The results are in!

Learning to cook and preparing food may not only enhance engagement, but promotes healthy eating habits, teaching real-life skills that will develop greater independence, self-reliance, and improved health.

Learning to cook improves object and language skills, fine motor skills, sequencing, timing, and multi-tasking, whilst in a group setting can build social participation and a friendship network.

Today I am chatting with Aladdin Watson.                          

Aladdin entered teaching through the Teach for Australia program and now teaches at a small rural high school. He has taught junior and senior Humanities, English, senior Psychology and Careers and is currently the Year 10 Coordinator. 

He credits an innovative school breakfast programme for success in re-engaging students with mainstream education.

I was keen to learn more and asked Aladdin some key questions:

So, what were some of the challenges you faced that stimulated the idea of a breakfast program that really met the kid’s needs?

On my first day at the school, I was handed this programme which had not run before at the school called the Alternative Pathways Program. It was for about eight students in Year 9/10 who were particularly vulnerable and struggled to learn in a mainstream setting due to several challenging behavioural and social-emotional issues. Initially, the program was envisaged as a literacy and numeracy intervention program run very similarly to a normal class, just away from the main school building and in their own small class. However, it soon became apparent that this model of learning was not going to be appropriate for their needs. One of the biggest barriers to their learning (of any style) was that many were either not eating breakfast at home, or not being provided breakfast at home. This made engaging them in class difficult, especially as the breakfast replacement was typically a bag of chips and a large can of energy drink (you can imagine what this did to their learning!). So, with rudimentary resources, the breakfast club was established. We ran it out of small maintenance room. Food was provided from charity services and a spare fridge/microwave was found around the school. Plates/bowls/cutlery etc were either brought in by the kids or bought by me. When a hot breakfast was provided, we had a freestanding hot plate. The food wasn’t the healthiest always, but it was better than cans of soft drink. Toasties were a big hit.  

The opportunity to have breakfast provided us with several benefits: 

1. It created a safe and nurturing environment for the kids to learn and an incentive for them to come to school. This was one aim of the programme, to increase attendance and reduce absenteeism and truancy.  
2. It gave hungry students an opportunity to eat, and not replace this with rubbish or go hungry. 
3. It taught students about table manners, helped them relate to each other (semi-politely) and gave them responsibility over their cleaning and cooking. 
4. It gave me an ‘in’ to teaching them. I’d studied a bit of pre-med/health science at university and learnt that when you eat, your body goes into a state of digest and rest (to be precise, your parasympathetic nervous system is dominant). For most of the day, the students were heightened so I figured this was an opportunity to begin the working day when it was going to be least confrontational, and I could get them to engage with the work less combatively. We did literacy in the mornings which worked well. 

*I should say a large breakfast club was already run at the school, but we created our own smaller version, the logic being we wanted to create a small group dynamic. 

**The breakfast programme was one element of a much bigger programme. We had classes for cooking, gardening, textiles, literacy and numeracy as subjects, that a few other teachers and I ran for the students in the group. 

During Covid, the programme ran remotely with modules being develop for the students to cook at home. This is an example of how the module would work.

Alternative Pathways Program Moving Out of Home Module 1: Cooking

Welcome to Term Two remote learning with Aladdin, Ms Bock and Mr Tilley (+ Captain Hamish!) 

Have you missed school? Well, I hope you have because we miss you guys! – APP Teachers and Cpt Hamish 2 

What will the rest of term look like? 

This term is broken up into 3 modules. Each module lasts 3 weeks.

Packs will be ready to collect from school in week 3, 6 and 9. Some of the work requires submitting content online; other parts of the booklet require you to write in them. When you pick up your packs, you’ll drop off these packs with the hard copy work inside. 

Week 3 – Cooking Module 

What is this module about? Knowing how to cook for yourself is an important life skill. When you move out of home you will have to buy food, budget and cook for yourself. This module will allow you to practice some of these skills. 

Over the next 3 weeks, you are going to prepare, cook, film and serve up 3 different meals. 

1. 1. Preparing and cooking: you will be given 3 recipes and 3 boxes of food (one each week delivered to you) for you to make the dishes.
2. Filming: you must video yourself cooking your meal each week. This includes cutting things up, cooking them and serving them up. You might have to ask for someone to film you on your phone! Ms Bock and Aladdin will upload a video to Facebook to show you what this looks like. Your videos are due on a Friday. Upload them to our Facebook group. 
3. Serving up: you must share the food you make with at least one other person. You can cook for your entire family, or just a sibling or parent. This step is important since the person who eats your food will be scoring and commenting on your food. 
4. Photos: take some photos of yourself with your meal! Be proud. Post them on Fridays on our Facebook group.

What made you think of food as an answer?

I realised my students couldn’t be expected to engage with the work if they were:

 a) starving or b) full of sugar. Basically, I went back to basic principles: Are my students clothed – yes. Are my students fed – not always etc. 

Did you have specific goals for the programme?

The goals evolved. I was in my first year of teaching, so survival was a key personal goal. For the kids, I wanted them to feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to each other, as a group, and to the school. Before they could engage in learning, we needed to improve their connection to school as an institution which had been destroyed for them over the last 10 years. The breakfast programme was hands on too, which was a much-needed foci for the program, to engage in more hands-on learning opportunities.  

How did you know you were getting it right? What changes did you see that made you feel that you were on the right track?

• the ability to finish breakfast club in a set amount of time (i.e., be organised, be on time, clean up quickly).
• the ability to engage with each other in a relatively civil manner (less f and c-bombs).
• to get students talking about themselves and to create a group dynamic.

What were the highlights of the programme for you?

• Expanding the breakfast programme into a cooking programme too – this broadened their numeracy skills (portioning, reading units etc.) and literacy and collaborative skills. 
• Creating a strong group dynamic 
• The students getting into a routine and improving their communication skills towards one another (a small but large goal). 
• Greater self-regulation. 

Did you see any unexpected results? 

• Students began creating a group dynamic where they looked out for each other 
• I’m still particularly close with the remaining students at the school and I’m still their go-to-person for issues of wellbeing/socioemotional assistance. I feel honoured to be an integral part of their school lives and for being able to offer them an alternative view on school and teachers. 

I understand it is a couple of years since you did the breakfast programme. Are you aware of any long-term positive impacts for the students who took part?

Our aim was to try and reengage these students in mainstream education. We achieved mixed results (bearing in mind that this was also mid-COVID in 2020 too). Out of the 8 students, we had 2 move away from the school, 3 go into full-time apprenticeships after the program, and 3 have continued in VCAL (Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning) and are now in Year 12 (although I’m not sure currently how many will make it through unfortunately). I don’t believe any of these students would’ve gone into their workplaces, or stayed in education, if it had not been for our efforts to create this reengagement programme. The breakfast programme component was a key part of this.  

What feedback did you get from other teachers, parents, and caregivers?

• Other teachers: ‘I don’t know how you manage with these students…’
• Teachers in the programme: ‘these kids are wild, but they just want to feel loved and listened to’
• Parents: extremely grateful. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some immense thanks from a number of their parents for the work that I put into their children, when these kids had mostly given up on the education system (and sadly some teachers had given up on them).  

I warmly thank Aladdin for sharing such a positive experience and applaud his innovative approach to building a connection with his students.

The simple joy of teaching someone to cook, brings such a wonderful mix of results. Increased confidence, the ability to plan and shop. Opening eyes to the world of food and tempting tastebuds with wonderful new flavours.

This simple joy of teaching those with a disability to cook, can also deliver these results, but the impact to their lives can be even more lifechanging!

Engage, Empower, Educate, And Support!