Ready to take your culinary skills beyond the classroom? This session highlights exciting competition opportunities available to students through FCCLA and beyond. Participants will learn about FCCLA STAR Events, including Culinary Arts and Baking & Pastry, as well as FCCLA Skill Demonstrations that allow students to showcase individual talents. We’ll also explore fun and competitive events such as Junior Chef, Burger Battle, and the Kentucky ProStart Invitational. Whether students are just getting started or already passionate about food service and culinary arts, this session will provide ideas, resources, and pathways to help them compete, grow, and succeed.
Before students master recipes, they must first master culture. This session explores how intentionally building expectations around respect, responsibility, communication, and professionalism creates a kitchen classroom that runs smoothly and develops confident, capable leaders. Learn how setting the bar high from day one transforms both behavior and student success.
As artificial intelligence rapidly enters classrooms, schools are facing pressure to adopt tools faster than they can fully understand their impact. This session takes a balanced approach to AI in education, grounded in research, child development, and lessons learned from past waves of technology adoption accelerated by COVID.Participants will examine national trends in AI use, school spending, and emerging evidence on inequities, unintended harms, and engagement-driven design. Rather than framing AI as something to race toward or resist, this session centers the need for pre-investment in capacity, guardrails, and shared understanding to avoid repeating mistakes made during large-scale edtech adoption.This session explores who should lead AI decision-making, how to evaluate tools through a developmental and instructional lens, and how to build staff and student readiness before implementation. Participants will leave with strategies to guide AI use thoughtfully, align decisions with student well-being and learning goals, and lead with clarity during uncertainty. This session focuses on leadership, preparation, and systems-level thinking rather than reactive adoption.
This session includes a clear overview of current nutrition guidelines, from the evolution of earlier models like the classic food pyramid and the MyPlate balanced-plate model to today’s 2026 inverted food pyramid. Participants will look at easy, relatable ways to teach nutrient-dense eating habits, such as emphasizing whole grains, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and high-quality protein. They will also learn how to help students understand moderation with added sugars and ultra-processed foods in ways that relate to teens' daily decisions.
We will discuss how EP vs. AP impacts recipe costing and show easy ways to demonstrate and teach both these topics to students. This is a critical skill for any student who wants to work in the food and beverage industry to know in order to be successful. The concept also applies to other professions. You have to know what it costs to make something in order to know how much to charge!
Increase student achievement, strengthen community ties, and build your programs School-Based Enterprise while keeping it simple. Learn best practices of integrating Home-Based Processing into your classroom by integrating standards, standardizing grading criteria, and selecting menu items.
Turn up the heat on our traditional roundtables! Jump into fast-paced conversations around 3 hot topics, packed with practical tips, ready-to-use resources, and ideas you'll be excited to take back to the kitchen or classroom.
This session presents the fundamentals of plate presentation and design, from selecting the right plate to the importance of how food is prepped and cooked for the final garnish. Presentation is critical in the culinary industry as a driver for success whether your students want to work in the restaurant industry or own a catering, bakery, private chef, or cake decorating business. It does not matter how great the food is if it is not presented well, "The First Bite is With Your Eyes". We will also demonstrate a few basic food photography tips to show off your students' work.
This session is based on actual input from teachers who have participated in our annual Teachers Institute at Sullivan University. Their greatest challenge was to generate ideas for demonstrations and hands-on activities that could be performed within a short period of time. Attendees will walk away with demo recipes, ideas and resources to improve the student experience.
