Maybe it’s because I like spend so much time in the kitchen that I often find myself relating what happens in the classroom to the kitchen. It seems natural enough. Both venues are social situations with strong ties to our cultural pasts. Both involve some story telling (well, maybe that’s more a comment on my family and friends), and require that raw materials be converted to more digestible forms. Other parallels between food and learning stand out as well. For instance:
Time to Eat Does Not Equal Time to Prepare.
Often a meal, like a lecture or presentation, can take a week to prepare and minutes to consume. This is apt to be more gratifying to the teacher than to the serious chef, but in either case the time and trouble to the finished product may go unnoticed or unconsidered. Development managers usually have some conversion factors at hand for how many hours go into making an hour of instruction. (Does anybody know where these numbers come from and whether they are accurate or, more to the point, self fulfilling?) I don’t think that I’ve ever been asked how long it took to develop a presentation (or make a lasagna) and it really doesn’t matter. The object of the endeavor is really about something else and any good teacher (or cook) is generally pleased when the lesson (or the lasagna) is gobbled up with wild abandon and the student (or diner) returns for seconds and thirds.
Timing Matters.
A common feature on the training development landscape are instructional designers who treat course contents like ingredients, but with little or no concern for quantity or treatment. Frankly, I think it might come from the fact that many people who design training never actually teach. An example goes something like this: “We need to teach the seven layer OSI Model for TCP/IP. Period.” To my ear this is like saying “We need onion.” It doesn’t specify how much onion or how we should treat the onion, just that we need onion. Do we sauté the onion until it’s translucent, nicely browned or darkly caramelized? When do we add it? Even a little time in front of a class will teach you that when a topic is brought up for discussion and how long is spent on it are crucial to establishing how engaging the learning process is. The successful instructional designer will know the audience well enough to know how much for how long. There is always a temptation to belabor points because you think they are important (or rigorous) or perhaps because they are your favorite topics and make you sound impressive. Don’t do it! I love garlic, lemon and peppers but I have to admit that they are sometimes best used as condiments and might not be palatable when eaten raw or overcooked.
Cook for All the Senses.
In the kitchen an inspired cook will try to offer a balanced palette of sensory experiences to the diner. That is, a dish will include an interesting mixture or color, texture, aroma and flavors.
The instructional designer or instructor is faced with a similar challenge. Cooking for all the senses is akin to “design for all learning styles.” Just as engaging all or most senses in a dish tends to broaden the appeal of the dish and encourage more sensory involvement, so teaching to multiple learning styles can stimulate a more complete involvement by the learner and allow more people of different types to benefit from the training. It is for this reason that whenever possible ideas should be “pitched” to varied learning styles even though in corporate or professional training the bias of the audience may be pronounced.
Use Quality Ingredients.
I have recently started to use more organic foods in cooking, not because I am a health freak but because I’ve noticed an improvement in taste. Really great ingredients are a little more expensive and generally a little harder to find, but all things considered they make a distinct improvement. Similarly, in producing training materials use the best components and designs that time and money can bear. Look for or create better, clearer, more apt graphics. Produce and edit audio to make it clearer and easier to listen to. Design pages to flow and present information in a way that is easy on the eye. Select colors and fonts to illustrate the message and facilitate the learning process.
In many cases you will suffer the slings and arrows of outraged instructional designers and managers who will chide you for spending too much time (and money) on “eye candy” that “doesn’t really aid the learning process.” Don’t give in. Design does matter. Well designed tools assist in their application. They make the job easier. Besides being more efficient at communicating the points of the instruction, top-notch design materials tell users (the students) that they matter, that the endeavor is worthwhile, and that the content (the message) is important. A lot is communicated non-verbally in a training situation. Instructional designers, trainers, and production staff need to maintain high standards for the quality of their work even if it means learning new production skills (God forbid!) or going to other people for help. Be careful: “You are what you eat” might well be a metaphor for the learning process.
Introduce new (strange) foods in the company of old (familiar) ones.
I’ve noticed that whenever you want to introduce a reluctant diner to a new (and possibly odd) food, it’s a good idea to present the new food in the company of one or two familiar ones. The familiar foods seem to defuse the danger of the new food and lower the perceived risk. The same seems to be true of ideas. Difficult to grasp nonintuitive concepts are easier to get across when they are prefaced (or surrounded) by already-known or easier to accept notions. This isn’t just linearly building a logical path to a new idea. It’s more akin to a scaffold that gets you to the new idea. Consider an example: the square root of minus one (or “i” in mathematics).
Usually by the time a person gets to wrestling with the square root of negative one (i), the notion of a “negative” number is pretty well accepted and established. A common representation of a negative number is direction, that is, the sign of the number refers to whether a transaction moves positively, increasing in value, or negatively, decreasing in value, along the number line. The notion of debt is often used in this context as an example of the utility of negative numbers in real life even though the physical reality of negative numbers might be suspect.
Once negative numbers are comfortably in place the imaginary number “i” can enter the stage. Equated to the square root of -1 an immediate revulsion is almost universally present. What two transactions/operations can be undertaken to yield -1? As it turns out, just as the sign of the number implies direction the relationship that describes x•x=-1 is rotation. Kalid Azad at BetterExplained.com has a nice discussion and illustration showing this.
Notice how in the development of the explanation to “What’s the meaning of the square root of minus one?” it is the relationship between ideas that is key. Moving to a new and difficult concept through an old and comfortable one makes the job a lot easier and probably results in a more memorable experience as well for the learner. Getting back to food for a moment, is this why people who serve insects often cover them in chocolate?
