Reply To: Voc Talk Café by Après-cours – Food & Tourism

  • Robin Long

    Member
    5 July 2024 at 4:14 pm

    September 18, 2023

    Food and Tourism: Project-based Learning: The Secret is in the Sauce

    Hello everyone!

    Thanks for coming to the Voc Talk Café and if you weren’t able to make it, no worries! You can check out the recording, discussion notes and resources on the Voc Talk Café by Après-cours website page here, and read the session summary below!

    Summary

    PBL is about authentic learning – an underlying principle in VT – but what makes it a bit different is that there can be a different focus on the project that is not in alignment with the industry, but in alignment with what the student needs to learn. Eg focus on quality of language in a document.
    Student cookbook – multi-competency project that involved students creating and standardising recipes for a service menu that they then put into a cookbook that was sold to the restaurant patrons as a souvenir.
    PBL often mentions learning retention, but what was noticeable in this project was student engagement – it was hard, a lot of work, but students were driven to push through the struggle.
    Difficult for the teacher – let go of the end result and focus on the student learning.
    Sounds great, but how do you motivate students to participate in big projects like this?
    In perspective, this project was done at the end of the program and a student -teacher rapport was already established.
    As a teacher, the pre-work is heavy. Everything has to be planned out, a back-up plan established and the learning goals and relationship to competency content have to be very clear to the students. In this case, the student had the possiblity to opt out of the project but still do the competency learning.
    You also have to let go – It isn’t about the teacher’s expectations, but rather about the students self-appropriation of the result. It might be that their vision of the result is different, but as long as the learning goals are met, that is ok.
    Does the fact that it will be shared with the public motivate the students?
    For some yes, others no. It can be a source of aniexity, but accounting for that is part of the teachers plan B, C, D…
    For some teachers, PBL is more comfortable once they have a rapport with the students, for others it isn’t necessary since they frame it out with Universal Design in Learning (UDL) principles.

    Do you have an idea for a Voc Talk Café discussion topic that you would like to discuss with your fellow teachers across the province? Let us know! We can help you set it up! Thanks to all who participated in discussing this very interesting subject, and I look forward to the next session!

    📱👩‍🍳 Robin