Evaluating Values

Some of my personal values are as follows ...

Honesty - Through self evaluations, I encourage honesty. I allow students to describe things that they did incorrectly while in the kitchen and tell me the correct way to do it. This encourages the students to be honest with mistakes they made while also teaching them the correct way that they should do next time. If in their self evaluation, they are honest about mistakes then I take off less points for the mistakes. Honesty is important in a kitchen because if you have done something like accidentally left the chicken out of the refrigerator too long, you need to tell someone rather than just cook it and hope for the best. I ate somewhere recently and my food was spoiled rotten (literally) and I am certain that it happened because an employee was scared to tell their boss of the mistake.

Work Ethic - Through my classroom/lab management evaluation, I encourage work ethic. It is designed that there is one manager at every table and they are in charge of the 3 employees at their table. This encourages the students to take charge and be leaders. It also teaches them that it can be fun to be the boss but that the boss is ultimately responsible for everything that happens. The manager gets 30 points for each week they work but can lose points for the employees not doing their assigned jobs.

Teamwork - Most of my evaluations are done as groups which encourages teamwork. In a kitchen, nothing can happen just with one person. The group must work as a team. It is tough sometimes to work as a team especially when you have team members that do less than their share. I tell my students that in the real world that happens all the time and you must learn to adapt and find those individuals strengths.

I feel that overall many of my evaluations focus more on teaching lessons on how to be a great employee regardless of what career they go into. I may not be able to make all of my students into great chefs but I do want them to learn traits that will make them successful in whatever they do.