Becoming the Blueprint is a thought-leadership podcast about what we build through the kitchen, not simply what we make in it.
Hosted by educator, entrepreneur, and curriculum designer Kimberly I. Houston, the show explores what becomes possible when we treat the kitchen as a place to build capability. From baking and culinary education to applied learning, career readiness, entrepreneurship, and leadership, these conversations look beyond the finished product to examine what people are actually learning, developing, and becoming along the way.
Some episodes begin in the classroom. Others begin with a business, an idea, or a question about how we've always done things. Through solo episodes and carefully selected conversations with builders, educators, and leaders, Kimberly explores the decisions underneath the work: what we build, what we question, what we outgrow, and who we have to become when the existing blueprint no longer fits.
Because sometimes the goal isn't to follow the blueprint.
Creating more content is easy. Building a program that people can actually use to succeed is something else entirely.
In this episode of Becoming the Blueprint, Kimberly I. Houston challenges the assumption that more curriculum automatically produces better educational outcomes. Drawing from fourteen years of entrepreneurship, a decade of developing online education, and her transition into building baking and pastry curriculum for schools, she explains why implementation must be considered from the beginning.
The same curriculum will not function identically in a classroom of six students and a classroom of thirty. Teachers need the freedom, resources, staffing, and instructional options to adapt the material to the students in front of them. That means curriculum cannot be designed only for the learner. It must also equip the teacher responsible for creating the learning experience.
Kimberly explores the difference between consistency and rigidity, content creation and systems building, and giving someone information versus creating the conditions in which that information can change their life.
The defining question is no longer, “What else can we create?” It is, “What needs to be true for people to succeed inside what we have already created?”
Enjoyed this episode? Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Becoming the Blueprint! If today’s conversation resonated with you, share it with a fellow dreamer and tag us on Instagram [@kimberlyihouston].
🎙 Until next time, keep dreaming, keep building, and remember—your next big idea starts right here at the kitchen table.
SPEAKER_00
I have a hot take. Creating more curriculum does not create better programs across the board at all in any aspect of what we are doing. When I think about the past 14 years of my life as an entrepreneur and the last six, very specifically, of creating online classes and online academy digital content and moving over into more structured, more um widely used products like the Teach Me How to Bake Books and my baking and pastry curriculum. The thing that I have realized is creating more curriculum isn't the same thing as building a better program. It is easy to come up with a list and an agenda and modules of things that you want people to know, things that you expect people to know. When the reality is, is that when people buy an online course, 80% of them are not going to finish it. And so we on the other side of that are faced with we're creating content, we're creating materials for people to be able to further their education. Those people have to want to do that, right? And as I have moved from that realm of entrepreneurship into publishing, where my focus now is educational curriculum and baking. It is very, very different to create curriculum that is designed for implementation in a post-COVID world versus what existed previously. I am in a couple of Facebook groups where there has been a lot of conversation, particularly at the start of the year, about how teachers are having to adjust because of classroom sizes. Because one teacher may have six students, another teacher may have 30, and they have the same amount of time to create the same thing or to teach the same lesson. And if you just think about that, a classroom with six versus a classroom with 30, learning the same thing using the same curriculum, the six, you'll have a much better experience than the 30. There are things that you can do with a curriculum that is designed for implementation that you can't do with something that is just teaching to the void. In the class with the six, you can spend more time answering questions that the students may have as opposed to the class with the 30. As a teacher, if you are expected to have the same result in the classroom of 30 that the teacher in the classroom of six had, I'm not sure that that actually is possible. And if that makes any sense. How it's implemented has to be different based on your school, based on your class, based on the statistics of the young people that you have in front of you. You may need more hands-on learning, you may need uh labs, you may need field trips, you may need lecture style. Are you able to adjust the curriculum to fit the needs of your actual classroom? And that is the question I will ask before bringing in a curriculum or while even looking at a curriculum. I think for me, moving from uh creating curriculum and online academy for entrepreneurs, for baking entrepreneurs very specifically for the last decade or so, um, moving from that side of baking into the classroom and bringing some things to the people before they hit the entrepreneurial level, um, exposing the students to things that they will need to know as entrepreneurs. When I think about the difference in creating curriculum on that level, my focus wasn't just the children. When I was creating before, I was creating very specifically for entrepreneurs. That is one audience. It's me to the entrepreneur. When I started thinking about students, it wasn't just I'm creating curriculum for students. It became, I have two audiences here. I am creating curriculum for students, but I'm also creating curriculum for teachers. I'm creating curriculum for teachers where it makes their job easier. I'm creating curriculum for teachers where if the teacher has a wealth of knowledge about this subject and they are able to present it in multiple different ways from um games to labs to assignments being sent home to worksheets to guided student notes. The curriculum is built to help the teacher facilitate it in a way that the students receiving the instruction on the other side of this have an experience that is good, that they have an experience that allows them to absorb this information better because their teachers are fully armed with everything that they need. When I was designing an online academy for entrepreneurs, it was very, here are the things you need to know. Here's where you can go find help. If you want to diversify your income, here are things you can be thinking about. It was a lot of here's your starting point, no go finish it. Moving into the educational side of this, creating that curriculum, it is very much so. Not only here's your starting point, here's what will happen in the middle, here's what will happen in the end. And if we put all of this together, here's what will happen years from now when those students are no longer in your classroom. When I think about creating curriculum now, I think about legacy creation. And I think about things that will outlive that teacher's classroom. I think about all of my favorite instructors across my life. I think about how I was a favorite instructor to my students and how those kids who are now adults still message me and still tell me how much something I said to them has sat with them into their adult life. Creating curriculum for students also gave me the opportunity to create curriculum for teachers who can have more of a lasting effect on those students. If I have to think about or I guess make the claim that creating curriculum for implementation in a classroom will have a lasting effect in the realm of entrepreneurship. I think the simplest way I can explain it is like this. As entrepreneurs, as the CEO of a company, very, very different situation than just being an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, um, you can create the newsletter, send the email, go do pop-up shops, um, have a great social media presence. You can do all of those things and still not be making any money. Just because you have a million followers online does not mean there's a million dollars in the bank. And the thing that we have to help our students know and understand is that if they are thinking about moving into entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things you will ever do. And one of the statements that stuck with me for a really, really long time is you're either an entrepreneur or you're working for one. And that in itself completely changed how I approached running a company, how I approached making sure that the culture of the company was going to fit whatever it was I needed to get out of the other side. I also put that into curriculum so that teachers can run their classrooms in the same fashion. So as I continue to create curriculum and design programs and design experiences for teachers and students, um, I am becoming much less interested in asking what else can we create? And I am much more invested in asking the question of what needs to be true in order for people to succeed inside of the things we've already created. That in itself is the difference between building content and building a system that can change lives. A program is not the collection of things you created. A program is the experience someone has trying to use those things to accomplish something.
