Swings and Roundabouts.

How beautiful Sarah is! Her long soft hair,
her bright eyes and her radiant face, her full breasts
and her delicate hands, her round hips and her thighs!
There is no woman more beautiful than Sarah,
no woman who ever stood under the canopy
to be wed to a good man. Excellent is her beauty,
fair is she under the wide sky. Yet this is not
why she attracts our love: it is her wisdom,
her prudence, and the graceful way she moves her hands.

--Genesis Apocryphon and Jubilees

Wisdom is a quality that is not, today, often acknowledged... we must reclaim that wisdom, finding it within ourselves and sharing it fearlessly.

Wisdom comes from experience and embracing that experience. It's not something that can be learned from books or studied like a text, and then the knowledge applied... and a person can share all the wisdom they want/have gleaned over the years, but it is no good if the people with whom you're sharing are closed to it, and unaccepting. These are two 'lessons' I've learned/had undelined or pointed out in a number of ways over the last couple of weeks.

Like two sides of the same coin...

In the last week my team and I have been preparing out new units of work for the next 6 week block in school. After the previous week's debacle of meeting after meeting berating us for not working together as a team and aligning our teaching and learning, we were 'all' very conscious of each others needs and trying to make sure we did as we had been advised - brought our ideas to the meeting, talked things out and decided on a consensus - teamwork, right? (The fact that this is what we'd being doing all along is neither her or there at this point, so... just take it as a given). As I'd been asked to do I went through the literacy planning and came up with ideas, 'based on my experience as a good literacy practitioner and leader,' brought my ideas to the team meeting and those ideas were generally well received and adopted as the way to approach the unit, except...

Where are they writing... how are we going to assess this... they have to write for 30 minutes sustained period every day... and... so it went on, each of us trying to reassure this person that it would work out, that the measure of our experience, our wisdom showed that this was an approach that was valid. No, it wasn't something to be simply read from a text book, delivered in a formulaic way - followed religiously with all of those things in place. It was a truly exhausting conversation and very demoralising and demotivating to have ones wisdom, freely offered, thrown back in ones face.

On the other hand... Tuesday was a half teaching - half Professional Development day. I had offered to give an hour session on Talk for Writing (TfW). The ways in which Speaking and Listening actitivies can and do improve the teaching of writing. The session was well attended (9/10 spaces were filled) and the feedback I had was quite simply awesome, even if that /is/ blowing my own horn. Everyone said that it was the best PD they had attended in a long time, and people that attended have come up to me in the corridors and thanked me time and again for the session. One person even Emailed the head of Primary and suggested that we should have a whole school PD on the subject and adopt the practises I'd been talking about in the session throughout the school. It isn't pride I feel at all this... it's valued.

And guess what? Nothing I said in the planning meeting had not been presented in the PD... and the Head of Primary wants to talk about TfW.