Flash back to cooking
How did I use cooking as a metaphor for teaching?
In this post I provide a stroll down memory lane. Readers who have been around Special Education Today for a few years will recall a couple of times when I’ve used cooking as a metaphor to discuss what I consider important ideas about teaching.
Example 1: Cooking up behavior teaching
On 6 August 2021, I published “John's Kitchen: Making omlettes (and teaching behavior): How is cooking analogous to teaching?” That post has been sitting there in the archives for (what) four and a half years. It’s been viewed 32 times…sigh.
In the post I argued that behavior is actually important subject matter and educators should, therefore, engage in planned teaching of it. I provided a recipe for teaching behavior, and I embedded video of teaching routines illustrating how to teach behavior. Oh! And I showed evidence about the benefits of those sorts of teaching activities.
So, I pulled that antique post out from behind the paywall for the benefit of new readers. The link in the second paragraph will take you to it.
Example 2: Cooking up reading instruction
IN an earlier example of cooking as a metaphor, I wrote about making biscuits. In a post entitled “John's Kitchen: Making biscuits (and teaching reading): How is cooking like teaching early reading?” I explained that in the big picture, making biscuits is pretty quick and easy. One just puts ingredients (flour, shortening, a rising agent, salt, and milk) into a bowl, mixes them all together, rolls out the dough…etc.
Making biscuits is just like teaching decoding. One just gives kids some letter-sound equivalences, does some blending practice, gets kids to sound out words, and … WAIT! Let’s ask some questions about that simple analogy. What phoneme-grapheme correspondences should we teach? In what order should we teach them? Exactly how do we promote skill in blending? Are some ways of teaching blending better than others? How much time should we spend on onset-rhyme patterns?
In other words, there are probably circa 1,000,000 ways to teach decoding, but only a few of the recipes are going to lead to hot, flakey, yummy biscuits….err, uhm… I mean, successful readers.
I removed the paywall for this post about biscuits , too. Everyone will be able to read the antique post.
Cook up some good stuff for your kids!