The purpose of this article is to assert several approaches and benefits of fostering student engagement within the classroom.

In the last two years, my specialty area of instruction resides in training students and professionals of all ages in various degrees of difficulty within two areas of study found at Kendall College in Chicago. The first, Beverage Management, is a concentration for Bachelor’s degree-seeking students and the second, Wine Professional program, is tailored to wine-industry professionals and hard-core wine enthusiasts. Each program leads to the potential of a Level I and Level II sommelier certification.

Today’s Student
The vast majority of my students are part of the millennial generation, those individuals in their late teens, twenties and early thirties. Educators have often been told this generation maintains a short attention span. It’s been my belief that educators can make a choice to recognize this potential challenge and choose to stimulate the nature of millennials by building an engaged classroom through being dynamic and demanding (in an inspiring way). Regardless of a student’s age, being a more effective educator has always meant being able to demonstrate the practicality and application of new concepts.

As educators, we occasionally forget to consider that young peoples’ experiences are not any less real or less rich than those of adults. They may not have the accumulation of so many years, but the experiences they have are no less consuming or practical. This is a unique quality about working in the hospitality industry as compared to law or medicine. It is not uncommon to begin gaining experience at the age of 15 or 16 years old. Therefore, if an individual chooses to pursue an Associate or Bachelors degree in Hospitality & Tourism, Culinary Arts or Restaurant Management, he or she already has numerous work references to draw from regardless of his or her age.

Looking for Connections
Rather than simply transferring content, consider the significance of helping someone learn better. As educators, we strive to help students learn by drawing connections to something they can use that helps them to more effectively understand and retain new information. In a student-centered classroom, more time is available for discussing these connections. Student learning can be enhanced if the instructor actually reduces some content and spends at least five or 10 minutes in the middle and once again toward the end of each class session. This periodic break allows the instructor an opportunity to check for formative feedback by using an enhanced questioning technique in a purposeful manner.

Drinking wine is quite simple, but tasting wine is an advanced skill set. Therefore, I strive to ensure that students can draw connections between classroom concepts and some base understanding that is relatable. I always strive to help make these connections for the students, to jump start students into forming parallels to ones that may be more meaningful to themselves. Adult students will often make natural connections between pieces of knowledge when it’s more meaningfully organized. I find this to be particularly true when I intentionally give them time to share their assessment of wines experienced during the tasting phase of the class. Things become quite exciting as they start retrieving and applying their newfound knowledge from the first section of the classroom experience.

Parallels of Winemaking - For example, when discussing winemaking techniques, it can be compared to the idea of ordering coffee in a gourmet coffee shop. This can illustrate the impact of the winemaking techniques such as the moment you add sugar, milk or flavor syrups to a coffee. This illustrates the concept of altering a base product such as wine and how the winemaker can craft and coax a product through barrel aging or malolactic fermentation to offer multiple stylistic differences.

Parallels of Body - For example, when discussing the body (or weight) of a wine as it feels inside the mouth, it can be compared to the parallels of the weight of milk—skim milk being compared to a light-bodied wine, 1% milk compared to a medium-bodied wine and 2% milk to a full-bodied wine. An additional possibility is to physically provide three small vessels of the varying milks and having students blind taste the liquids in order to correctly identify them.

Parallels of Tannin – For example, when discussing the drying sensation of a red wine’s tannin content, it can be compared to the same sensation found in a cup of black tea. The tannin levels can be replicated according to different degrees of intensity with varying stages of steeping black tea.

Parallels of Acid and Sugar – For example, using classical music as a way to bridge the structural or mouthfeel concepts of a wine’s sugar and acid levels. I once had two musical acquaintances record a song solely in violin. Then I had them record the same piece of music in cello. And then a third recording playing the same song simultaneously in both violin and cello. The results served as an excellent way to display different quality levels of a Riesling’s balance of its sugar and acid content. Residual sugar was demonstrated by the deep, warming sound of the cello, while the acidity was illustrated by the brazen, lively sound of the violin.

In Conclusion
As an educator, it would be expeditious for me to simply lecture—transferring content from point A to point B. But this approach is much less effective if I don’t mix in a mélange of different instructional methods. When students get engaged, it becomes more of an intellectual, psychological and potentially physical experience leading to a more effective learning process.

Visit www.kendall.edu for more information on the Beverage Management concentration or Sommelier certifications at Kendall College.

Topics include: Learner-Centered, Engagement and Adult Learning