Making the Case for the "Sage on the Stage"

For years, admitting that you used direct instruction in your classroom – that you actually stood in front of your students and lectured to them – felt like acknowledging you were a terrible teacher. The prevailing orthodoxy insisted that effective educators should strictly be the "guide on the side," facilitating self-directed discovery, while banishing the "sage on the stage" to pedagogical exile.

Mandatory volunteering -- an oxymoron

If I had to guess, I would say most independent schools have programs dedicated to community service, believing, quite correctly, they have a responsibility to educate students not only academically, but also civically. And the instinct is a noble one – school leaders want to help students become compassionate, civic-minded adults. Yet, I think, when a school mandates service, with a check-off box and a graduation requirement, students don't learn civic responsibility; they just learn, once again, to pay lip service to compliance. It becomes, as with many things in education today, a purely transactional undertaking.