Blogging Too Far: Recipes That Don’t Work (with an education moral)

This blog entry looks at why recipes work and don’t work, with a juxtaposition to education and lessons - for why sometimes they work and sometimes they fail badly, and why this may not be our fault at all.

My sister in law just gave me a crepe/pancake cooker and I just made my first batch of Chocolate Pancakes.  As per the included recipe, they did not contain a hint of chocolate.  But they did have a large quantity of salt.

The pancakes were awful. No amount of maple syrup could hide the salt.  The recipe was simply made up and had never been tested.  I was then reminded of a cookbook I helped write once (I was the writer, not the chef).  We were ‘inspired by’ a lot of existing recipes, but as I was to find out, a lot of the recipes published in existing books had also never been tested.  No amount of wishful thinking could ever make the uninspired lump of gunk in front of us look like the yummy food in the photo.  It was our job to experiment with the ingredients to make the recipe work.

I learned a few important things. Firstly, chefs just lend their name to recipe books that other people have written, without ever checking if the recipes work.  Secondly, the cooking equipment in a commercial kitchen is nothing like a normal household oven.  As an example, most restaurants use a steam oven, which is normally too expensive for most household.  There is no way to duplicate this cooking technique in a normal kitchen.  Thirdly, when chefs cook something, they only cook one portion at a time using a recipe with small quantities. To make a family meal, you just can’t multiply everything by four and expect to get the same outcome.  The ingredients no longer react with each other in the same manner with bigger quantities.  In the same way a recipe for 100 servings can’t be cut down to four servings by simply dividing everything by twenty. And finally, my last lesson was that chefs lie their hearts out.  If they have found a recipe for the best mashed potatoes in the world, they will never reveal it in a cook-book.  You can try to replicate a recipe you have tasted at the chef’s restaurant, but you will fail miserably because the recipe is deliberately wrong.  That way you will have to keep going back to their restaurant and will appreciate the skills of the chef, skills which no mere mortal could ever replicate.  One example my chef friend’s menu was his “lemon mashed potato”, which looked yellow but contained no lemon.  But it was delicious.  If someone went home and tried to make mash with lemon, they would get a bitter mess, not the yellow, buttery and cheesy mixture served at the restaurant.

These are of course four metaphors for education and sharing among colleagues. One of my greatest education interests is the difference between individual constructivism and socially negotiated constructivism.  So of course I jump at the chance to buy any book or attend any conference that addresses these concepts.  I remember I once attended a conference with an international book-selling education guru, and I got to ask him a question in front of the whole audience,  “I am interested in what criteria you use to decide when you use individual constructivism and when it’s best to choose socially negotiated constructivism?”  The guru got embarrassed and could only say “I would not know, I have never actually taught students using either technique.”  I was to find out that such answers from ‘experts’ were more common than I would ever expect.

So before jumping on the latest education fad, it is probably best for us to ask ourselves:

1. Is this an idea that has been actually tested and peer assessed using quantitative and qualitative research?

2. Is this an idea that has been developed in an environment similar to my own?

3. Is this an idea that has been adapted for use from another environment or another field, that has been rechecked to ensure it works in an education context?

4. Is this an idea free of any commercial or political agendas that does not require the subscription to a service or the modification of an existing service to meet external influences?

Those seem a bit daunting and far-fetched, but with a bit of thinking time it is easy to see where these cautions become real:

1. Appropriate research: applies to most fads and new ideas.

2. Environment analysis: recognising the source of the idea and the differences between high school and primary school, rural and metropolitan schools, boys and girls etc.

3. Adaptations:  A lot of business practices, software and communication techniques come into schools from backgrounds in medicine, military, accounting and/or business management.  Schools need to analyse these practices first, before blindly accepting their use in education.

4. Truth and bias:  Every idea comes from somewhere and from some agenda. Most of these would be a political agenda that schools have no control over.  But some agendas, including personal career progression, need to be indentified and evaluated.

If we as teachers and educators can recognise these things, we can start to see the poor planning and decision making behind the things we are supposed to do.  And we might even see that no matter what we do, we can be destined to continual failure, because our fundamental ideas come from a place full of mistakes, bias and inappropriate adaptations.   I rarely thought about this in my early career, instead blaming myself for the failures in my classroom.  Instead the reality was that I was being pressured into teaching content and using pedagogies that were never fully tested.

Maybe as teachers we need a mental dialogue that says something like “No, I am not taking the fall for your poorly planned and badly executed policy.”  Next time we’re given a recipe to follow for chocolate pancakes and they fail, we should blame the person who wrote the recipe, not blame ourselves.

Maybe we should be saying that a whole lot more.  I know for a fact that when I wrote policy and made teaching materials for a period of years, I just spat them out with a bit of polishing graphic art and logos that made them look much better than they actually were. They were crap, for two reasons. Firstly, I was never an expert in anything but teaching Grade 5 Social Studies, mostly because I had to teach it so many times.  So when I needed to write policy for high school art, I never had much faith in my own skills.  Secondly, there is never any time or money to get policy checked off by practicing teachers.     For all of the years I worked in the departments of education in various jurisdictions, I realised that the “system” was just people like me, mostly working alone in a bewildering environment, pressured to turn out “output” with very little measurement of its quality.  I also know I promoted myself to a very high international panel for an art curriculum, without ever having any art training, experience or qualifications.  I just wanted to one day get a nice art job, and being a member of that panel would look great on my resume (I think most other people on the panel were the same).

There’s probably a bit too much anarchy in this view, but if I look back to the teachers I most remember working with, I did respect those who analysed what I said, and did not just accept whatever came out of my mouth or what was loaded on my website.  They did not want to fail, and they realised that their failures might actually be because of the decisions and actions of other people they never met.  That sort of thinking sounds like it would come from a very intelligent teacher.