Food Day!

Darn it!  Food Day came and went on October 24 this year and I missed the chance to do a blog post about it so I will do one now thinking ahead to next year.  Food Day was launched by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  They are to the processed food industry and the restaurant industy what daylight is to vampires.  They tell the truth about the bad food that is being sold to the American public by food conglomerates and restaurant chains which has led to changes that are good for the health of our nation.  I am for one am a huge advocate for the Center because it educates Americans on making better food choices for the sake of their health.
As I indicated, Food Day was October 24 and should remain that date for years to come so we can plan events in our community to promote healthy eating.  As the website says:
Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life—parents, teachers, and students; health professionals, community organizers, and local officials; chefs, school lunch providers, and eaters of all stripes—to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way. We will work with people around the country to create thousands of events in homes, schools, churches, farmers markets, city halls, and state capitals...Transforming the American diet means changing policies as well as changing individual behavior. Agricultural policies should support small and mid-size sustainable and organic farms—and not pour billions of dollars each year onto huge farms that produce monoculture commodity crops. The Americans—and the immigrants to America—who harvest our food deserve protection from harmful pesticides and poor working conditions. And the "factory farms" that hold millions of chickens, pigs, and cows should be replaced by farms that minimize suffering and avoid the pollution of our water, soil, and air.

It's all connected. The diets we select, the foods we grow, the policies we form, and the impact we have. Find—or create—a Food Day event today. It's time to get real about food and in the following ways:
1.  Reduce diet-related disease by promoting safe, healthy foods.
2.  Support sustainable farms & limit subsidies to big agribusiness

3.  Expand access to food and alleviate hunger

4.  Protect the environment & animals by reforming factory farms

5.  Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids
6.  Support fair conditions for food and farm workers

What am I doing in response?  I writing this blog post!  I promote local farmers in our community.  I have a full share and am able to get produce from the farmer year round due to his safe innovative farming methods, like growing greens during our Indiana winters in a retrofitted hog barn.  I have put him in touch with local restaurants that now feature his produce.  We are working now on developing healthy food products that can be processed on his farm and sold in the community.  Once he is certified I will be using his produce in our student run restaurant which I now teach.

The menu we have put together for the John Purdue Room is healthy with lots of healthy (vegetarian) dishes.  Since making the menu change and promoting it as a project for the students in my sales class the numbers keep growing week in and week out.  If you want to check out our menu and the job the sales class is doing to promote the operation through Facebook type John Purdue Room into the search window at the top of your Facebook page.

If you like the idea of Food Day and doing something in response please share with me by sending an e-mail to mlalopa@fooded.org.  I am happy to post it to the blog to share with others.  If you are vehemently opposed to it and have your reasons we do counterpoints, too!  It is all in the spirit of education!

Course Design and Curriculum Reform

The weather in Atlanta has been gorgeous and the sessions inside the Hilton have been sizzling, too, at the POD Conference.  It is always so invigorating to be amongst those who spend every day at their respective campus working with faculty to be better teachers.

As always there is a session that really has a wow factor and presents a new idea on something I thought I knew very well, which in this case is curriculum.  I attended a session entitled, "Course Design and Curriculum Reform" presented by Edmund Hansen from Northeastern Illinois University.  For once, the session was better than the description as I gained new insights into designing a curriculum that enhances and ensures student learning.  As the presenter said, the session was about how to teach the curriculum and know whether your students have learned it -- based on factual evidence.  He walked us through a matrix that had the following column headings from left to right: Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings (on the part of the student), Learning Outcomes, Common Misconceptions & Barriers (to student learning), Essential Questions, Guiding Concepts, Authentic Performance Tasks, Performance Criteria, and Required Competencies.

It would be next to impossible to explain the content of the workshop so going to recommend the book that I bought from the author at his book signing today for just under $18, entitled, Idea-Based Learning: A Course Design Process to Promote Conceptual Understanding.  It has just hit the market and not even on Amazon yet.  You can get it in paperback and published by Styllus, ISBN 978-1-57922-614-5.  Get yourself a copy, you will not regret it and it will give fresh insights on how to formulate an effective curriculum or revise your current one. If interested in speaking to author, his e-mail is E-Hansen@neiu.edu

Heading to POD!

I am so excited.  I leave on Wednesday for the POD Network Conference in Atlanta.  I am also staying at the same hotel that hosted the eastern ACF regional conference which was near the restaurant that sold me the best seared Ahi Tuna ever, Ray's.  POD supports a network of nearly 1,800 members, who are faculty and teaching assistant developers, faculty, administrators, consultants, and others who perform roles that value teaching and learning in higher education.  I have been a member for over 8 years and have learned so much about teaching and learning by hanging out on the listserv and attending / presenting at the annual conference. 

The majority of those who are members of POD know the teaching and learning literature inside and out and have been an invaluable resource to me as I find ways to be a better teacher.  They know best practices on teaching and learning.  They know the movers and shakers in the field of education and many will be in attendance or invited to speak as keynotes.

I learn so much from those I have come to know over the years at social functions, keynote addresses, publications, and conference sessions.  I will blog the highlights of the conference while in Atlanta.

In the meantime, check out what POD is all about at: http://www.podnetwork.org/index.htm  You can even check out some of my publications in the publications link under Essays on Teaching Excellence.

Take 20 Minutes!

Business Week is still one of my favorite periodicals to read each time it hits my mailbox. There is always cutting edge information on our industry and our profession of “learning.” There was a section in a recent issue on “most viewed talks.” One of the most viewed talks was by Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. As stated in the promo for the talk “Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.”

After viewing the video he indeed gives one pause for thought as to whether at the OK Plateau (I talked about in a previous post) or doing things in class or lab that let enable student’s to apply their creativity in an educational setting.

Here is an application of the talk. In last Wednesday’s lab I returned to see how clean up was going. The students informed me that they had been working with the TA to experiment with espresso machine and created a coffee drink they called “The Turtle.” I asked what “The Turtle” was and they told me the recipe and believed it to be one great tasting coffee drink. I said “I believe you” so let us put it on the menu. There was jubilation all around while I reminded them that in the orientation for the class they were to think of the restaurant lab class as their own business and glad to hear they are taking ownership six weeks into the semester. I then told them I expect Turtle sales be stellar during their next lab because they believed in it.

That is teaching to me! I hope it is the same to you. So stop in our lab on Wednesday and grab a Turtle, or favorite beverage, then kick back and enjoy it while watching a thought-provoking heavily viewed video by Ken Robinson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Rate Your Syllabus!

The syllabus may be one of the most important documents we can prepare as educators.  It is the primary method that students know what the course is about, how it will be taught, how they will be assessed, important policies, and so forth.  I must confess that I have seen plenty of syllabi from other faculty and amazed at how poorly they are written and no wonder the students struggle in the class -- they have no clue as to the instructor's expecations, what they are to learn, and so forth.  Indeed, many syllabi I have reviewed spend the vast majority on how students are to behave in the class when it comes to dress, attitude, attendance, punctuality, cell phone or laptop use in class, cheating, and precisous little on LEARNING.  It is more like Hammurabi's Code of Laws than a syllabus.

So for those who want to see how their syllabus stacks up to a rubric designed to assess one, first visit the following URL. Then go through your syllabus and score it.  Naturally, where a criterion has a ranking of 1, or perhaps  2, then make necessary corrections.  The rubric has such criteria as syllabus heading, learning outcomes, instructional strategies, and more.  As my friends in the UK would say, "give it a go!"  Your students will appreciate it for sure and be far less confused as to what it is they are to learn from your teaching. 
The URL with the rubric is found at:
http://www.fsc.edu/extended/documents/Rubric-evaluatingsyllabi1-5-06final.doc