Team Building Weds - Building Bridges (healing post election)

Our teambuilding activity today focused around a few rather timely topics:

1. How to show good sportsmanship by exhibiting grace and humility after wining or losing a contest.

2. How to work with people that have different opinions and experiences to overcome a challenge.

We began with a quick conversation to highlight some of the problems of such heightened partisan division in our country, especially post election. We noted that people (students, teachers, family and friends) were all entitled to their own beliefs, and that today may be particularly emotional for people based on these beliefs. Our goal of building bridges today was to prove that people of different backgrounds can work together to overcome obstacles - a bridge serves as a great symbol for this.

Students were then asked to think of a situation in which people in their world (neighborhood, state, country, or world at large) were divided and how the bridge they make might serve as a metaphoric means to close the divide and bring those people closer together.

Some situations posed by students included:

• Democrats and Republicans

• Mexico and "the wall"

• persons of different races

• people living in different countries

• people of different belief systems (religions or lack thereof)

• people of different economic means

• people living in big cities vs small cities

• boys and girls

The challenge: build a bridge sturdier enough to span the distance between to tables while supporting the weight of a medicine ball, using only a roll of tape and a stack of newspapers.

We did a quick architectural analysis of how bridge builders use triangles in their design of trusses to add strength and stability to their designs. Then students briefly sketched out their plans before receiving their supplies and beginning to build. In order to offer more time for building we decided to postpone testing the bridges for a later day.

Here is the website that inspired much of this activity.