"Iron Chef" style learning

"Iron Chef" style learning

This article reports on an example of interactivity through "Iron Chef" style learning.

Although these articles are written under the title of “Presentation Skills Examiner,” it has long been this Examiner’s opinion that the best presentations are those where the trainees, students, or attendees discover their own knowledge.

When you say it, you own it. But when they say it, they own it. Accordingly, effective presentations should set up situations where the trainees, students, and attendees “discover” and then share their knowledge with the teacher, trainer, or speaker.

It sounds simple, but can be difficult to set up in practice. When a brilliant example of a situation ready-made for telling is instead turned into an example of doing, I like to highlight it.

Recently, the Boulder Valley School District had a dilemma. Lunch menus—never considered crowd pleasers—needed an update. Menu items must meet U.S. Department of Agriculture's school-lunch nutrition guidelines, cost $1.25 per plate, and be easy to recreate for thousands of students. Those specs can, of course, lead to some unappetizing dishes.

The usual approach would have been for the cooking or nutrition staff to create new items. Instead, Boulder Valley School District placed the students in charge via an Iron Chef contest.

Student teams were invited to submit recipes. Finalists were selected and met and cooked in an Iron Chef style competition. The finalist entries included Aztec soup with chips with a cheese steak, mango chicken wrap with a granola and yogurt parfait, sloppy joes with a side of apple-jicama slaw, and a veggie pesto pizza.

When the contest was over, a new dish—fully “sanctioned” by student participation—was selected for the menu. The winner ... sloppy joes.

Wow. If the nutrition staff can create such a dynamic experience over a lunch menu, imagine what we trainers, teachers, and speakers can do to teach our concepts. Surely learning can be more engaging than cafeteria lunch menu creation.

Lenn Millbower, the Learnertainment® Trainer and former Disney training leader, helps trainers, teachers, and speakers keep their learners awake so the learning can take through one-on-one coaching, keynotes and seminars, open enrollment workshops, instructional design consulting, and his published works. He is a member of the GPS Consortium.