In Bill Buford’s Heat, the author quits his job at The New Yorker to work as a kitchen slave at Babbo, Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant.  It’s a crazy experience where Buford learns that there is much more to cooking than any book or TV show could ever offer an amateur like him.  When he attempts to recreate dishes from Babbo’s kitchen, he finds that for all the precision and food science the cookbook claims to have, he can’t get the home version to taste like Babbo itself.

I wonder if we do the same thing with best practices.  Researchers (or administrators, or curriculum coordinators) enter a class looking for what makes a great teacher tick.  They write down their observations, thereby legitimizing them, and other experts or bosses proclaim what the teacher does as “best practices.”  But can other professionals recreate what happened in the original kitchen?

What really confounds Buford is that the kitchen staff never measures a single ingredient–recipes take a pinch of this or a handful of that.  This is particularly frustrating when he attempts to make polenta, a deceptively simple food.  Polenta takes three things: cornmeal, water, and time.  But how much of each?  Every set of instructions–even the ones on the bag–is misleading.  “It’s not so much water and so much polenta and so much time,” Buford writes, “but water and polenta and time, in whatever quantities it takes, until the dish is ready, which is never forty minutes but as long as three hours.”  Apparently polenta doesn’t cook itself quickly, and it requires effort unique to a given situation.  Just like true teaching and learning?

While certain principles and methods may arise from a great classroom and be transferable elsewhere, what made magic happen can never be duplicated as accurately as others would like.  The magic comes when you add yourself.  As teachers, we can borrow best practices all we want, but sooner or later, we have to be ourselves.  Our comfort with that inevitability may be a major determinant of our success in the classroom.  We can’t just ask what we’re doing; we must also ask how we can make it our own.

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