Future Bites: The Next Great American Food

Seventh graders stand in front of poster boards and screens pitching a group of visiting parents, teachers, and other students. They are looking for investors in their products – the next great American food. This is the culmination of their interdisciplinary projects. The winner? Student engagement.

Future Bites is the brainchild of this team of teachers - Alyssa Harrington (Science), Will Stewart (Social Studies), Cora Becker (English Language Arts) and Angela Clement (Math). Together, they share 115 7^th graders. While they’ve dabbled in interdisciplinary projects over their five years working together, this year – and this project – is the biggest effort they’ve ever attempted, and it’s paying off.

The volume is high – and so is the excitement as the potential investors make their way around the Westwood Den. As teachers listen to students pitch their foods, they will decide who will get one of their hundred-dollar bills. At the end of the showcase, the winning food will be the one with the most investments.

This is a showcase designed to make mouths water. Candy-flavored fruit. Cauliflower ice cream. Spicy burger and chicken. Protein packed burgers, bars and cake bites. Edible utensils. The products are colorful, clever and kid-friendly. What’s most impressive, though, is seeing and hearing the demonstration of seventh grade learning outcomes come to life with such energy and enthusiasm.

The project: Future bites

For students – and teachers – the project has been a learning journey in each of the core subject areas of social studies, science, math and English Language Arts.

For American Studies, which is the focus of 7^th grade social studies, students have spent time learning about how food has reflected our American history.

“An easy example is SPAM - it was developed during World War II as a ration that could be easily shipped. Same thing with M&M's,” says Will. “We have been learning about how our foods are shaped by what we as Americans need or want in a particular time period.”

For the project, students needed to know something about America as they were creating their food products. For example, facts about consumption – or lack – of fruits and vegetables.

For Science, one of the ingredients had to be genetically modified and the modification had to improve the food somehow.

“We spent most of our second trimester on genetics,” says Alyssa. “They spent quite a big chunk of time learning about genetic engineering and artificial selection.”

Teachers were looking for which ingredient was modified, which traits were altered, if any new things introduced and then ensuring that it was part of their pitch.

For Math, students had to create their packaging. Then they had to provide the dimensions and calculate surface area and volume – things they had just finished doing in math.

Projects were required to include two graphs and some sort of data. This was tied to the data analysis competency that spans Math, Science and American Studies. For many, one of the graphs or data elements tied to that American story - How many Americans eat beef.  Some students collected their own data, like how many of their classmates would eat a certain flavor or product.

The English Language Arts piece was the pitch they made to potential investors.

“We just finished a persuasive writing unit,” says Cora. “They were focusing on persuasive strategies and using those in their pitches. Then, I was looking at the competency of Communicating to an Audience. I was assessing that as I listened to their pitches to our audience.”

Presentation day is when all the pieces come together. This was also the first time the team had gone this big – and invited parents, staff and other students in to be a real audience for the learning.

The impact: Learning and engagement

The Icer team pitched a cauliflower-based ice cream genetically modified to taste and feel like real ice cream. It’s a tasty way to get your veggies.

"I loved it all," says Kayley, a student, when asked about the project overall. "Maybe my favorite part was connecting food to history."

Her partner, Emma, was more into the math.

"My favorite part was calculating the surface area of the packaging and coming up with our design," she says.

The presentation included a real (though slightly wilting) cauliflower for 3D impact.

“It felt like students were trying to outdo each other,” says Will. “They've got a real package so I should probably have a real package… Even for the kids at the top, this experience was elevated. There are kids who are usually asking us - is this good enough to get proficient? They didn't ask us for this…or if they asked, they still just kept working.”

The Spicy Blue Nuggler group went all in with their physical prototype of spicy chicken in different shapes.

"This was fun and helped us learn new things working together," says Gisel.

“Helped us hustle - and work together," adds Megan.

Alyssa observed how groups were really holding each other accountable a lot more with this project.

“A lot of times, with group work, we don’t have that. Or, they were covering for each. They really stepped it up,” she says. “It’s the most buy-in we’ve gotten from anything. We only had five out of 115 students not finish.”

The teachers agree that the interdisciplinary work is more motivating for kids to come to school because it feels relevant.

“We had a student yesterday who was saying - I'm not sure I'm going to come tomorrow,” says Will. “But, I’m like, it's presentation day. And, she was here today.”

Teachers have watched the learning become more relevant when students see there's actually a much bigger picture.

“You’ve got to convince people that it's a good product and you have to think about how your ingredients can be improved through genetic modification and you've got to think about what have people eaten in the past and why did they eat it,” says Will.

As a teaching team, they focused on the competencies and how they were designed into the project and learning experiences. The students focused on making the product good. In order for it to be good, they had to do the competency work.

“There was no way around it,” says Will. “I feel like there are some students who always find a way to get the competency while somehow avoiding actually doing anything or learning anything. For this, there just wasn't any way around it. You just had to put in the time and energy. We are seeing kids who were getting F's getting C's and kids who were getting A’s going above and beyond.”

All this year, Wednesdays are team days when all 115 students and four teachers come together for a day in the Den. Four days a week they follow a traditional schedule. Teachers decide how they will use the team day – they negotiate from week to week. One of them might have a project that just can’t be done in 45 minutes – they’ll ask for and an hour and 15 minutes on a Wednesday.

“Even though we've probably done more work this year than we've ever had to, it's more fun to come up with ideas and be creative with it because we know what the others are teaching,” says Alyssa. “The motivation has also been wonderful. With our team days all year, we see huge motivation because they get to look at learning in a different way.”

When they started team Wednesdays they did so with trepidation. They weren’t sure how it would go with 115 seventh graders together in one room.

“I know 115 students together in a room feels really uncomfortable and chaotic to a lot of people, even teachers in this building,” says Cora. “But, for some reason, 115 kids with four teachers is sometimes a lot easier than a room of 30 with one.”

At the end of the day, after the poster boards are stashed and the Den is quiet, the real payoff is the unexpected affirmation that this type of interdisciplinary learning is worth the effort.

We just finished learning about persuasion in English Language Arts and students had to each individually give a speech. It was cool to see kids do their pitches today who struggled with that speech. One parent shared that her son would not practice his speech at home at all. But his pitch? He did that in front of them like six times. Cora Becker, Westwood English Language Arts Teacher