--- title: "Facilitator sheet" url: https://cavendish.space/facilitator.html updated: 2026-09-17 license: CC0-1.0 license_url: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ --- # Cavendish Cards — Facilitator Sheet A deck for naming sensory and niche-construction needs. Point at a card, or lay a few. No reading needed to play. **Two rules hold the whole thing up.** - **No scoring.** No points, no matching, no right answer, no winning. There is no wrong card and no wrong hand. - **The person controls sharing.** Turning a card up is the person sharing it; the turn is the consent. You don't turn their cards over for them. ---- ## Seven ways to play **Show me** — *early years, anyone* Pick the one card that's you right now. That's the whole game. Say back what you see: "Buzzy today. Okay." Under a minute. **Build my day** — *a person and a facilitator* Lay a place, a weather, and a couple of what-helps cards. A sentence in pictures — *the cave, buzzy, headphones.* You've been handed a design brief. Build the conditions. Two to five minutes. **Class weather** — *a whole group* Everyone lays a weather card face-up. The room's weather becomes visible. No one is named. Nothing is scored. Two minutes, and the group has a shared word for the day. **Map the edges** — *older learners, or a group* Every day has edges — the jumps between one thing and the next, where a mind in deep focus gets yanked to something new. Those crossings are where the day gets hard, and the strain is the *jump*, not the person. Lay the day out left to right, then find its edges: focus → talking, rest → joining in, home → out the door. On each edge that bites, lay a lily pad — *slowly, not yet, i need a minute, coming back* — the stepping stone that would let you land gently instead of being pulled across. A what-helps card can pad a crossing too: *tell me first* is the one that most often does. You're not mapping what's wrong with you; you're padding the crossings so the day fits. Designed *with* the person, never *at* them. Ten to fifteen minutes. **Play as the environment** — *staff training* Deal a table of what-helps cards with needs that conflict — room to move against less talking, just one person against a full group. Build one habitat that holds them all. You'll feel neurological pluralism instead of hearing about it. Twenty minutes. **Moving between** — *anyone, across a day* Lay places, interaction moods, and lily pads left to right — the cave, ready now, the campfire, i need a minute, back again. A rhythm of alone and together, mapped in cards. Move one when the rhythm shifts. This is intermittent collaboration: nobody stays in one place all day. **Build a niche** — *a learner, or a group* Lay the what-helps that would make a space fit you — a den, less to look at, the right temperature — with the habitat card at the center. A design brief for the room, not a snapshot of a day. Then build it, on any budget — [Zone a room](https://cavendish.space/rooms.html) works out which zones the space can already hold, and prints signs for the door. ---- ## Sharing belongs to the person The turn of a card is the consent. It plays out three ways: - **Kept** — the spread stays face-down. Nothing is read until the person turns something up. - **Shown by invitation** — the person hands the spread to one person they pick. A deliberate act, not standing permission. - **Ambient only** — in group play, only the room's weather shows. No individual's cards, ever. Interaction cards are the exception — they're made to be shown. In the web deck that choice is two buttons. **Copy for a journal** is the whole spread — the date, the questions, the note box — and it belongs to the person. **Copy to share** is the cards alone. Ask for the shared one by name: it leaves out the note, the date, and the interaction, kind words and grower cards, which are worn or kept rather than sent. ---- ## When a person lays "stuck" Stuck is a lily pad. It's a place to land, not a failure. Read it as information: something in the environment isn't fitting yet. Don't push the person across. Ask what would help them land — or offer a what-helps card and let them choose. ## How to respond, in three moves 1. **Mirror it back.** Name what you see, plainly. No praise, no fixing, no interrogation. 2. **Reach for the environment, not the person.** A card is a request to change the conditions. Change them. 3. **Leave the sharing with the person.** What they turn up is theirs to turn up. ## A pile of spreads after an event Nobody can hold twenty spreads in their head. [Group access needs](https://cavendish.space/group-needs.html) turns a pile into one short brief for the room, written so you can hand that page to whatever AI you already use and have it do the sorting — under rules that keep the room as the subject and never count anybody. Merge and strip first; the page says what to take out, and why. ---- **If it's not working, it's not the person.** **Not an AAC board.** It sits alongside a person's real communication system and never replaces it; a spread cannot carry somebody's words. [Why that matters](https://cavendish.space/not-aac.html). **Not a screening tool.** A spread is the person telling you something — not you assessing them. No pathology paradigm, no deficit ideology, no behaviorism, no emotional sorting: a card names a need, never a symptom, a target, or a level. Broken systems, not broken people. The deck exists so a person can shape the space around them — and so the people beside them can read what they need without asking a person to explain in words they may not have. ---- Free to use, print, and adapt. [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Home: https://stimpunks.org/projects/cavendish-space-project/