About Us - SharpReading
SharpReading had its beginnings in 2000 when Hilton Ayrey was invited to join the team of tutors at the New Zealand Graduate School of Education, a private teacher training organisation in Christchurch, with an international reputation for training quality teachers. Given responsibility for developing an innovative reading programme for the teacher trainees attending NZGSE, this was the beginning of 10 years of action research to develop what is now known as SharpReading.
In 2007 Brian Parker joined NZGSE and become the driving force behind developing the online delivery of SharpReading to teachers internationally. After three iterations of SharpReading ONLiNE, it is rapidly becoming a powerful learning tool for teachers of reading worldwide.
In 2010, when Hilton and Brian left NZGSE, they were graciously allowed to take their intellectual property with them and SharpReading became an independent literacy consultancy. Since then they have trained literally hundreds of teachers face-to-face and online to use their SharpReading approach to reading instruction.
SharpReading is now an established educational framework for reading instruction. It includes a well defined developmental progression for the learner moving from decoding through to high level comprehension. It is embedded in a 'best practice' teaching and learning methodology that supports the learner, provides direction for the teacher with easy to follow lesson routines...AND IT GETS RESULTS.
Hilton Ayrey - Director, SharpReading
Hilton AYREY - BSocSci, Dip T Primary
Hilton taught in Christchurch primary schools for 18 years before taking up a position as tutor with the New Zealand Graduate School of Education, Christchurch, New Zealand.
For 10 years he worked on refining the delivery of reading instruction to teachers in training at NZGSE. In 2010 he left NZGSE to form an independent literacy consultancy with Brian Parker and has since lead whole school implementation of SharpReading in many schools in New Zealand, Australia and further afield.
His other contribution in this field has been to write a large number of literacy resources to support guided reading programmes. This includes StoryBytes and InfoBytes - short lesson sized pieces of text at a wide range of reading ages (RA 7-16 yrs). He has also written and published collections of longer age graded stories and non fiction text. His assessment procedure, Informal Prose Inventory, was first published in 1999 and has sold thousands of copies world wide.
Brian Parker - Director, SharpReading
DipT Secondary DipT Primary, Dip FA, Cambridge CTEFLA
Brian trained as a high school art and art history teacher back in 1990, retrained as an English as a second language teacher in Japan before settling into teaching the 'little guys' when he trained to become a primary school teacher at the New Zealand Graduate School of Education in 2000.
After 17 years of teaching in the classroom Brian was asked to join the team at NZGSE as a primary and secondary school tutor. The aim was to develop training video and bridge the gap between primary and secondary teaching. This is where he met and formed a strong connection with Hilton Ayrey, and together they developed their online training programme SharpReading ONLiNE.
For the past 10 years Brian has worked with Hilton and other experts in education to refine teaching routines in order to make them more accessible for a wider range of teachers.