Reflection Paper - May 2014

As a part time faculty member turned full time, my thoughts regarding my teaching,
my goals, and my plans are more a continuation of what my past 8 years at GBC
have been with the added lens of permanence. My earlier years at GBC were an
eye opening exposure to the world of teaching culinary labs, demos, and theory
classes. I really felt the need to improve how I was going to approach teaching this
new generation of students as my own experiences as a student were dominated by
the very traditional approach of lecturing to teach. Taking the Instructing Adults
certificate program helped immensely and leads me to firmly believing that all new
hires need at minimum an introductory seminar on the pedagogy of modern and up
to date ways to engage students and facilitate their learning experience. I still feel
that I have more to learn, especially in the chef school realm of demos and labs. I
have shadowed chefs and I am currently collaborating with some chefs to find an
optimal format for the CMDI 2047 demo and lab which is only happening this spring
session. I find that, for myself, I have experienced some challenges in accurately
marking individual students on all things as I am either at one end of the lab or the
other and do not see all the skills being performed, rather just the end result. The
marking rubrics went a long way in taking out the vastly subjective element in the
labs of previous years and the newly installed instructor manuals also help to
balance the subjective teaching I have heard from students and other faculty. I
continue to take PD courses such as Smart Board which tackles new technology that
is coming to the college, and First Aid/CPR to maintain current skills. Curriculum
development is another area I am keen to work on and I have the opportunity this
semester to look at the Culinary Nutrition course with the coordinator and other
chefs, to modify content and to see the academic process that this requires. As this
is an area of future growth for CHCA, I am looking ahead to taking the Food Science
certificate course offered on-line from Guelph University to further advance my own
knowledge of the subject and thus offer more insight when teaching my classes. I
look forward to setting new goals and challenges for myself in the coming years.