The place of Pebbles

During 2016 I developed "Progress Pebbles" to help me understand the progressions and make the children's learning more cognitively portable for me.

The pebbles are also a fantastic tool for assessment - where they are now, and next steps. At the moment I have taken the maths pebbles we used last year and split them into the different maths learning areas and have tried to cover from stage 1 through to stage 5. The reason for this is that students will get an immediate taste of success (when the colour in lots of red pebbles) and they will be able to see the progress that is expected of them during the year (regardless of ethnicity).

Here are this years maths pebbles.

Kaizen, change for the better

What a powerful way to review the year. I felt good going into it and great coming out!

We had a big conversation about my Red side (or absence of it) and Muireann rightly pointed out that the HBDI isn’t a deficit model and shouldn’t be used like it is - Red is simply not a preference for me however I do have some strong Red elements;

Relationships - with the community, students, parents, mentors

Knowing Self - i’m very reflective and acutely aware of my strengths and preferences and my weaknesses and I do strive to overcome them.

Links and connections - I am comfortable in this situation because I have already formed links and connections and don’t need to manufacture them! I am quite an ambivert - an introvert in that meeting new people where I have no connections isn’t something I enjoy, and an extrovert when I am comfortable with people I know. I still revert to being an introvert as I need my time and space to recharge.

Growing the People side of my 3Ps there are several things I will aim to do next year;

Ask more questions,

Listen to understand,

Ask for coaching in terms of questions to ask,

Slow down!

Another of my goals is around asking for help. I need to start realising when I need help (not sure how to do this yet!) and then asking for help before I hit the ice-berg, rather than waiting until i’m sinking! One reason that came out of the discussion about this is my desire to have control and ownership.

Using creating Maths resources as an example, I felt that if I created them then I would know what there was and how to use them and it that it was just as fast for me to do this rather than explain what I was trying to do and then figure out what someone else had done. What I need to do is have the courage to let it go, let go of the control because others ideas and input are of equal (and sometimes greater) value to what i’m aiming for. Perhaps this will be my goal next year.

At the end of the meeting it was lovely to get feedback from Muireann;

• I have continually grown throughout the year, learning myself and becoming more comfortable with the how of teaching.
• Muireann appreciated my professionalism and my enthusiasm - going beyond what was necessary.
•  In the case of play based learning really supporting the vision we have with “proof”  and detailed “why” which I have gained from extra reading.

Quite sad at the end of the meeting as it has been indicated that I won’t be in the same team next year, although as I’m writing this...who knows!

Term 3, 2016 Reflection

Going into term 3 I was very apprehensive about the number of students Eve and I would have between us and I was below the line, blaming and thinking dark thoughts! Had a 1 to 1 scheduled with Ben for the end of term which actually happened at the beginning of term 3 which was just as well!

The 2 week break gave me a chance to put things into perspective and bring myself to be back above the line - accepting of the situation and thinking creatively on how to manage things.

One of my biggest concerns was managing NW between the 2 of us and supporting Eve as much as I could. I still feel he needs extra support which we simply can’t give given the fact that there are 53 other children who need us.

Working my way through CL comments was another area of concern - just the sheer numbers, and to start with it was a daunting task - 108 comments to write in 9 weeks! Getting to know what 27 children could do, what their next steps were and how I could best support them was (and still is) a challenge.

Highlights and lowlights from term 3;

• 5 weeks of teaching maths and eagling writing then swapping
• This worked and we are carrying on this term. 5 weeks is a good length of time to start and finish some learning
• Amount of time teaching maths has been great but being an Eagle has been hard - felt like I was pulled in too many directions
• After a chat with Claire we decided to use the environment more wisely so Owling of Maths has moved to the more closed in Theatre and the Eagling is now in one area - the bay and gallery.
• 2 weeks in to term 4 and it is working much better
• As a team we have 2 weeks of teaching reading then 2 weeks of town time
• This also works will as it means you need on put your energy into one thing which should result in a better outcome!
• At concept time Eve and I worked together
• Working with just one other was great
• Our planning wasn’t great though so our outcomes weren’t always clear
• I took over towards the end when I had the “brilliant” idea of role plays to demonstrate understandings and then filming on the green screen (far more work than anticipated!)
• While the structure of reading was great had some high needs (DL) which meant I always felt rushed and under pressure when doing guided reading. I don’t think I did the best I could have for the children.
• Taking this into account for term 4 we are in a much better place as Jill is taking our able readers and so I feel comfortable that their needs are being met
• Have also tried reading a new book every-other day which I am really enjoying as reading can now be fun again as we talk about the story and words and meaning and can have more emphasis on strategies
• At the end of the term there was a frantic rush to JAM the children
• I didn’t get all children done as I ran out of time
• Having talked to Claire since she has pointed out that JAM is just a snapshot in time of what a child can do and will have changed already so to not stress about doing the others!
• Instead I will focus on making sure pebbles are upto date
• CL comments were as hard as I thought they would be! This was partially caused by my desire to including everything in the comment.
• I’ve learnt not to do this, and focus on one highlight!

Something I read over the holidays was a book by Biz Stone one of the founders of Twitter and in it he says that constraints make you more creative. So my (and Eve’s) challenge is to use the constraints we have and be creative in our solutions.

Writing Reflection

To help with my Writing Inquiry and see what my next steps are I looked in more detail at my chosen 3 students to analyse the good, the bad and the brilliant.



My big realisation from looking at their writing is that having looked (studied!) the progressions, this really helped me pinpoint (with Jill's help) what their next steps were.

My next steps are to;

• keep this analysis going - do it again at the end of the term,
• feedback to the children their specific goals
• based on what happens next with these 3 then perhaps have 2 levels of goals for each child
• be more confident in my ability as I have had a positive impact
• create and display some exemplars so children have a bench mark - they know what "good writing" looks like.

The Practicalities of pebbles

Moving into next term I will be teaching reading again, and some of the readers will be emergent / magenta readers, which I have never taught before!

I love the challenge of this and so decided to pull apart the SPS reading progressions and pebble-ise them so I have a clearer understanding of what I need the learners to be able to do. I don’t want to make things “tick-boxy” but I do need to know where to start, and how to identify a child’s next step.

I just looked at magenta, red and yellow as I don’t think in the next term I’ll get my readers beyond this level.

Here are my pebbles!

To help with my writing inquiry I also pebble-ised the writing progressions. Initially I grouped them into levels but was then prompted to think about the progressions in a less linear way so the pebbles below are grouped by focus areas.


This work on pebbling the progressions has made the progressions more accessible and real for me and I now have a go to document that I understand to help me.

To help with communicating learning, and to hopefully motivate the children, each individual pebble could be used as a "badge" of achievement - either on Linc-Ed or as "tokens" the children could collect - this idea was inspired by Claire.

Pebbles and WALTs

I have started reading part of Clarity in the Classroom and something that struck me that I’m not currently doing and that I need to get better at is setting learning expectations.

Over the last few weeks whilst I’ve had fun (and the children too) exploring the world of our senses and movement I had no clear objectives and so the lessons kind of meandered through all sorts of areas very loosely connected to movement. Whilst I know it is essential to be adaptive to the childrens’ needs and interests, I need to be much clearer with my aims and communicate this to them so I can be held accountable for achieving these.

Maths is an easier area to have intentions and build a plan around them, but I still feel I haven’t done this particularly well. I need to start asking myself “Why?” when planning the learning to make sure that it links back clearly to my overall aim / focus / goal / intention. Our Progress Pebbles from last year are great to help with number knowledge and need to be developed further so they cover more areas in more detail – add/sub etc.

Before launching on my “Writing Inquiry” I draw up some pebbles based on our progressions to make them more cognitively portable. I need to dig these out and start using them – even break some of the steps down even further so we can see even the smallest progression clearly.

The Pebbles are a great tool for us to use to look at progress, and for the children to use so they can see what they have achieved and to know their next steps.

Whilst they can be quite time consuming to make I think that I would benefit from having most things “Pebbled” so I can see the progressions and the focus for learning and make this cognitively portable.

Communicating Learning

I don’t know what it is about “reports” or “communicating learning” but whenever this rears its (ugly) head I seem to go into headless chicken mode and get all panicy about it.

Something that springs to mind is a session we had with Ben about maintaining our professional capacity even when we are under pressure and that this ability is what will make us individually and collectively great.

A week ago I know I lost a vast chunk of my professional capacity when it dawned on me I had to write 22 comments and take 22 photos to share with parents (with hindsight that is not a lot to do!). I am proud of myself as I did ask for help but then I didn’t really appreciate the help I was given as I felt it wasn’t “right”.

Having come out of the other end of this particular tunnel I can now see that I blew the task up so it seemed way bigger than it actually was, and although I did my usual list writing to help me all I needed to do was just get started. Once Claire pushed me to get started the task wasn’t actually that bad! Having read and re-read the comments and battled internally with the present and past tense of some of the comments I’m actually happy with what I have achieved and am feeling quite confident about the meetings next week – that I do actually know my children well enough to talk to them and their parents.