I'm relatively new to the instructing game - about 5 years, but have been to several seminars, both aeroplane and microlight in that time and the odd one before. For what it's worth, one of my qualifications is as a university lecturer, so I've spent quite a lot of my life thinking about best practices in teaching and learning.
I've seen an interesting mix, some of which I think is exceptionally good, some of which I think is dreadful rubbish.
Nav's an interesting point. I've been in the last 3 years to one seminar where an extremely experienced instructor/examiner was telling us that everything we should do should be WW2 style DR, and another where a nearly as experienced instructor/examiner was advocating that we should stop using paper charts and old fashioned DR, and teach students to do everything with GPS.
I've been droned at with dreadful examples of "chalk and talk", I've very occasionally seen active audience participation.
I've seen state of the art rigorous research presented, and I've seen theory that was probably getting old the year I was born.
I've had huge packs of useful material to take away and use, and I've had a meagre couple of sheets of vague reminders I've also had a pack of material that seemed to be basically somebody's "brain dump" with no real thought about how we might use it.
What I've not seen very much of is "ordinary" instructors being facilitated in sharing their own recent experiences and lessons learned. It seems to be the working assumption that nobody who has been instructing less than 20 years has anything to say worth listening to.
What I've usually seen, and is hellishly useful, is updates on air law as it keeps changing, and at a recent BMAA seminar on hangar security and trying not to get your Rotax 912 nicked.
Basically, there's not a level playing field, nor any clear picture of best practice. I think that the good sessions are very useful - I've not yet been to enough yet to consistently predict the bad ones.
G