An article published earlier this year by Education Week (edweek.org) and written by Ross Brenneman, centers around a Gallup poll of close to a million U.S. students and how engaged those students were with their education. Of course, reading this article sparked my attention and made me think of Chava. Chava is an engagement app that started as an in-house project for our team to engage and connect offsite coworkers with the home office. Over time, it turned into a commercially available Platform as a Service product.
In the article, Brenneman notes, “The survey, conducted by Gallup, found that only half of adolescents report feeling engaged in school, and a fifth are actively disengaged. About 10 percent of students are classified as both disengaged and discouraged. Engagement levels also show a consistent decrease as students get older, bottoming out in 11th grade.” Only half of adolescents currently feel engaged in school! You don’t have to be an educator to know that a disengaged student certainly is not meeting their full potential.
The study also noted that engagement drops by grade level, as indicated in the chart to below.
Education is important to me - always has been - and engagement in one’s education is a leading factor in their success. If we are not engaging children all throughout their student career, what kind of future successes can they expect to have?
It is important for everyone to feel some sense of connection - to feel like part of a team. Chava is a great first step toward re-engaging students and connecting them back into the educational process. In the same way that Chava engages offsite employees, it can be utilized to engage students, teachers, faculty, and parents for the benefit of the students’ education.
To assist in our development of Chava, we polled thought leaders across the country. We asked them to prioritized our product’s features by what they believed would drive engagement in their company. Regardless of company size or field, the features that consistently bubbled to the top were (1) the ability to connect with employees on their mobile devices, (2) the ability to give and receive recognition, and (3) the distribution of company information and news.
These same features all connect directly to students, educational professionals, and parents. Most students have access to some sort of technology where they could utilize Chava—indeed, the majority of students are using cell phones and computers prior to even entering the school system! Children thrive under positive recognition and this is a feature that Chava does exceptionally well. Finally the ability to quickly distribute news from student to teacher, teacher to parent, parent back to teacher, and teacher to student is limitless with Chava.
If you’d like to learn more about our engagement app, Chava, or to discuss the ideas we’ve implemented, feel free to contact me. I’m always ready to talk shop on student engagement and share our ideas and best practices.
Article quoted in blog post: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/03/23/gallup-student-poll-finds-engagement-in-school.html