The Recipe
John Zola
johnzola.com
This is a “meaning making” activity that can also serve as a formative or performance assessment. It provides an opportunity for students, in small groups, to review content and then present it in a format that is very easy to grade with the accompanying rubric!
In this activity, students are asked to take course content and turn it into a “recipe” that includes ingredients and procedures. As in a recipe for cooking, students have to combine specific quantities of “things” (ingredients) in a prescribed set of steps (procedures.) The student assignment sheet explains the difference between ingredients and procedures in this way:
•INGREDIENTS: A recipe has a coherent set of ingredients that, together, make up a particular dish. These ingredients are always listed with specific amounts. Thus, a recipe for bread has a particular amount of yeast, sugar, water, and flour. The amounts are in proportion to each other. When making bread, for example, a relatively small amount of yeast is combined with a relatively large amount of flour. Spices are often included in amounts that are sufficient to provide specific tastes without overpowering other ingredients. Your recipe must include ALL of the ingredients that help you craft a recipe that demonstrates your understanding of the assigned content.
PROCEDURE: Once the ingredients have been identified, a recipe includes a very carefully outlined procedure. Sometimes, there are "procedures within procedures" such as in the making of bread. One recipe for making bread has a series of steps for "activating" the yeast before it is added to the dry ingredients. Regardless, your recipe must include a logical series of steps that take the ingredients and "manipulates" them to create the final product. When thinking about procedures, there are a number of terms that are useful because they indicate different ways of working with ingredients. Some verbs indicate a gentle combination (fold, sift, incorporate) while other procedures are more aggressive (knead, whisk, crush.) Some things MUST happen before others--the clearest examples are that an oven must be pre-heated before baking or ingredients must be combined before they are baked!
Several elements of these explanations are of particular importance. First, the list of ingredients must be sufficiently comprehensive to demonstrate student understanding of all the factors that are needed to complete the intended “dish.” Second, there need to be quantities for ingredients. This shows student understanding of the relative importance of different items in the recipe. Third, the procedures need to show an understanding of chronological aspects, as well as an understanding that not everything always happens in a linear fashion.
This format lends itself to a wide range of content. Examples include:
•a recipe for a Presidential Campaign
•a recipe for a healthy lifestyle
•a recipe for totalitarianism
•a recipe for a solution to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses
•a recipe for making friends
This activity can be done with or without notes. With notes, it’s an engaging way of reviewing content and manipulating it into a different format. Without notes, it becomes a performance assessment.
If students are unfamiliar with cooking and recipes, an alternative format is to create “Ikea” style instructions for assembling the desired content. What are they assembling? What “parts” are included in the package and how many of each? In what order are these parts assembled? Do some have to be assembled before being added to something else? The process is the same as a recipe, but this might be more familiar for some students. In fact, Lego model building instructions could be the format!
Examples of recipe assignments, exemplars of student work, and a suggested rubric for evaluating recipes can all be found at johnzola.com
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