Professional Development
Professional Development Built for Culinary Educators
Culinary education is essential education.
Culinary Skills
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Kitchen Confidence
Professional techniques, demonstrations, and practical skills you can bring directly into your classroom.
Instruction
+
Assessment
Practical strategies for stronger instruction and meaningful assessment in the culinary classroom.
Student Engagement +
Classroom Culture
Build trust, increase participation, and create a classroom where students feel safe to take risks and grow.
Curriculum
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Career Readiness
Create relevant, rigorous learning that connects culinary skills to standards, real-world applications, and career pathways.
What Our Professional Development Can Cover
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Instruction and assessment
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Rigorous, meaningful culinary labs
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Curriculum + standards alignment
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Student independence + decision-making
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Building rapport and trust with students
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Classroom culture + engagement
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Career-connected learning
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Culinary techniques + demonstrations
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Program advocacy
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Educator well being + mindfulness
Previous Professional Development
FLIP THE SCRIPT
Using unexpected dishes to challenge assumptions and spark creativity, curiosity, and open-mindedness in the culinary classroom.
BEYOND THE RECIPE
Moving beyond recipe execution to create rigorous, engaging culinary experiences that build skill, independence, critical thinking, and authentic assessment.
REIGNITE YOUR KITCHEN CLASSROOM
Exploring meaningful assignments, varied approaches to assessment, and new ways to build connection and engagement with students.
CALM AS A SKILL
Practical mindfulness and culinary experiences that help educators cultivate calm, presence, and connection in and beyond the classroom.
Let’s create professional development that meets your educators where they are — and gives them something they can use.
Meet Melanie
Melanie Underwood knows what it means to keep a classroom engaged, manage a kitchen that isn't cooperating, and find calm in the middle of chaos. The techniques she brings to teachers aren't theory - they're what she uses herself. Her work integrates culinary skill, practical teaching strategy, and mindfulness.
Because the most powerful thing in your classroom isn't the curriculum. It's you.
She has spent 30 years on both sides of what you do - professional kitchens and classrooms. She worked at the Plaza Hotel and Four Seasons Hotel before spending 25 years on faculty at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan. She taught high school culinary and baking and pastry, and ran the CTE student-run restaurant. She serves on a Perkins Stakeholder Committee, is a certified mindfulness instructor, for adults and children, a published cookbook author, and has taught over 50,000 students.
What People Are Saying
Melanie’s PD was more than I expected. I thought it would be a simple team-building session, but it became a meaningful bonding experience for our staff. Teachers walked away with practical tools they could use immediately and felt invigorated by the experience.
M.F.
Our FCS department brought Melanie in for a custom class. She built it around exactly what we needed and every one of us left teaching differently.
K.W.
I had the chance to be trained by Melanie and it made a world of difference for me. I was a child development teacher that was asked to teach culinary. She brought me through my imposter syndrome and into my confident culinary teacher era.
J.D.
We took a PD called "Flip the Script" and it did exactly what it said. I walked back into my classroom Monday morning with a completely different approach.
L.B.