Professionals who work with young people often ask, in training courses, for tools to act on their screen practices. I hear in this request a loneliness at work as much as a need for technique: each person faces alone situations that colleagues, sometimes a few kilometres away, already know how to approach. The practices exist, scattered and rarely recognised; the work of training consists in organising their circulation, between people and between institutions.
The request for tools
“Concretely, what do we offer them?” The question comes up in almost every training course I lead with teams from child protection, specialised prevention or adolescent health centres, and I am careful not to treat it as intellectual laziness. Those who ask it describe, when you take the time to listen, a work situation: teenagers whose practices overwhelm them, a public discourse that keeps repeating that screens are destroying youth and holds them accountable for not preventing it, a hierarchy that expects results, and no colleague with whom to put their own way of working to the test. The request for tools is a request for company as much as for technique.
The work psychologist Yves Clot gives precise words to this situation. In Le travail à cœur (La Découverte, 2010), he locates the source of professional suffering in what he calls “impeded quality”, the impossibility of doing work one could be proud of, and in the disappearance of the places where people of a trade argue among themselves about the criteria of work well done. Health at work, he maintains, depends on the collective: no well-being without doing well, and no doing well without a professional dispute about what doing well means. An educator alone in front of a teenager’s phone lives exactly this: the daily decisions, to confiscate, to negotiate, to let go, engage their conception of the profession, and no space exists in which to confront them with those of others. They then address their request to the training course, as to a court of appeal. Answering it with a protocol handed down from above brings relief for ten minutes; protocols do not survive the first real group.
The practices are already in the room
Every time I begin a training course with a real round of introductions, where each person tells what they already do rather than their job title, the same thing happens. A youth worker has a technical baccalaureate with a cinema option and has never dared to use it with his young people. A neighbourhood team makes videos with secondary school pupils to defuse conflicts between territories. Another accompanies groups of young musicians and edits their music videos. A professional uses private groups on social media to work with teenage girls on what they want to show of themselves. Another does light painting during residential trips. The practices are there, numerous, inventive, and almost all experienced as marginal by those who carry them, because nobody has ever reflected them back to them as skills. The first tool I can give in a training course is that mirror: you already know how to do things, and so do your colleagues.
Circulating rather than handing down
If the competence is scattered, the answer lies in organising its circulation. This is what I try to do with the methods I have gathered in the section Collective intelligence facilitation methods: rounds of introductions that start from practices, mutual-acquaintance exercises in which shared belongings appear over and above institutional labels, world café formats where the solutions of some become the resources of others, contributions written by everyone and displayed for everyone to see. I deliver no content there; I organise the conditions for the content, which is in the room, to start circulating.
In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), Jacques Rancière recounts the adventure of Joseph Jacotot, a French pedagogue who, in 1818, taught Flemish students whose language he did not speak, and observed that they learned without his explanations. Rancière draws from it a critique of what he calls the “explicative order”: to explain something to someone is first of all to demonstrate to them that they cannot understand it by themselves, and the pedagogy of explanation manufactures the very dependency it claims to fill. Against it he sets a postulate of equality of intelligences, which cannot be proven but can be verified, in what people do when they are trusted. The trainer who hands down a protocol replays the explicative order: he demonstrates to the professionals, without meaning to, that they would not be able to find out on their own. By starting from the practices present in the room, I make the opposite wager, and it is verified session after session. There is, moreover, a recognisable moment in these days, the one where somebody says “I thought we were the only ones”: loneliness gives way at that moment, and it is from there that practices begin to change, far more than from reading the memo sheet handed out on the way home.
Networking as an institutional answer
The same logic applies between institutions. In January 2026, I co-constructed and facilitated in Limoges a seminar that brought together youth judicial protection, culture, health, education, justice and their associative partners around psychosocial skills, an assembly I had never seen anywhere else, which I recounted in the article When thirty-five professionals discover their psychosocial skills through creative experience. The participants took away from it one precise thing: they now know whom to call, in which institution, for which type of situation. When a professional alone in front of a teenager’s screens knows that there is a counselling service twenty minutes away, a colleague from the cultural sector who leads video workshops, a health contact who knows the subject, the question itself shifts: “what do we offer them?” becomes “with whom do we offer it?”.
Starting from people’s questions
There remains the method for building these collective moments, and it comes down to one rule: start from the questions people actually ask themselves, rather than from those we ask in their place. In 2023, in the Ain, for a public meeting with families about digital parenting, we had gathered their questions beforehand, and the whole programme came out of them; the speakers answered the room, not a specification sheet. For a professionals’ day, the same principle applies: gather beforehand the concrete situations that put them in difficulty, and build the day on them. The people who come to a meeting built this way come as colleagues, looking for an answer to a question they formulated themselves, and that is why the effects last.
