A little friendly competition goes a long way in building a culture of reading at your school or district. We've found that competitions are the common denominator among Beanstack schools with strong engagement.
Beanstack’s data insights make it easy to leverage competition to motivate everyone from student readers to principals. And our built-in leaderboards for students stoke friendly competition among friends, grades, and schools. Read on to learn how to inspire friendly competition in your community!
Using Beanstack Data to Drive Competition
Creating a reading competition can be as simple as checking your Beanstack leaderboard and highlighting a top classroom on the morning announcements—or as elaborate as you wish! Just follow these simple steps.
First, scope your competition
- For district implementations, school competitions are a must (but you can also run student and staff competitions). Check out your district insights and reports to find top-performing schools by minutes logged or active participation.
- For administrators working at the building level, classroom competitions rule (and are great for engaging teachers)! Get data in a snap (for grade- and student-based competitions too) in our insights leaderboard.
- Teachers—your insights leaderboard is scoped to your rostered students, making it easy to run a competition among your student readers or multiple classes.
Tip: Get star principals or teachers in the game to drive competition among their peers.
Then, get the word out
- At the district level, use communication channels that reach principals, teachers, parents, and students. Email announcements, regular meetings, and social media are great options.
- At a school, use morning announcements, hallway signs or bulletin board, and assemblies to hype your competition.
- In your classroom or library, bulletin boards are huge, and in-class celebrations and shoutouts make an impact.
Tip: Use our leaderboard templates to make promoting your competition a breeze.
Finally, mix it up
- With any competition, find ways to get new groups and readers into your celebration rotation.
- Take advantage of Beanstack’s flexible data insights and reporting to change the parameters of your competition. Minutes, books, participation rates, reviews, activities and progress toward community goals are all great options.
Leverage Beanstack’s Leaderboards
Beanstack’s built-in leaderboards inspire students to work together with their peers to amp up their reading efforts.
Friends and Leaderboards
Beanstack sites with our friends and leaderboards functionality activated see 28.36% higher participation rates—and 55.27% more reviews written—than those without.
Students can send and accept friend invitations and view one another’s reading stats, badges, and logs. Learn more about how friends and leaderboards work, and nudge your students to add each other as friends! Teachers can friend each other, too!
Tip: Add an activity badge to a reading challenge that tasks readers with adding another student as a friend.
Grade and School Leaderboards
All students have access to school-wide grade-based leaderboards that show top grades. Schools that are part of a district implementation in Beanstack have access to district-wide school-based leaderboards that show top schools. Read more about leaderboards here.