right now from free to paid is a nice summary of there PD learning cycle which includes:
Engaging: "These tools enable teachers to join groups, ask questions and share resources. Most tools that allow educators to engage also include a “Learn” component, such as webinars, online courses, and modules.”
Learning: “These are content-rich tools presented in a variety of ways including online courses, webinars or self-paced modules. Some of these tools also provide “Support” capabilities that help teachers implement skills and ideas.”
Supporting: “These tools help educators connect and share their practice with experienced mentors for feedback and coaching. Some tools in the “Support” category allow teachers to also “Engage” with their peers, as well as to “Measure” their learning.”
Measuring: “These tools are usually associated with some form of collecting data on a teacher’s practice. They provide some way to measure a teacher’s growth or progress in adopting new practices or acquiring new skills.”
Unfortunately, nowhere in that nicely done report do the authors look at whether or not the product teaches creativity, self thought, independent exploration, all the things needed to make a cook a chef.
Even the literature overlooks what I think is the obvious: To make PD effective, you have to make the learner a learner.
The 2010 Department of Education’s National Ed Tech Plan listed the top seven attributes of effective PD:
Relate to teachers’ content areas;
Be consistent with technology goals in the district;
Allow for active engagement with content;
Be tailored to different levels of teachers’ knowledge, skill, and interest;
Include follow-up activities.
I suppose one could make the case that creativity could be squeezed into any of those seven, but lets face it: In a time crunch, no one is looking for creativity in PD.
So I want to throw down a challenge to all the professional development organizations and all the professional developers out there doing work this summer: Ask yourselves these questions before you present your PD:
Do teachers have the ability to create something in this PD that is not canned?
Can educators make the connection between the PD and what they teach? If so, how can they demonstrate that connection to you?
Can your PD be connected to other PD that they have received, ESPECIALLY if it was not done by you? Are they able to make connections?
Are the teachers in your sessions free to question you? Are you willing to take criticism?
Paula Scher once said “We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera. You are a mashup of what you let into your life.”
Teachers, in the classroom, are a mashup of all the PD and training they have received over the years. If we ignore the creative side, if we do not allow them to be creative during PD, then we squander a great opportunity for them to mash creativity into their lessons with there students. If we do not allow them to be chefs in our PD, they won’t allow their students to be chefs either. And we will continue to make generation and generation of cooks.
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