Recipes and Lesson Plans: Process and Practice

Fitness and cooking are the interests I most often use as analogies when I work with new teachers. Nothing original there, I admit. It’s almost too easy to compare interval training as a building block for faster race times with 10-minute free-writes to help develop students’ writing stamina. Or how about bread-baking as an analogy for supporting the development of young readers? Proofing, kneading, punching down before a second rise—they’re all parallels to pre-assessment, guided practice, and setting new goals when another has been achieved.

I love to peruse my favorite magazine for all things kitchen, Cook’s Illustrated, and I’m even more convinced about the close connection between successful cooking and successful teaching. Lesson plans are like recipes in many ways, but most essentially, in the role that process needs to play in both.

If you’ve never read an article in Cook’s Illustrated, then here’s a snapshot of their approach. Writers, who are accomplished chefs working in the test kitchens at the Cook’s Illustrated New England headquarters, write in great detail about how they arrived at the “perfect” version of a dish. They start with the stone in their shoe, something about a finished product or dish that rubbed them the wrong way: a carbonara sauce that didn’t coat a pasta strand consistently; a snickerdoodle that was too chalky. The rest of the article describes how they shook that pebble out of their Birkenstocks.

With painstaking notes, they write about each small adjustment they made to a recipe and how, more often than not, that adjustment fixed one thing but ruined another—an extra egg in the carbonara made the sauce stick, but too well. The pasta was gloppy. Adding more cream? The sauce was too rich and overpowered the pancetta bits. More pancetta? The dish was too salty. Finally, and to the reader’s great relief, the cook realizes that adding another two tablespoons of hot pasta water to the sauce keeps the flavor balanced and the grip factor on the pasta strands sufficiently tight. Whew. And the snickerdoodle problem? Less cream of tartar, a quarter cup of shortening added with the butter, an oven temperature 25 degrees hotter, and the cookies baked up dense and chewy. 

See what I mean? People who care about cooking and baking see their work as a process. Which is how I got to thinking about the way skilled teachers work with lesson plans. There is a basic truth I want to illuminate for the new teachers I work with: Most lessons, like most recipes, will fall short in some way. Expect it. And then do something about it. 

With this in mind, I wondered, What if, in one of our PLC meetings with first-year teachers, we discussed a lesson as a process, not a finished product? Using the Cook’s Illustrated approach, we could start with what wasn’t working in a lesson we taught, discuss ideas for improving the problem, try it out, and then bring the results back to the group for further study.

My experience with new teachers tells me that they need permission, and then coaching and supportive spaces to experiment with their lessons, to embrace the idea that teaching is a process.

So, at the start of the new year, when teachers’ energy is up and their senses of humor are sharp, I’m going to try a lesson study session in the spirit of a Cook’s Illustrated article. I’ll prepare the first piece to see how well it works, and my writing will follow this template:

Here is the example I will share.

Stone: My fifth graders’ conversations about books initially improved with the use of literature circle roles, but lately, their talk has turned stale and formulaic.

Evidence: They take their sweet time gathering in their circles, bringing along halfhearted notes that look like they were written on a bumpy bus ride to school, they rely too much on the discussion director’s summary to fill up the time, and the sentence starters that at first prompted insightful comments are now used in a perfunctory way. For example, "If I compared this character to an animal, he or she would be . . . because . . ." became, “If I compared Ariana to an animal, she would be a turtle because she’s shy. Next!”

My Ideal: Students consistently come to their circles enthusiastically, conversation is animated, and they’re listening carefully to each other and building on their peers’ responses. They’re bummed when time runs out.

Adjustment 1: Old habits die hard. I changed up a few roles to inject creativity into the discussion. In place of the connector, one person was in charge of developing a playlist that reflected the personality, actions, and likes and dislikes of a book’s main character. Instead of being the literary luminary, another person was tasked with writing an obituary for a character in the book. The artful artist role went high-tech, with one reader developing a prototype of a web page that related to a person or place in the text. For a while, this tweak worked, although there was some conflict around "favorite" roles. And quickly I realized that the person having the most fun was me, because I was getting the pleasure of doing the creative work. 

Adjustment 2: Lose the roles. I realized that literature-circle roles are scaffolds intended to get readers acclimated to the ways more experienced readers talk about their reading. Eventually, the scaffolds should fall away—when’s the last time I was in a book group where I had a role to complete before we met? It was January, and my students had been using the lit circle roles for three months. It was time to release them from that constraint and see what happened.

What happened? I explained to my students that we were going to try less structured book discussions. They cheered. I didn’t release complete control, because I still wanted to be sure students prepped for their discussions, and I wanted something to collect and review. In place of the standard literature-circle roles, I gave everyone a sheet of paper divided into four quadrants with the same framework in each:

This approach reinvigorated reading groups, although they had to troubleshoot some issues that cropped up. Early on, for instance, some readers chose a passage to discuss, but not a reason. When this happened, other students took control, naming a possible reason for choosing the passage, and thus leaving their peer without a strong voice in the conversation.  We got around this by giving the whole class three quiet writing minutes before reading groups started to make sure their quadrant was completely filled in.

Another problem that came up was when two students chose the same, or nearly the same, topic to discuss. At first, some kids were bent out of shape, until they realized that although the topic might be the same, the reason for choosing it often wasn’t. This was compelling. We spent some time playing around with an activity called The Last Word. I gave groups of students a common passage to read silently, and then each person wrote about his her reaction. We took turns sharing what we wrote, and again, students realized that readers are affected by powerful writing for different reasons.

Where am I now? I’m thinking about analysis and assessment. Students turned in their response sheets when all four quadrants were complete. I spent some time doing a content analysis and noticed that, magically, the reasons students chose to discuss a topic from their reading mapped onto the original literature-circle roles. Someone chose a passage because of the writer’s beautiful use of language and how it created a vivid image in the reader’s mind (literary luminary); someone else wanted to discuss how a character reminded her of a character in another book (connector); another person picked a passage because he didn’t understand an allusion (questioner). Next year, I want to turn over this content analysis to my students to see if they recognize that there are predictable categories that readers’ conversations fit in—and maybe they’ll discover new ones that I overlooked.

And with assessment, I want to formalize my review of students’ quadrant work by noting the variety (or lack thereof) of their reasons for bringing a topic to their reading group. In a perfect world, readers weave in and out of noticing well-written passages, making connections, and asking questions. In the real world, young readers often get into a rut, always making connections or pointing out nice writing—or they simply need instructional support to see more possibilities for discussion topics.

It is likely that this reflection-revision-reteaching cycle won’t conclude with the tweak that solved everything: unlike working with recipes, lesson plans never have a one-size-fits-all solution. A whole class of kids can’t be coaxed to a photo finish with an extra measure of broth, a dash of salt, a squeeze of lemon to brighten the flavors. But, with a habit of thinking that sees lessons as works in progress, teachers can get more students to the finish line successfully.