In the summer of 2015 I was teaching Lesson Plan Writing to a class of prospective instructors. I was trying to explain how important chunking was, but I didn’t feel that I was making my point emphatically enough. On the break, I copied a recipe for baking apple pie from Julie Dirksen’s book, “Design for How People Learn.”
When the class resumed, I handed out the recipe.
Mix together the flour and the salt
Chill the butter and water
Add the butter to the flour and cut it with a pastry blender until it resembles coarse crumbs.
Add enough water until the dough barely hangs together
Cut the dough in half and make two balls
Wrap the dough in plastic
Peel the apples
Core and quarter the apples and cut into 1/4” slices
Mix the apples with sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon and a small amount of flour.
Roll out one of the pieces of pie dough into a circle slightly larger than your pie pan.
Fold the pie dough with the apple mixture
Press the dough into the pan
Fill the pie dough with the apple mixture
Roll the other pieces of dough into a circle slightly larger than your pie pan
Place the dough on top of the pie and crimp the edges.
Cut stream holes in the top crust.
Bake the pie for 45 min. in a 350˚ oven.
I told them that they were going to teach me how to bake an apple pie. I told them that I was a man who had once used scissors to cut spaghetti, had baked a ham with the wrapping still around it, (no wonder why the cloves didn’t stick), and that my favorite recipe book was “A Man, A Can, A Plan.” (All true). I further told them that if you attempt to teach me the whole recipe at one time, the result would be a disaster.
The class didn’t take long to break the recipe down into its parts, and even subparts by explaining to me how to “core an apple,” and how much of each ingredient I needed. Now they not only knew about chunking a task, but they knew about sub-tasks and elements of sub-tasks.
There are four parts to chunking this. Can you find them?
It's as easy as apple pie!