My Coach and You

What is My Coach?

My Coach is one of our latest features designed to support players’ reading comprehension skills. When our learning engine detects that a player is struggling with a particular skill, the Coach will intervene with a customized assignment to reinforce understanding in that skill. Players will receive questions from these customized assignments until they have responded to all of them. The Coach will report on players’ received interventions.

What Skills Does My Coach Apply to?

The Coach will apply to our defined independent reading comprehension skills. This will include adjectives, commas, compare & contrast, connotations, ellipses, em dashes, gerunds, hyperbole, idioms, imagery, metaphors, semicolons, symbolism, synonyms, and so many more skills.

For a complete list of the skills Shoelace has defined, please refer to our Reading Comprehension Skills Guide. My Coach will gradually cover more skills in future releases beyond our initial independent reading comprehension skills.

How does My Coach work?

Our Learning Engine will track patterns in player responses to particular skills. When it has discovered a high rate of incorrect responses, that player will be served with questions tailored to that skill. After the player has responded to all questions for this skill in this special assignment, if they still require assistance to understand this literary skill, then the educator will be notified on their dashboard.

Who Can Use My Coach?

Educators on our premium plan will have My Coach available to them. All players registered to a class on a premium dashboard will automatically be monitored for struggling reading skills, even if they are part of a non-premium educator’s class.

Where Can I See My Coach?

In Dreamscape and Dreamseeker Drift, players will see the Coach’s intervention questions within their question window. They will not be notified that they are in an intervention state targeting a reading skill. These questions will continue to impact their gameplay as regular questions from the question window would normally behave for their in-game progression.

On the educator dashboard, please visit the My Coach tab to check on past & present intervention statuses and the skills they target. Premium dashboards will have the full view of interventions that have occurred in their class including the date an intervention was assigned, which player was targeted, the targeted skill, and the current status of that intervention.

Why Should I Use My Coach?

The Coach will be monitoring skill tiers from our extensive literary library. It will detect the reading skills a player is struggling with and intervene with no additional effort on an educator’s behalf. These players will be served an assignment that targets their developing skills. If they do well on this assignment then the players have demonstrated an understanding of that particular skill.

If they have a high occurrence of inaccurate responses then it will be confirmed that this is a skill the player struggles with. The educator will then be notified of the player’s needs, saving time by presenting all the skills your players have struggled with most recently and automatically intervening rather than requiring your attention.

When does My Coach activate?

For Premium users, My Coach is always active, monitoring players as they answer questions in the game and automatically assigning interventions if they are detected as struggling on a skill.

However, if a student has already received an intervention assignment for a specific skill within a few weeks, they will not receive another intervention for the same skill until this cooldown period has passed.

Non-Premium educators who upgrade to Premium when there is an existing queue of pending interventions will have their interventions go live to their players upon membership activation.