The title to this entry is a little misleading. We aren’t expanding so much as returning to our roots and original mission.

Pebble Creek began as a consulting shop with a mission to help teachers grow their instructional repertoire. Our priority, and unique and primary contribution to the field I feel, is sharing instructional strategies and building instructional repertoire. Studying teaching is fun, real, relevant, useful, important and inspiring for teachers. It is also a lifelong pursuit.

I wrote curricula to help teachers practice strategies daily, to get more expert faster. These resources also exposed what a lack of engaging curriculum there is available to students and teachers. We had to start somewhere, and thus chose to start where the greatest need is— the early years of secondary school, in literacy. The work took off and we got so busy helping schools with our curriculum offerings that we become kind of nichey… inadvertently.

By this I mean a vast majority of our work began to concentrate too exclusively on schools teaching our Grade 9 and Grade 10 English curriculum, and/or World Geography.

We went into this work wanting to help teachers of all levels, at all disciplines, with the study of teaching. I really believe in our curriculum, and we have seen amazing results. I also believe strongly in the need to help urban, traditionally underserved, secondary schools and their students.

Having said all this, we also want to work with students and teachers everywhere on instruction and repertoire. All students, and all teachers, want to be in classrooms of diversity, depth, challenge, and creativity. Thus the “expansion”, or probably better said, “rebranding” of our services to include the important work we do in urban secondary schools, yet also expand to serve elementary, middle and high schools of all shapes and stripes.

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