Engaging and disengaging

"I am writing to inform you that we as a Faculty have discussed the idea further and are not able to contribute to the project."

thus emailed a school contact, disengaging from our project.  I didn't get the marketing right, not for this public for our research.  The gatekeepers are school teachers, the people that would have to orchestrate the classrooms and timetables while the students juxtapose their learning with their own performed ideas. And my targeting email got it wrong. 

However, my colleague, Gill has been working on this and written a one page hand-out that starts:

JuxtaLearn is a large EU-­funded project that aims to help students overcome the barriers presented by Tricky Topics which often cause students to give up a subject. During initial trials, 74% of students showed progression in their quiz results over the course of the day. The JuxtaLearn Workshops can be run as a series of sessions. All sessions and supporting tools are free to schools. The first session is with researchers and teacher(s) and takes place before the student sessions. Student sessions are flexible; they can run over a full school day, or split into smaller sessions with activities taking place pre-­‐workshop following the flipped classroom approach.

Then she outlines the preparatory session for teacher training and professional development.  I particularly like how she shows the radar charts that reveal gaps in student understanding, indicating that teachers will learn to write effective quiz questions that will result in such useful charts.

Links to our videos are

• JuxtaLearn tricky topic tool and quiz: https://vimeo.com/109829640 (2 minutes 56 secs)
• JuxtaLearn workshop (chemistry): https://vimeo.com/109827064 (3 minutes 21 secs)
• Juxtaposing performance and learning :  https://vimeo.com/109331885 (3 minutes)

So we'll try sharing this information with other schools.  Will they engage?

Previous literature on engagement

I review engagement literature here because Andrew comments:

"who can tell you how to engage in general, becuase as far as I know there has been little work on systematically analysing engagement either qualitatively and quantitaivley"

I'm considering literature that addresses different articulations of engagement:

• involvement,
• participation,
• commitment,
• collaboration and
• motivation.

Previous research on engagement focused on outcomes and products and seems one-sided, focusing on for example,

• employee engagement with work (Saks, 2006, Schaufeli et al., 2006),
• student engagement with learning (Handley et al., 2007, Robinson and Hullinger, 2008, Arbaugh, 2000),
• client engagement with child welfare services (Yatchmenoff, 2005)
• customer engagement with a brand (Mollen, 2010).

These approaches apparently use engagement as a one-way relationship, rather than share knowledge.

However, consultancy practitioner literature advises consultants how to engage to with clients to get and share information. Axelrod (2002) suggested four underlying principles that would produce an engaged organisation:

• widening the circle of involvement through people and ideas,
• connecting people to each other,
• creating communities for action and
• embracing democratic principles.

Block advised setting out the room in a manner than encouraged people to engage with each other.  i.e. adapt the conditions of the setting or environment and you'll get different behaviour.

Involvement
How does engagement differ from involvement?
Barki et al suggested involvement is a separate construct from participation and refers to a psychological state, although they do not elaborate on what that state might be.  For Saks, job involvement relates to self-image, and to how employees perform their jobs (Saks, 2006 p. 602).    Axelrod, (2004) states that involvement is “working with others to get things done” thus implying that involvement and engagement may be similar phenomena (Axelrod et al., 2004 p. iv). In conclusion, in the sense that involvement is working with other people, it is highly relevant to engagement.

Commitment
The term engagement has the sense of 'engagement with' someone, so implies some form of relationship that might require commitment. Commitment may affect sense making and the social structure (Weick, 1995). An organisational context with visibility (behaviour is public), volition (with an element of choice) and irrevocability (behaviour cannot be undone) “should generate stronger commitment” (Weick, 1995 p. 159). Nevertheless, commitment is “also a liability because it reduces flexibility, learning and adaption”. However McCormick, who developed a survey tool to measure the impact that participation in large-group intervention had on attitudes and beliefs of participants, found engagement increased commitment (McCormick, 1999) suggesting engagement leads to commitment. Perhaps we can collect data on commitment as a measure of engagement.

Collaboration
Collaboration may also be related to engagement. Collaboration is what organisations do together and is closely related to cooperation (Huxham, 1993).  Cooperation and collaboration both mean “something to do with working together,” (Huxham, 1993 p. 5) which is similar to Axelrod’s involvement being the art of bringing people together (Axelrod, 2001). Huxham uses the concept of “collaborative advantage” (Kanter, 1994) to solve problems together (Huxham and Vangen, 2005). Collaborative advantage, meaning being a good partner, arises from organisations pooling resources and expertise for a common aim, creating synergy. A reason to discard Huxham’s collaborative model is that it focuses on cooperative relationships that have complementary rather than shared goals.

And it depends whether we're researching engagement between individuals or between organisations.  If the stakeholders for this research project are individuals, then data from a collaborative model of organisations is not relevant.

Motivation
Marcum, comparing motivation with engagement, points out that people choose to be engaged. He reviews literature on engagement from learning theory, information management and philosophy, concluding that “An engagement mindset offers a more useful model for cultivating mutually beneficial working relationships with staff and colleagues ... engagement is based on learning and involvement” (Marcum, 1999  p. 46). Marcum’s perspective concurs with Hartwick and Barki’s findings that participation and involvement depend on whether IT system use is mandatory or voluntary (Hartwick and Barki, 1994). Previous discussion explored different constructions of engagement, but did not identify an existing conceptual framework for the phenomenon. We still do not understand the quality of the engagement, what produces it, how and whose engagement leads to effectiveness.

Participation I look at participation in a separate posting because it merits special attention.

We need research that looks at the process of engagement and how interaction between people builds commitment

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