Boulder, Pebble, Sand

Orient the team

While it is admirable to have ambitious goals for our professional development, it’s equally important to work on realistic, incremental and manageable shifts. In working through this tool, the aim is to reduce the ‘grain size’ of our practice improvement so that we narrow our focus on something that is achievable during a 2 – 4 week Sprint phase.

Define your Boulder Focus

Collectively, come to a decision about the broad area in which you’d like to improve.

This may be a general focus for practice improvement, e.g. Teacher questioning, guided reading, feedback strategies, using learning intentions or improving formative assessment.

Define your Pebble Focus

Collectively, discuss a finer-grain component of your boulder focus that would make the goal for practice improvement clearer. Consider the following:

- What is a sub-component of this that we could work on?

- What smaller slice of this would be a helpful focus for a Sprint?

- Which sub-element of this practice should we work on first?

Record your Pebble Focus, e.g. Questioning to check for understanding

Define your Sand Focus

Finally, reduce the size of your focus for practice improvement further by getting even more specific about what you will work on in the classroom. Your sand focus should represent a real change to practice, but be small enough to tackle in a single Sprint.

Record your Sand Focus, e.g. Use mini-whiteboards to check for understanding in the opening part of every mathematics lesson.