I suppose it is relative to the methodology you speak of. And what you mean by being a Sage. The previous posts would suggest that it is the sage who is at fault since they are "pontificating loud and long" about things that are not relevant to the students education.
Actually, that has not been the primary thrust of my posts. That really isn't the main methodological problem, although it could be when it is done.
Because there are many to choose from, which ever ones reach the student most effectively would probably be considered the most successful. It has been left to the Instructor to determine what is successful.
That's true.
I think that too has been the spark of much debate in that some Instructors may set the bar so low that what is successful to one may be incomplete to another.
That is one of the drawbacks of the traditional approach to education and assessment. Add to this the notion promoted by a false conclusion drawn because of poor research methodology by the famed Coleman Report (1966) that suggested that academic achievement was primarily determined by the capabilities of the student and was beyond the control of the instructor. This led teachers for 30 years to conclude that the only way to have some students meet academic standards was to lower the standards to meet the level of th students. Research over the past few decades has shown the opposite, that proper application of effective methodologies can make any student succeed at a high level. The approach among knowledgeable educators today is to raise the student to the level of the standards. That is supposed to be the thinking beyond
No Child Left Behind (which is significantly flawed in its approach to the problem).
One (and only one) of the Coleman flaws was that pretty much everybody was using ineffective instructional methods in those days. When you use ineffective methods, many students will have the ability to overcome them and achieve at a reasonably high level, but some students cannot overcome those instructional flaws and will fail. When you use superior instructional strategies, you help those failing students succeed, and the students who would have succeeded anyway will do even better than before.
Coleman's primary flaw, though, was that he measured whole school performances and compared them, finding that the performance of the average student in a school was closely aligned with the student's socio-economic status. If he had compared teacher to teacher, he would have found that within each school individual teachers were succeeding or failing with students in dramatically different levels, and their success or failure was primarily tied to inistructional methodology.
In fact, recent research has indicated that much of what we call native intelligence is actually a set of skills learned in the first years of life. Applying certain strategies (even during a lecture) with this in mind can have a dramatic impact on learning, and students can even be taught those missing skills later in life, in effect becoming more intelligent. One such general strategy has been shown to have the greatest effect increase on student achievement of all other strategies.
I am still unclear as to why you believe that being a sage on the stage is the least effective method of educating students.
Because decades of research has shown it to be true. I can't think of a single major educational theorist who would say otherwise. Bob Marzano has compiled several metastudies of this research in case you are interested. Other theorists you might want to look into are Grant Wiggins, Jay McTigue, Rick Stiggins, Carol Ann Tomlinson, Chris Dede, Michael Fullan, Rick DuFour ...(I can go on).
My personal experience suggests to the contrary.
How much have you studied alternative approaches, and how many have you tried? Check out Wiggins and Marzano especially and see how much of what they have written about is in your repertoire.
As Maslow said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
