Chapters
If you really want to whet your students’ appetites, you have to offer recipes and dishes that they’d want to cook themselves and make sure that there’s a friendly environment in your classroom or kitchen. The atmosphere you create in your cooking classes or culinary workshops should make everyone want to attend and your first ever class with a new student might be your only opportunity to impress them. Put your apron on because we’re going to give you a few tips and tricks for teaching cooking classes! If you dream of opening your own cooking school someday, you're going to have know how to prepare both classes and delicious dishes.
How Do You Effectively Teach Cooking?
Preparing a good cooking class starts here. Before you start, you’re going to have to ask yourself what kind of cooking you’re best at and what you’re going to teach your students. 
Pay Attention to Time Management
During your cooking classes, time management is essential. You can’t plan a dish that takes an hour to cook if your lessons only last half an hour. That said, you could always get students to chop the vegetables before the class or bring fresh pasta (which takes less time to cook), for example. 
Consider timing yourself so you can see how long each part of the lesson takes and how long you’ll need for the whole lesson or workshop.
Keep in mind that making a simple dish might not be enough for a cooking class. While your cooking knowledge is useful, the whole lesson can’t rely on it. Teaching skills, like explaining what to do and transferring all that knowledge you have, are also really important. If you're teaching kids cooking, you'll have to allocate time to showing them the basics of kitchen safety, for example. If you're running a team building exercise, keep in mind that your students probably have other things to do once they're finished. Ensure you finish on time. Testing will help you see which concepts work and give you an opportunity to better organise your lessons. You can also get feedback from friends and family and perfect your methodology. In fact, our closest friends and family members can often be far more brutally honest than strangers. Some advice, like avoiding “lulls”, might seem obvious once somebody’s pointed them out. You could use the time things are cooking to answer students’ questions, for example. You should outline your objectives at the beginning of the lesson so that you don’t drown in questions when you’re preparing the food. Don't forget to establish the rules so you can keep control of your class, too. Why not read our complete guide to preparing a cooking lesson?
End the Cooking Class with a Bit of Fun
You should make sure that your students enjoy every one of your classes. This is especially important for kids classes since they probably won't even be thinking about whether or not they learnt a new skill. Cooking with kids can be a completely different beast to cooking with teens or adults. 
- Think about setting aside some time for the students to try the food that they prepared during the class. When it comes to cooking, tasting the food is one of the best ways to get better at cooking and see what each student should be focusing on. We cook so we can eat, after all, don’t we?
- You should always be honest with your students. If one of them got something wrong, lying to them won’t help them get better. If they’re novices, they probably won’t have noticed it themselves. If you have to give them some feedback, you should stay positive and tell them where they’re going wrong (how long they cooked it for, seasoning, dressing, etc.). Remind them that a chef can always improve and there's no harm in making mistakes.
- After you’ve tasted the food, you can spend the last few minutes of the class to have a friendly chat and an exchange of ideas between the students. Since not everyone in your class is going to be an expert chef, they’ll each have their different tastes and ways of cooking. This is also a good way to establish a rapport with your students. Ask them which parts of your lesson they liked and which parts they didn’t.
You need to consider how long you’re going to spend doing this during your lessons so that your lesson doesn’t finish late since both you and your students might have something to do afterwards. Make sure you stick to your lesson plan and schedule as the teacher of the class. Discover some of the best ways to plan a cooking class!
Create a Bond with Your Students
Don’t forget that your cooking classes go well beyond the classes themselves. If you want your students’ loyalty, you’ll have to go the extra mile outside of class. 
- Firstly, try out teaching techniques and recipes with people you know before using them in classes and workshops with paying students.
- Preparation is key. Planning ahead can help you manage your time better in each of your lessons.
- Make effective use of the lulls in your lessons while things cook so that your students get the most out of every minute with you.
- You should use the end of your lessons for exchanging ideas. Give your students a chance to share their homemade creations and useful information. Get the students to eat their food, get feedback on it from other students, and try and work out for themselves what a recipe might need. While a demonstration detailing where they went wrong could be useful, most students will learn how to cook if you guide them towards discovery rather than directly telling them.
- Once the class is over, you should maintain a link with your students. You can share feedback and practical tips with them over the internet. You can also create your own resources or use existing teaching resources to help students study between classes and prepare themselves for the next lesson. You could even set up a virtual cooking school (on a blog or website) where your students can help each other to learn.
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