Student engagement is paramount in education. If students aren’t engaged, they won’t invest in the content, attain mastery, and ultimately apply what they are learning, right?

Just as educators are focused on engaging students, in order to boost employee engagement, there is an increased focus on making workplace fun. Many employers have added ping pong tables, social events, and a variety of other games and activities, but as the author shares in this article, Why the Million we Spend on Employee Engagement Buys us so Little, it turns out there is little impact on long-term employee engagement nor their performance.

“Organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on employee engagement programs, yet their scores on engagement surveys remain abysmally low. How is that possible? Because most initiatives amount to an adrenaline shot. A perk is introduced to boost scores, but over time the effect wears off and scores go back down. Another perk is introduced, and scores go back up — and then they fall again. The more this cycle repeats itself, the more it feels like manipulation.”

As I read this article about the increased focus on employee engagement in the world of work, I thought of how this parallels the attention to engagement in schools.

The lack of impact is a result of what he refers to as a focus on “shallow fun” where the focus is on games and enjoyment and rewards as opposed to deep engagement and purpose in their work.

We have focused on our fair share of “adrenaline shots” in education.  Here are a few common examples:

• When I ask kids what they use their iPads or computers for, I still hear things like “we play games” or “we can go on them when we finish our work” far too often. And we continue to think the latest tools and apps are the ticket to engaging our students- they aren’t.
• I love a good celebration and think that we need them but we have to understand that rewarding a student for reading books with a pizza will not inspire lifelong readers no more than putting on a school dance for students who did well on a standardized test will inspire critical thinkers and problem solvers.
• I have seen some of the most beautiful spaces, fully decked out with the latest technology and beautiful, flexible furniture where educators and students play games and build things that are disconnected from any meaningful or relevant learning experiences. Sometimes it’s fun but not always.

In spite of many efforts to reward and engage learners, the 2016 Gallup poll indicates, as students progress through school, they are increasingly disengaged and lack opportunities to build on their unique strengths, talents, and interests.

If we only focus on short-term, extrinsic rewards to coax kids through low-level tasks and provide technology as games or rewards to motivate learners instead of designing authentic and personal learning experiences that draw on learners curiosity, passion, and interests, we will not truly engage learners.  The data in employee engagement highlights the fun and rewards might get short-term results but have a limited long-term impact.

Just as in the workplace the ping pong table didn’t increase employee engagement over time, the newest app or another pizza party might be fun but will fail to increase deeper learning and true engagement if kids are still turning in the same worksheet in order to reap shallow, short-term rewards.

In Drive, Dan Pink’s shares, “People don’t engage by being managed. They don’t engage by being controlled. The way that people engage is if they get there under their own steam, and that requires sometimes enormous amounts of autonomy over people’s time (when they do what they do), over their technique (how they do it), over their team (who they do it with) and over their task.”

If we primarily focus on “shallow fun” and rewards while opportunities for creation, exploration, and developing connections between people and ideas are limited, we will fail to develop students as learners and thinkers and continue to get abysmal results in pursuit of shallow fun and “engagement”.