Best Practices to Boost Student Engagement with Beanstack’s Tandem Connection
Enhance your students’ reading journey by partnering with your local library using Beanstack's seamless tandem connection! This powerful partnership helps to:
- Increase reading engagement: By linking school and library Beanstack accounts, students can easily track their reading across both platforms, participate in more challenges, and earn more badges and rewards, keeping them motivated and excited about reading all year long.
- Boost student achievement: Beanstack's tandem connection ensures all reading counts toward both school and library challenges, making it a breeze for students to follow their progress and celebrate their achievements.
- Grow your community of readers: Encouraging collaboration and connection between schools and public libraries fosters a unified reading experience that extends beyond the school walls.
Promote your tandem partnership to let students and families know how to link their profiles!
Spread the word
- Share our flyer with students and families to guide them through the easy account linking process.
- Students with an existing family Beanstack account at the library should link to that account instead of creating a new one. Encourage families to help younger students link their profiles to avoid duplicate accounts.
- Students without an existing Beanstack library account will be prompted to instantly create a new account, allowing them to participate in public library challenges.
Spark engagement with incentives and competition
- Add a special “tandem reader” activity badge to your challenge and award students who connect their account.
- Fire up a friendly competition between grade levels to see which class will be the most connected.
- Take it to the next level by challenging another school in your district to see who can get the most readers to link their accounts.
Team up with your public library to maximize student engagement
Collaborate with your school or public library counterpart
- Plan reading challenge roadmaps together. This allows you to promote challenges across both platforms and amplify students’ reading motivation.
- Use the same log types (like minutes)—only reading logs activated on a school or library site will transfer via tandem links.
- Schools and public libraries can run reading challenges at the same time—but we recommend running differently themed challenges in that case. Students will enjoy earning badges and incentives in all active challenges!
Hype one another’s content
- Share special incentives and programming with students and families.
- Keep readers informed and encourage students to stay engaged through social media posts and newsletter blurbs.
- Celebrate the success! Share milestone statistics (like total minutes read during a month or specific reading challenge) and other wins.
If your school is not yet set up to tandem, get in touch with your School Success Manager to begin the process.