Best Practices in Teaching Commercial Cooking: Input to Pupils' Learning to Cook as Life Skill

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Cooking, as a life skill, is an important contributor to pupils developing healthy lifestyles, while studying food as an academic subject can provide motivation and challenge, support the development of higher order thinking skills and develop pupils' understanding of scientific concepts. In the Department of Education (Department of Education), cooking is one of the specializations offered from Grades 7 to 12. In Senior High School, it is one of the specializations that will offer its students opportunities to join the workforce once they graduated from the program. Hence, the researcher, as one of the teachers of the SHS program specializing in commercial cooking, aimed to find out the best practices in teaching commercial cooking to teach cooking as a life skill.

METHODS

This study used the descriptive quantitative research design used for the appropriateness to the nature of the study. The respondents were the 25 teachers who are handling Commercial Cooking in the Senior High School in Batangas Division. The data gathering instrument used was a researcher-made questionnaire that measured the needed best practices done by the teachers in the delivery of the contents of Commercial Cooking, the strategies in teaching the subject, and the life skills needed to be learned by the students. The data were analyzed using the frequency count, weighted mean, and ranking.

RESULTS

Practices done by teachers in teaching Commercial Cooking will be effective with the aid of the Department of Educations' approaches such as constructivist, competency-based, collaborative, inquiry-based, integrative, and reflective. Life skills in cooking also developed in the students such as culinary skills, technical skills, endurance, basic oral and written English skills, computer literacy, comfort, and patience.

DISCUSSIONS

There are best practices performed by the teachers in Commercial Cooking which are worthy to be shared such as culinary skills, developing endurance, English communication skills, and patience. All the approaches recommended by theDepartment of Education could be used in teaching Commercial Cooking such as constructivist, competency-based, collaborative, inquiry-based, integrative, and reflective approaches. Teaching Commercial Cooking among the students definitely develop among them life skills such as technical skills, endurance, English competency skills, serving other people comfortably, patience, and computer skills.