One of my favorite ways to begin the school year looks like a competition.

It isn’t.

But I don’t tell my students that.

I give each team one piece of paper, six inches of masking tape, and a pair of scissors.

Their challenge is simple:

Make the longest paper chain in ten minutes.

That’s it.

Immediately, the room gets loud.

Ideas fly.

Paper gets cut.

Tape gets rationed like it’s a precious natural resource.

Someone inevitably realizes, much too late, that perhaps cutting giant strips wasn’t the best strategy.

And ten minutes later, we measure.

There is a winner.

We celebrate.

Then we look at all the chains.

What worked?

What didn’t?

Why are some links enormous while others are tiny?

Which strategies seemed to create more length?

What would you do differently?

And then we move on.

Until the next day.

I pull out the paper, tape, and scissors again and ask:

“If you had another chance, do you think you could do better?”

Every hand goes up.

Of course they can.

They’ve been thinking about it.

They’ve seen what other teams tried.

They know where they wasted paper.

They’ve noticed possibilities they didn’t see the first time.

So I say something else my students hear from me probably far too often:

“Let’s do it!”

Cheers!

And we try again.

The second round is always my favorite.

Almost every chain gets longer.

But something interesting happens.

The team that created the longest chain the first day usually shows the least growth.

Meanwhile, some of the teams with the shortest chains completely transform their results.

Sometimes yesterday’s shortest chain becomes longer than yesterday’s winner.

I love watching them realize that.

Because now we’re not really talking about paper chains anymore.

The first result wasn’t a verdict on what they were capable of doing.

It was information.

They tried something.

They saw what happened.

They learned from their own choices.

They learned from one another.

And when they were given another opportunity, they used what they’d learned to grow.

And we have another very important discussion:

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you learn.

But we’re not finished.

Once we’ve admired the dramatically improved chains, I ask one more question.

“How could these chains have been even longer?”

They start offering ideas.

Thinner strips.

Smaller links.

Less overlap.

Better use of the tape.

Until eventually someone sees it.

“We could put them together.”

Exactly.

And suddenly the question changes.

For two days, they’ve been asking:

Whose chain is the longest?

Now we’re finally answering the the original question:

How can WE make the longest possible chain?

That’s a much more interesting question.

One year, a class was so proud of what they’d made that they wanted to display their chains around the room.

Sure.

I figured we’d tape them up and be done with it.

My students had other plans.

They designed and built cardboard hooks, attached them around the top of the classroom, and draped their chains across them.

The chains are long gone.

The hooks are still there.

They’re actually pretty fabulous.

And maybe that’s fitting.

Because the chain was never really the thing I hoped would last.

I wanted them to experience what happens when we get another chance.

When we reflect instead of simply accepting a result.

When someone else’s good idea becomes something we can learn from rather than something we have to beat.

When mine becomes ours.

Competition can make us want to try.

Reflection can help us grow.

But community changes what’s possible.

Sometimes you win.
Sometimes you learn.
And sometimes we learn enough from one another that winning stops being the most interesting question.

Because community lets us build something none of us could have built alone.