The Stour Academy Trust uses Reading Progress and Reading Coach to inspire a love of reading and support students with reading difficulties

Building reading proficiency

Reading Progress and Reading Coach, two of Microsoft Education’s Learning Accelerators, enable seamless assignment creation, personalization, review, individualized coaching, and analysis with an enhanced assignment review experience that allows educators to quickly review student reading recordings with Al powered auto-detect capabilities. Both tools are available within Microsoft Teams and Reading Coach is also available on the web and as a Windows stand-alone app.

Catherine Coleman, Year Five Teacher at Richmond Academy, was one of the educators eager to implement these innovative literacy tools in her classroom to support young readers in the bottom 20th percentile of reading proficiency. She began by using Reading Progress with her students that were reading five years below their expected curriculum level. With Reading Progress, students read a passage aloud while recording video and audio, then turn in their recordings to their teacher.

“One of my girls in the bottom 20th percentile has since moved to reading at a Year 5 fluency,” says Coleman. “She came to me in September at our lowest early-reading level, and her confidence was at an all-time low. No matter how much I told her she could do it; she wouldn’t believe me. Since then, she has made four-to-five years of progress in just four-and-a-half months. Even her mum has commented that she cannot believe what I’ve done for her daughter and her reading, she reads every night.” 

Another student of Coleman’s—an English as an International Language (EIL) student also reading below their expected curriculum level—has made half a year's worth of progress in just four weeks. She grew by two reading levels using Reading Progress every single day. 

Reading Progress and Reading Coach help students improve their reading comprehension and fluency.

No stigmas. Just stories.

When students are between the ages of 8 and 9, “learning to read” is typically expected to become “reading to learn”. Without solid foundational reading skills, students risk falling behind not just in reading but across all subjects leading to disengagement and even failure. Even small reading deficiencies can worsen over time. Traditional literacy supports can exacerbate feelings of humiliation or exclusion. 

“With Reading Progress, I can focus on closing gaps,” says Coleman. “And, after school, I can listen to my students read through the tool! Do they sound fluent? Do they sound monotone? Are they pausing at the right places and using the correct inflections in the voice? It really helps me to target any gaps that might have been otherwise missed in their curriculum.”   

Reading Progress has helped Stour Academy Trust by improving student vocabulary recognition, which in turn boosts their comprehension and quality of writing across subjects. Students gain high-quality exposure to increasingly sophisticated reading, allowing them to apply the words they learn in new contexts, which helps their progress in other subjects. 

Normally, a student would have to be taken out of a lesson or the classroom to do reading intervention practices such as phonics. With Reading Progress, this can be done as part of the regular class experience. 

“Now a child can get the specialized support they need while still being part of their class, and not having to feel singled-out or look ‘different’ than the other children,” Hamilton explains. “This not only preserves classroom unity but also supports continuous, inclusive learning.”

Harnessing the power of AI

Stour Academy Trust beta-tested AI-enabled Reading Coach to further enhance student reading fluency. When added to Reading Progress assignments, Reading Coach identifies words that were most challenging for each student and gives them a supported opportunity to practice the words again. 

One of the most exciting features of Reading Coach is the ability for learners to co-create their own personalized reading experiences utilizing responsible AI. Students select the story’s protagonist and setting and are provided with choices that alter the plot of the story as they read. Reading Coach combines these inputs with the learner’s selected reading level and words they mispronounce to dynamically create fun, compelling, and cohesive stories. 

“My children have never been this engaged with their reading,” says Coleman. “I’ve got children that are coming up to me after creating a few chapters of their stories and they will tell me about what has happened, which is fantastic. They compare their own scores, and then we’ll look at the pronunciation of the words they are struggling with. The children that are a challenge to get reading even a couple of pages a week are now like ‘I want to go read this’!’” 

With Reading Coach, students are not just passive readers; they are active participants in their learning. They start by choosing their story’s difficulty, sampling each small passage before they generate the story. As they navigate through their passage, they decide where the story goes next. Rather than just reading, they receive real-time feedback that tracks how they score so students can begin to recognize their own reading patterns. With each improvement, they unlock new character options to incorporate into their next story.

Antoinette Hamilton, Digital Teaching and Learning Lead, points to the bright, AI-generated pictures as something that captivates students. These compelling images are customized to align with a student’s unique interests and support students’ active imaginations. Badges and new character options provide a simplified view of what students have accomplished, instilling a sense of confidence that is so important in creating a life-long love of reading.

“There's an enticement: you must read a chapter before seeing what happens next,” says Antoinette Hamilton. “And the stories are so entertaining that they encourage the child to finish that chapter. And because they are involved in the process, it makes children leaders in their own learning.”

New features in Reading Progress also leverage AI to generate and personalize reading passages and assessments, which significantly reduces an educator’s workload while addressing student's specific needs. Using Reading Coach alongside Reading Progress helps Coleman to identify words that students find challenging so that she can incorporate those words into their passages, as well as utilizing Reading Progress to help her students with their reading fluency. 

Making the most of precious learning time

While most educators would love to sit down with each student daily and listen to them read, large class sizes and limited time can make this unrealistic. Reading Coach offers a practical solution by providing reading and pronunciation practice both in and out of school. This frees up educators to allocate their time more effectively, focusing their energies on hands-on, targeted instruction for groups of students who need it the most. 

Antoinette Hamilton sees Reading Progress as a fantastic way of doing quick gap analyses of students to prioritize their unique needs. Reading Progress’s adaptive software listens as students read aloud, providing real-time feedback and adjusting text difficulty to keep readers challenged but not overwhelmed. Meanwhile, educators instantly receive actionable data they can use to modify their instruction when it’s needed the most: right now! What would normally require hours of teacher-time to collate information and input data can now be reinvested in personalizing instruction for each student’s unique needs.

“It’s been a game changer for us,” she says. “We can clearly see what our children's needs are across the Trust. And teachers have been able to reinvest that time back into preparing work for all the children, making their learning more personalized rather than spending 2-3 hours per day being data importers. Reading Progress is like having 30 extra teachers on hand. And that ‘extra teacher’ is invaluable.” 

Ensuring the right to read

Due to their success, Reading Coach and Reading Progress continue to be introduced across the Stour Academy Trust so that all educators can see how these tools fit into their classroom practices. 

Catherine Coleman is excited to broaden and deepen her use of the tools to better target and personalize learning for her students, helping with self-assessment so that they can push themselves further, both with reading comprehension but also pronunciation. But beyond that, she views success as the sheer enthusiasm for reading that is spreading across her classroom.

“I have one student who—on the days that I allocate her Reading Coach— begs me to let her read,” says Coleman. “She is raring to go! And I’m like ‘absolutely!’ I don't even need to say good morning! We look through their Reading Progress data together, and when they see how far they have come, they just grin from ear to ear with pride. Instead of just getting children to read, with Reading Coach and Reading Progress, we are making those children readers, which has been nothing short of astounding.”