Sage on the Stage Vs Guide on the Side Reading
"Sage on the Stage" vs. "Guide on the Side" Education Philosophy
I expect near educators are familiar with this concept: You can exist a "sage on the phase" in your classroom, using your expertise to share knowledge with your students through lectures and presentations. Or yous tin can be a "guide on the side," using your skills to engage your students in first-paw learning through projects and experiences.
I also get the sense that teachers tin can be sensitive when discussing this dichotomy or even thinking most how they fit into it. It makes perfect sense that it could be a touchy issue: Most teachers are very proud of what they exercise, and we tin can react apace if we feel people are judging how nosotros choose to teach and manage our classrooms. (That's certainly truthful for me.) All the same, I think it's worthwhile to take a stab at outlining my own thoughts on the sage vs. guide dichotomy—and perhaps information technology might even spark productive give-and-take!
I've been thinking about my ain tendencies equally a sage or a guide throughout my teaching career and then far, but I was especially motivated to write this post in response to the strong positions taken past Ted Dintersmith in his 2018 volume What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America, a volume I likewise wrote about in this recent post.
First, let's clarify: Few master and secondary teachers in the United States are going to exist entirely "sages" or entirely "guides" 100% of the time in their classrooms. Even in the classrooms I've observed where teachers create the well-nigh meridian-down systems of imparting knowledge to students, in that location are still occasions where students are asked to struggle with textile on their own and don't receive all the answers from their teacher. Even in the most open up, project-based learning surround, a teacher will nigh certainly still ask for moments of silence where they can give students instructions and lay the guidelines for learning. The sage and the guide are highly contrasting images of pedagogy, but few educators are e'er going to fully embody one or the other.
I don't even know if I could quantify how much of my time in the classroom I spend existence a sage or a guide. If I had to take a guess, I have probably been more of a guide for the past 5 years. Nevertheless, it seems that many thinkers in education today are strongly opposed to the sage approach—including Ted Dintersmith—and I want to push back confronting that line of thinking. I believe the platonic instructor should be able to act equally both a sage on the stage and a guide on the side, and they should advisedly evaluate when it'southward most valuable to use each approach.
Agency and Adults
In his volume, Dintersmith talks about his ideal goal of schools creating "PEAK" learning environments, where Tiptop stands for providing Purpose, Essentials, Bureau, and Cognition. The key letter here is A, because i implication of prioritizing students' agency higher up all else is that existence a "sage on the stage" as a teacher—choosing what students should learn next—becomes virtually impossible.
What School Could Exist is based on Dintersmith'due south tour through hundreds of schools in all fifty states, and while he describes a wide multifariousness of dissimilar ideas and approaches, it's clear that he believes teachers should exist guides on the side. Here he describes the Acton Academy in Austin, Texas:
The school has no teachers, merely a few adult "guides" who aren't expected to be subject-matter experts or immune to answer questions.
This description sounds pretty extreme, and even approaches the idea of "unschooling," where children play and learn entirely exterior of a set up curriculum or whatsoever of the bounds of traditional schooling.
I admire and capeesh the bulldoze to requite students more agency in their educations: It would be astonishing to see more schools where students cull what goals they want to pursue, what questions they want to ask, and how they want to find the answers. All the same, the Acton University model (as described in this inevitably simplified sentence) sounds like a misstep to me, non because of the agency given to the students, just because of the low expectations and limits ready for the adults.
Even if a child was beingness unschooled, completely divorced from a schedule or a schoolhouse building, I would still want that child to be able to interact with educated, knowledgeable adults and turn to them for answers and communication whenever they wanted to. The thought that adults would monitor a classroom full of students and not be "allowed to answer questions" stymies me, and it feels completely artificial. Humans are social creatures, and since the very development of spoken communication we take passed noesis from generation to generation by talking to each other, telling stories, and sharing accumulated wisdom. I can sympathize the idea that an adult may withhold an firsthand, direct answer in order to encourage students to explore deeper—teachers practise that all the time—but to foreclose adults to provide any answers at all? It defies our very history.
One of the chief reasons I became a teacher is because I am a subject-matter expert. Dintersmith strongly emphasizes that students should be taught real-world skills and approaches in schoolhouse — and we need to remember that request subject field-affair experts for help and information is absolutely a real-world skill. (I hear there's even an entire industry called "consulting" based on it.) I never pretend to know all the answers to my students questions in the classroom; I regularly turn them toward other sources to find what they desire to know. However, if a student asks me virtually medieval Republic of ireland, 19th-century Korea, Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon), or whatever other of the many, many topics that I have specifically pursued in my education and go specially knowledgeable near, I'yard never going to pretend that I can't help them out and provide them with insights. In fact, I believe that when teachers display enthusiastic expertise in the classroom, they can fifty-fifty inspire students to reach for the same sort of in-depth knowledge of a subject.
Let'south take Chinuk Wawa every bit what I hope will be an illuminating instance: The language is not an essential office of the curricula for whatsoever of my courses, simply if it came up in course I would honey to take a few minutes to talk over it further. Let's consider 2 different courses of action I could take—a "guide" arroyo and a "sage" approach—if the topic came up in the classroom:
- I could ask the students to go out their phones and laptops to research Chinuk Wawa on the net for a few minutes. So they could discuss what they learned in pairs or small groups and then share with me.
- I could use my own expertise to talk to the students near Chinuk Wawa for a few minutes.
In scenario #1, a lot of my students would very quickly find some bones explanatory information about Chinook Jargon, likely from Wikipedia. (They would exist unlikely to discover any information indicating that the give-and-take "jargon" tin can be problematic and misleading in describing the language.) A few students might dig a piddling deeper and find more than interesting details, and a few might even connect the information with prior knowledge they have. About, nonetheless, would non.
In scenario #2, I could rapidly and efficiently explicate to my students both the definition and importance of Chinuk Wawa to Northwest Coast History. I could connect that information immediately to whatever we're learning in course, and to prior knowledge the students may accept (the virtually common Chinuk Wawa words used in Alaska, for example, or the words in the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian languages that originally came from English or French by way of Chinuk Wawa). That data tin exist quite hard to find with a quick internet search.
Clearly, this scenario is a specific one, and there are others where I wouldn't take the same level of expertise to requite students immediate insights. Still, I practise believe that "sage on the stage" approaches are valid and valuable in a variety of circumstances. Experts and sages make a difference.
Guiding Students Through the Net
This example raises another extremely important issue with pedagogy in the 21st century—the role of the internet in student learning. Dintersmith writes:
The role of teachers changes in PEAK environments. They don't try to outdo the Internet in delivering content.
Here, Dintersmith really seems to believe that the Internet holds all the answers that students demand in their learning, but I couldn't disagree more. Non but is there a keen deal of knowledge that is either difficult or incommunicable to detect on the internet, but in many cases teachers can besides serve as far better "content delivery systems" than the cyberspace. As human beings, teachers are more intelligent, more flexible, more than responsive, and more capable of coming together students' needs. Nosotros think constantly almost what will help our students most, and content creators on the internet can't replicate that process.
I hope I don't sound arrogant in proverb this, but I regularly "outdo" the internet on a mean solar day-to-day basis in my classroom. I can communicate information to my students more than efficiently, and I can often exist only as funny as the more humorous historians out there. I understand my students, their cultural context, their prior knowledge, and their individual needs far improve than someone who creates YouTube videos thousands of miles abroad or wrote an article on a website years ago. It'south not that online videos and articles aren't extremely useful; I employ them in the classroom constantly. Information technology's just that those videos and articles often fail to see students' needs or communicate data finer in isolation.
Frequently, the websites and videos students detect when doing research are either likewise dry or too overwhelming to engage them, and a good teacher can explain information in ways that are both more captivating and more than precise. As a daily consumer of YouTube videos, I constantly notice videos that tin can easily lead young people into misinformation, misinterpretation, and most dangerously, hateful ideologies.
Teachers shouldn't ban or ignore the internet considering of these dangers; instead, we need to challenge the internet, suggest students in their utilize of it, and phone call "Bullshit!" loudly whenever nosotros need to (which can be pretty frequently). If teachers aren't knowledgeable about what they're education and don't take whatsoever more perspective on whatever given slice of internet enquiry than the students who found it, then those teachers will likely neglect their students in guiding them to think critically about their apply of applied science and sources of data.
The Sage on the Side and the Guide on the Inside?
In the case of internet apply, I remember teachers really need to serve as "sages on the side." It is important to ask students to develop inquiry skills and turn to the internet for answers in many situations—which is, of grade, a real-world skill—but educators demand to be knowledgeable and wise enough to guide students abroad from the online pitfalls of misinformation and ideology that are all too easy for immature people to fall into. It took me a long fourth dimension to develop the level of critical mistrust of the internet that I take today, and fifty-fifty now at that place are still occasions where I'll get engrossed in an attractive myth presented online earlier realizing at that place's something fishy about it.
There'due south besides another important chemical element to consider when bandying most this sage vs. guide dichotomy: To what extent are yous equally an educator participating with your students, working amid them, rather than standing in front of them or off to the side? This article by Mark Nichols effectively criticizes the sage vs. guide terminology, and one of the commenters suggests the phrase "guide from the inside" equally an alternative that emphasizes educators' participation with their students. I don't think I've been very successful in this goal so far in my career, simply I would also aspire to show my students how I am a lifelong learner exploring correct aslope them. I might be a teacher, but I'grand also still a educatee.
In the terminate, the best path we can all follow as educators is to actively question how we collaborate with our students and what methods will serve them best in whatsoever given situation. The "sage on the stage" and "guide on the side" ideas may be clichés, but I think they're still useful concepts to help u.s.a. consider how nosotros human activity in the classroom and how nosotros can choose the appropriate arroyo in dissimilar circumstances. I plan to continue striving to exist the best sage I tin can be and the best guide I can be—whether I'm on the stage, off to the side, or deep in the trenches with my students.
Sage on the Stage Vs Guide on the Side Reading
Source: https://peterwstanton.medium.com/sage-on-the-stage-vs-guide-on-the-side-education-philosophy-f065bebf36cf
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