Children’s Discussion Circles: The Adult Role

The Moderator’s Role:

Not as The Controller Not as The Do’er
More Like The Watchful Farmer
Not Knowing What Seeds Are Growing
In This Little Plot . . . That Is Childhood
More Like The Care Taker Than The Builder
. . . Allowing Space . . . Allowing Time . . .
For The Children to Discover Themselves
And we share in That . . . In That We Live

Discussion Topics and Framing The Discussion: But it is not just the topic that matters, it is also how it is approached, for the discussion can easily degenerate into the children just repeating what they have been told or heard not really being connecting to it at all.
Letting It Go Where The Child Takes It: Consider the topic of “Rules & Fairness”. We do not know where the discussion will go or what it will reveal. We step aside and just watch it unfold. Or with a topic like “Death” we do not know what it will be becomes a wide, wide basket and you never know what the kids will pull out of it or how the group interactions will work. We do not know where the children are leading so as the moderator we are like a watchful farmer not knowing what type of seeds are growing in the field right before us.
Group Setup: A mix of boys and girls ages 5-11 year olds. Both. It is best if there are no siblings and that most of the children do not know each other very well; it helps them reveal who they are not just the role they play family and friends.
Group Configurations: As the moderator, watch the way the communications take place in the various group configurations. For example, when older kids are mixed with a few younger ones, they tend to be more articulate and make more of an effort to communicate precisely because the little ones are present. And realize while the older ones can talk quite well and can make good radio, there is an innocent purity the young have, and to some extent, the older ones have left some of that behind. Watch. Listen. Care.
Not Entertainment As Much As Discovery: We often understand our role as discussion leaders by what we should not do? Consider, the 1960’s Show ‘Kids Say The Darnedest Things” with Art Linkletter and then later reprised by Bill Cosby; from the perspective of our approach they made all the mistakes we are trying to avoid. They try to entertain. To laugh at the kids not to understand their world. But even on these shows occasionally discover a bit of a Child’s Inner World as some of it seeps out.