The Facilitator's Way
A route toward transforming how we work with young people
In 1991, a teacher named John Taylor Gatto gave a speech as he accepted his award as New York State Teacher of the Year. He began as one might expect, thanking others, acknowledging the many other teachers who also deserved to be recognized. But then he did something quite unexpected: he quit. On the spot.
His speech was published in the Wall Street Journal, and it took no prisoners. He wrote:
“I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any…” [Reference]
I had the chance to get to know Gatto in the early 2000s, and he was still in full firebrand mode. He wrote books like Dumbing Us Down, explaining why American education had become so focused on compliance, and just simply so dull. He was a bit bombastic but it was hard to disagree with him. I was not so far out of my own schooling at the time, and I could still feel the boredom and frustration of those years in my bones. I had been gifted with smart, thoughtful teachers ready and eager to help, but they were trained to “deliver instruction” at the front of the room, while I poked my hand with a pencil to try and stay awake.
But my intention is not to repeat a criticism of the system as it has been, in part because people like Gatto have already cut through it so keenly with their writing. Rather, I’d like to point to a transformation that feels central to revitalizing it.
It’s time to evolve from instructor to facilitator.
This may sound like semantics. But I think it has the potential to change how we think about teaching and parenting on a fundamental level. Here’s what the shift from instructor to facilitator could look like:
When we deeply believe that a child has their own wisdom, is trustworthy, and does not need to be like everyone else in order to succeed.
When we see our gifts as adults less in the knowledge held in our brains, and more in the awareness and access we hold, which we can use to open doors for young people and help them on their path.
When our default is to listen rather than speak, to walk alongside rather than lead, to ask questions rather than lecture.
When we believe that coercing children should only be done for limited issues of safety, and not to quell abstract adult fears about “competition in a global economy” or “readiness for the future”, which they are here to invent in ways we cannot imagine anyway.
When we realize that our primary work is on ourselves, growing into our own potential for its inherent value and for the modeling and encouragement it offers those around us, and becoming more self-aware so that we don’t pass so many limiting or traumatic patterns to the next generation.
Then we realize that, while occasional instruction when requested is helpful, and while boundaries of physical and psychological safety are worth holding, most of the time adults should be waiting to see what a child wants to do and wondering how we can help when needed.
If this resonates with you, welcome to the path of being a facilitator.
For the past five years I’ve been teaching summer institutes on facilitation, and from that experience and my own mentors, some principles are starting to emerge. Here are five things that great facilitators know how to do:
Create Safety. Particularly with the skill of being able to slow down.
Connect Through Play. Always available when we learn to follow kids.
Accept Everything. Building on the classic improv rule of “yes and”.
Bring Yourself. An invitation toward self-awareness and courageous vulnerability.
Make Use of Each Other. Using the skill of bridging, to help students discover connections with each other.
For me, the idea of facilitation began to click when I first became an advisor to a group of middle schoolers. Pretty quickly I saw that guiding them through a pre-set social-emotional learning curriculum was often a waste of time, not because the content was bad, but because if taught in some dry predefined sequence, it felt irrelevant and boring.
My students knew, consciously or not, that simply hanging out with their friends would teach them more. But when advisory grew into something else — a place where they could speak openly, maybe more honestly than anywhere else in their lives — everything shifted. It became a place for peers, but “contained” and made safe by the presence of an adult. I realized I could offer something that was hard to find among friends, or online, or at home. It was a group of peers where it was safe to speak your mind, to be vulnerable, to ask each other questions, and yes, to learn social-emotional skills when needed to solve a problem someone was facing.
I’ll tell you one thing: facilitators have a hell of a lot more fun. When I shifted to this mode I spent so much less effort controlling and hardly any to “motivate” anyone. It was not always more relaxing, as I had to get used to the uncertainty of not knowing what topic would emerge. But it made me lean in. The time in advisory felt alive with possibility, and I did too.
None of this means it’s easy. I believe facilitation is a harder skill to master than instruction. It takes knowing the content and having the self-control to not blurt it out when you feel like it, to not use your adult power to coerce students to follow your plan. It takes a lot of self-awareness. I’m certainly a work-in-progress here, and in the advisories I lead, I constantly make mistakes erring on one side or the other, most often slipping back into controlling students or quieting someone down so I can “get back to the topic”, which really means my topic. But I do that less than before, and my students are gracious about it nearly all the time.
I’ll share one last anecdote. In his brilliant book Age of Opportunity, adolescent development researcher Dr. Larry Steinberg points out a classic mistake adults make. When we see teenagers at risk of making a serious mistake, like binge drinking, we often respond by instructing more intensely about the dangers. We assume their mistake is from a lack of knowledge. But most teenagers already know the dangers very well. What they lack is the self-regulation to avoid doing something risky when around peers. And how do they gain that self-regulation? Enter research from Dr. Mona Delahooke on how self-regulation develops: she argues that fundamentally, it comes from co-regulation. Meaning that young people learn self-awareness and self-regulation by being around adults who are good at self-awareness and self-regulation.
In other words: they need about a lot less lectures (instructor mode), and a lot more time with adults who are working on their self-awareness (facilitator mode).
So I make this invitation to you: what would it look to try on the role of facilitator? Here, your primary work is on yourself. You won’t need to spend as much time controlling others. You’ll spend more time listening and observing, finding awe and fascination in the young people around you. It might just open a door to the kind of education young people deserve.
In other news…
Middle School Magic: My book Finding the Magic in Middle School is coming up on its 1 year anniversary this August, and thanks to it I’m in touch with more schools than ever that want to re-envision what middle school could be. It’s so exciting to be part of these conversations and to work for the ultimate underdogs in our K-12 system — middle schoolers!
More books, maybe? In the spirit of Brené Brown’s comment that “unused creativity is not benign”, I’m foolishly outlining a possible next book. It’s for middle schoolers themselves, about challenges they can take on to discover their potential. Of course, at my current rate of writing, it will take somewhere between 2 years and 2 centuries to get it out there!
Blood Match Drive: As I shared in an earlier newsletter, my family is trying to find a life-saving blood donor match for my truly amazing mother in law, who is battling blood cancer. If you have not yet registered in the national match database, all it takes is a free cheek swab to see if you might be someone’s match. It’s all done via mail, it takes about 1 minute, and you may save someone’s life. It’s worth it! Registration here.
So much wisdom and resonance, Chris. I particularly love the last anecdote on co-regulation. Thank you for sharing!
Spot on.
Also, best line: "facilitators have a hell of a lot more fun."