Sharp Reading Professional Development

Sharp Reading Professional Development

At the beginning of Term 3 myself and Paulien Gray attended a workshop looking at the Sharp Reading programme. Both of us had been using some of their reading resources and really liked the content. The stories and articles were 'child-friendly' and levelled well for ability.
Sharp Reading is a very structured programme focusing on short intensive guided reading sessions with small groups. The Sharp Reading process is based around very systematic routines designed to give the students ample time and practice to embed good reading practices. The workshop day was very intensive and practical, with the goal of giving us the initial skills to introduce it at as soon as we got back to class. My initial thoughts were positive. I had been looking for more structure and direction in my reading programme and this appeared to give this in spades! The only misgivings I had were the time pressures it entailed and the extension of my more able readers.
I rearranged my reading groups so I had 5 groups of 6 rather than 4 groups of 8 and began at the beginning of Term 3.

Thoughts

• As expected I loved the structure of the programme. It made planning much simpler because I always knew what my next steps were.
• The majority of the children enjoyed it. This was especially the case with the less able readers. After discussion with them it appears that they liked knowing the structure of the lesson and what was going to happen. Because of it's repetitive nature they got better at the skills required and subsequently became more confident.
• The Sharp stories and articles I used were very engaging for the children and there is beginning to be a wide variety to choose from. 
• The idea of children verbalising  ITTM ( I think this means ...) after each sentence (or paragraph) was repetitive but you could really see the progress in how well the children were analysing and understanding what they were reading, as they were reading. 
• The expected timeframe was difficult to achieve. Often we got a bit side tracked and this led to a group missing out on their session occasionally.
• My more able readers became a bit bored with the repetitive process, however the use of ITTM still showed me that they did often lack fundamental understanding of what they were reading. 

Future

• If carrying on with Year 5/6 students I would definitely continue with the programme.  It would be interesting to see the progress after a full teaching year.
• I would look more closely at Stages 4 and 5 of the programme which deal with critical thinking, for my more able readers.
• As I am working with Year ones in 2017, I am very curious to see how the programme approaches decoding in its structure. This is covered in Stages 1 and 2. I will attempt to implement this during the year.