Last Learning Team Meetings Part 2

Last Thursday was the last Learning Team Meetings for the Year 8 groups for the year.
I found the English/SOSE/RE people a little subdued. It was almost like this group had very little to offer such capable people. The group itself will be very different next year - two are going on long service, one is pregnant and the another has the year off to stay at home to look after his child.
I thought Tricia came up with a good way of structuring some scaffolding for significant writing in Year 8. She separated the task into distinct parts and then for each part, created a page of instructions and then a blank section for students to write bibliographic details and then notes. The rest was discussion of a presentation from one of the teachers.
The Science/Maths people were a little more lively with an animated discussion about Self-Paced Maths. Some people were hesitating about the process feeling as though they had lost some control over the class and feeling that they were not working as hard as they should - and that this would reflect on them as teachers.
Danielle brought up the importance of teaching students how to use the resources - i.e. how to use the text book to get the most out of it. She also has experimented with success with students marking their own tests. This takes a great load off her, but gives the students immediate feedback - no just with a score, but also with an idea of where they went wrong and why.
Craig talked about using re-tests as a learning opportunity and the need to have more opened-ended investigations that students could do along side of the textbook work. This will encourage problem solving skills.
I discuss the struggle I had with allowing students to fall behind. How sometimes it's important to let that happen because they need to struggle with some things at some stages in their life and then be thankful when they actually succeed.
The Leadership group and I will meet next week to see where we go from here.