Thursday, April 19, 2012

TeamLEAD at Duke Medical School

It is interesting to me that culinary program after culinary program has the same cookie cutter approach to preparing students (with slight variations) to be chefs and all claim to be the best -- whatever that means -- because there are no measurements other than accreditation to determine what consitutes "the best culinary program" at the end of the day.  When will someone take a bold new approach to educating chefs regardless of accreditation rules and regulations and make a change for the better?

For goodness sake, we are teaching kids to cook food so why can't we find new ways to teach culinary arts and hospitality management so that the way we teach is more interesting, engaging and effective for the students?  I can speak for myself on this, we are constantly reinventing our approach to teaching students in our foodservice lab and each new change brings about a better educated, invigorated and engaged student.  Excitement, energy and education abound in the lab because we ask ourselves every day how we can make the experience better and invite students in on the conversation because they have to spend their day learning in the environment we have created so why not let them have their say!

Compare what many are doing in culinary arts with TeamLEAD at Duke University which is teaching students to be doctor's!  Here is a blurb about what it is they say they are doing:
This is a video showcasing the TeamLEAD curriculum at Duke-NUS. We believe medical education is more than just memorizing facts; more importantly, it should critically examine facts and build creative thinking skills. To this end, we use an innovative yet rigorous team-based learning platform called TeamLEAD. TeamLEAD -- which stands for Learn, Engage and Develop -- describes how our students and faculty work and exemplifies the innovative spirit of our school.


Watch the video if you have 9 minutes and feel good about yourself if doing anything in your class or lab remotely close to what Duke is doing to produce doctors.  If not, perhaps it is time to reenginer the approach being taken to prepare the next generation of chefs who will need to log 10,000 hours to be truly great chefs (read Outliers) or have we forgotten to tell them that as we accept their tuition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlVPLYGdBLg&feature=youtu.be
When all is said and done, our limits are self imposed, so when is the time to make changes that will better prepare the next generation of chefs-in-wating.

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