By Shenel Lambiro, a member of the Courageous Minority group.

I have invited members of the Courageous Minority group to write about their experiences. Here is another one.

At a conference in October 2025, I saw a talk by architect Takaharu Tezuka, who designed a Tokyo kindergarten around one idea: kids need a real, small dose of danger to grow. The roof doubles as a running track, and trees grow through the building, wrapped in netting so kids can climb. As Tezuka put it, “a small dosage of danger is always needed.” Kids fall there, and land safe by design.

The threshold problem

For eight to ten years, success in school has meant one thing for adolescent learners: follow the instructions, and you will be rewarded. So when we finally hand them real autonomy, a project with no predefined path, we expect relief, the same immediate, uninhibited just go for it energy Tezuka’s kindergartners bring to that net. Instead, many students freeze, and it makes sense. The difference is conditioning: those kindergartners haven’t spent eight years learning to follow instructions and make the safe choice. Our students have. As progressive educators, we believe so strongly in kids’ natural passions that we forget the unlearning has to happen first: the identity a student has spent years building to protect against failure and humiliation doesn’t step aside just because we’ve opened the door.

Anthropologist Victor Turner had a term for this in-between state: liminal space, the threshold between who you were and who you’re becoming. It’s genuinely disorienting, closer to Rumspringa, the Amish rite of passage where teenagers step outside their community’s rules to decide whether to return, than an ordinary growing pain. The old rules stop applying before new ones solidify, and the instinct is to grip harder on what you know, even once it fails. Real change means prying your own white-knuckled grip off a wobbly foundation with courage, a partnering coach, and enough hope to believe new ground will hold. Without prescribed assignments or a guaranteed path to approval, students often stall out.

I’ve come to hear that stalling as Avoidance Discourse, the verbal shields students reach for when open-endedness starts to feel like risk. A few I hear constantly:

• Legacy-or-Bust Language: “If this isn’t groundbreaking, I’m not doing it.” An impossible bar excuses skipping the first step.
• Clock-Stopping Language: “I’m just going to pick this idea I don’t even like, I’m running out of time.” Discomfort gets mistaken for a dead end.
• External Blaming Language: “The room’s too loud, nobody has time to meet with me.” Real friction becomes the whole explanation.

None of these are character flaws. The language is smoke, signaling a nervous system still frozen underneath, blocking real creativity and innovation. We can’t strategize our way out of a state we can’t yet name. Naming it comes first, and once a student can name it, the work still isn’t ideas yet. It’s helping that nervous system come back online.

Co-regulate first, co-ideate second

None of this is about rescuing a student from that disorientation. No coach can do that; trying only prolongs it. The job is helping them tolerate the distress to reach the other side.

The instinct to jump straight to brainstorming (let’s just list some ideas!) rarely works, because the block isn’t a thinking problem yet, it’s a nervous system problem cosplaying as one. It calls for co-regulation first: one steadier nervous system helping another settle, the way a calm adult can quiet a crying toddler without a word. In practice: sit alongside a student, slow down, help them name what they’re feeling. That’s not therapy, it’s making room for the prefrontal cortex to come back online before creative work.

Only after that does real ideation stand a chance. My toolkit for that phase: a bad-idea exercise borrowed from Google’s old 20-percent-time philosophy and improv’s “yes, and” rule, AI used as a wall to bounce ideas off rather than an answer key, dry-erase dice, an audience matrix. Each lowers the stakes enough that a student’s hands start moving before perfectionism catches up.

Holding the line

The hardest part isn’t the tools. It’s resisting the urge to lower the bar when a student is uncomfortable, and holding the line instead, a phrase I borrowed from Mark Gutkowski, who built the model I teach within. It echoes Peter Senge’s idea that growth happens in the gap between where you stand and what you’re capable of, and collapsing it too early costs them that chance.

The coach’s job is to hold that line: high expectation, low-friction support. The net, not the rescue, and not empty air either.

There may not be literal nets and trees to climb in a high-autonomy adolescent classroom, but conceptually, they’re there. I see it in my own coaching, watching kids rediscover the hobbies they loved as kids, playing and sometimes falling, loud and social and joyfully hectic. It’s its own kind of jungle gym, and watching a fifteen-year-old reconnect with that particular joy, the unguarded kind most of them buried somewhere around fifth grade, is one of the best parts of this work. The kids who thrive fastest test the net early and find it holds. The kids who struggle hardest with this liminal phase of values realignment and identity shift tend to be the most anxious and perfectionistic among them, the ones who’ve built an identity out of achievement and self-sufficiency. For them, reaching for the net is humiliating: it means admitting the messy, interdependent, help-needing parts of themselves they’ve spent years learning to hide. That’s not a skills gap; it’s a threat to who they think they are. The trust built when they test the net anyway has a name we recognize: resilience. The alternative is meeting this disorientation later, without a trained coach nearby. Better to build that muscle here, while someone’s still holding the line.

This piece is part of an ongoing action research project this year, testing these coaching moves with real students. Some will hold up, some won’t survive contact with a classroom. I’ll report back later this year on what worked, what I abandoned, and what surprised me.

About the author: Shenel Lambiro is an educator at Avenues: The World School in New York City, where she teaches in the school’s Mastery Learning System. She spent nearly a decade teaching English at a Title I public high school in East Harlem before moving into this work.