This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 53 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, I'm going to talk with Matt Vaudry and John Stevens

about how you can approach your teaching like a master chef.

If you've been looking for a boost of inspiration lately,

something to help you engage students deeply and make your teaching fun again,

then I have just the book for you. It's called the Classroom Chef and it was written by two

California educators, Matt Vaudry and John Stevens. The premise of the book is this,

if we want our lessons to have a long-lasting impact on our students, if we want to make our

content really relevant to them, we need to design our instruction the way a chef orchestrates

a good meal. Rather than giving in to the educational equivalent of processed food,

we could be putting more thought into preparing our lessons from the appetizer all the way to

dessert. Just like with cooking, teaching well is hard and like any accomplished chef,

we will only get really good at it if we take risks, if we experiment, if we're willing to fall

flat on our faces. In the book, Stevens and Vaudry show us how they learn to do this in their

math classes. They walk us through lessons like Mollet Ratio, where students discover the concept

of ratios by trying to determine which haircut is more Mollety. And Barbie's Appline, a lesson on

the distance formula that challenges students to design the most fun zip line for a Barbie while

also keeping her safe. Although all the examples are from math and math teachers are absolutely

going to love this book. It's easy to imagine how the same kinds of lessons could be prepared in

any subject area. Non-math teachers who skip this book will really be missing something special.

So today we're going to talk with John and Matt about the book and about how teachers who find

it tough to get students interested in their content can start to do things differently.

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