RESTORATIVE PRACTICES – Approach

Restorative Practices is an alternative to using solely punishment to manage misbehavior. Punishment-based approaches are the tradition most of us are familiar with, because they are the basis of our criminal justice system, guided by the idea that punishment, if fair and proportionate, is the best response to crime. In practice this means identifying, prosecuting, and punishing the offender. Often this is done at great cost to society, with little healing for victims and communities and outright harmful effect on offenders and their families.

School discipline has for the most part taken its cue from the criminal justice system. The focus is on punishing wrongdoers with the aim of enforcing behaviors that are safe and non-disruptive. When punishment does not work, misbehaving students may be excluded through suspension or expulsion, with possibly serious long-term harmful consequences to them and society. There is little or no opportunity for social and emotional learning.

Punitive approaches focus solely on two main objectives:

• Teach right and wrong
• Incentivize right behavior

Missing is the skill development component - the most dependable mechanism for ensuring students do the right thing without staff assistance is helping them internalize how their behaviors have affected others.

Restorative practices aims first to build classroom communities that are supported by clear agreements, authentic communication, and specific tools to bring issues and conflicts forward in a helpful way. They provide specific pathways to repair harms by bringing together those who are affected by misbehavior in a dialogue to address concerns, achieve understanding, and come to agreement about setting things right. In addition to serving the cause of fairness and justice, restorative approaches make safer schools and contribute to social and emotional learning.

RESTORATIVE PRACTICES – Redefining What We Believe

Three of the most important shifts to truly embrace the Restorative Practices approach are as follows:

1. The first shift acknowledges that troublesome behavior is normal, and when students behave in troublesome ways they create opportunities to learn important social and emotional skills. What is important is not so much that they got into trouble in the first place, but what they learn along the way. Making things right is a powerful learning experience.

1. The second shift is a departure from the retributive model in which an authority, after taking testimony from the aggrieved party, decides guilt and assigns punishment. In restorative practices the authority figure acts more as a convener and facilitator. The initial investigation is concerned with identifying who was significantly affected by the incident. The facilitator invites them into a circle dialogue or conference and, if they accept the invitation, helps prepare them. During the intervention the problem and its impacts are explored and the group comes up with ideas on how to make things right. Usually this means the students who were the source of the trouble take specific actions that address the consequences of their choices. Consider the difference in outcomes between the authoritarian/punitive approach and the restorative approach: the first breeds resentment, alienation and shame and/or possibly an equally troublesome habit of fearing and submitting to authority; the second builds empathy, responsibility and helps restore relationships and in turn community.

1. The third shift moves the locus of responsibility for well-being of the community from the shoulders of the experts to the community itself. While counseling and similar strategies have their place and are often helpful by themselves, they are immeasurably strengthened when complemented by restorative practices that challenge those who are in the Restorative Processes to share information with each other and to come to agreements as a group.

RESTORATIVE PRACTICES – Authentic Accountability

Restorative Practices starts with the premise that students who misbehave are not aware of the impact of their behavior. Even those who behave in ways that appear intentionally harmful rarely understand the true nature and scope of the hurt they are causing. Part of our job as educators is to help them to learn the consequences of their behavior.

Typical school discipline practices respond to wrongdoing by focusing on the rules that were broken and seek to assert the school’s authority by administering punishment to those who broke the rules. While schools do have legitimate authority, it is important to remind ourselves that the underlying rationale for school rules is to protect people from harm and ensure a safe and functional learning environment. Rather than a bureaucratic perspective that simply assigns punishments for violations of the code of conduct, our focus should be on the real needs of human beings. We must repair the harm done to interpersonal relationships and restore a feeling of security and peace in the school community, which then makes it possible for teachers to teach and students to learn.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

GUIDING PRINCIPLES – Build Community

Restorative Practices moves beyond the single axis of a Punitive-Permissive Continuum – by examining the interplay between two axes, one for control or limit-setting and another for support or nurture, additional possibilities are discovered. The “Social Discipline Window” highlights the four resulting combinations (see below). The “restorative” response to wrongdoing combines both high control and high support. This is the critical choice that is missing on the Punitive-Permissive Continuum. This is when those in authority exercise their control, refusing to accept inappropriate behavior, but do so in a caring and supportive way. The Social Discipline Window suggests that educators can take the best of both axes and achieve high levels of nurturing and support with high levels of expectation and accountability. The idea is to support students and engage them in finding ways to curb their own negative behavior.

By engaging students into their own system of processing, we can hold them accountable in an active way. It is then when we are doing things WITH them, in what is known as a FAIR PROCESS (see below).

GUIDING PRINCIPLES – Take Ownership

The Psychology of Affect, based on the work of psychologist Silvan Tompkins, helps us better understand why human beings act and respond in certain ways and why Restorative Practices work so well. According to Tompkins, human beings have three main categories of “affect:” Positive, Neutral, and Negative. The gateway for any time an individual’s sense of positive affect is interrupted is identified as “shame.” There are four ways in which we react to shame (see Compass of Shame below):

Attack Others: when people blame others for what they’ve done, turning the tables, lashing out verbally or physically.

Attack Self: when people put themselves down and say things like, “I’m so stupid” or “Why can’t I do anything right?”

Avoidance: when people deny, ignore or try to change the subject with humor or other distractions (even drugs/alcohol)  

Withdrawal: when people pull away or feel they want to run and hide – simply refusing to interact with anyone.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES – Acknowledge Impact

The Goals of Restorative Practices that respond to wrongdoing are as follows:

• Foster an understanding of the impact of the behavior
• Seek to repair the harm that was done to people and relationships
• Attend to the needs of victims and others in the community
• Avoid imposing on students intentional pain, embarrassment and discomfort
• Actively involve others as much as possible

When reviewing the goals above, the terms “impact, harm, victims and community” all speak to the outcomes of wrongdoing that are ”Natural.”

GUIDING PRINCIPLES – Repair Harm

Schools and societies have come to the conclusion that if those who misbehave or commit crimes are made to suffer with a punishment, they will be less likely to repeat the harmful behavior. If this were true, then the job of the school disciplinarian would be easy. With each infraction, he or she would impose a certain amount of discomfort. If that punishment failed to change a student’s behavior, then the disciplinarian would simply increase the level of suffering until the inappropriate behavior stopped. However, punishments do not create empathy in students and encourage them to internalize a commitment to behave properly, so soon the inappropriate behavior repeats itself again.

It is the objective of any consequence for the “offender” to truly understand the Natural outcomes of their behavior and therefor repair the harm committed.

Related

The consequence is directly connected to the student’s behavior and its function. The function of the same behavior may be different for each student or even for the same student at different times. Therefore, it is crucial that staff take this into consideration and do not use one consequence for all inappropriate behavior. An example of a consequence that is not related would be having a student go to time out for calling another student a name. A related consequence may be to have the student spend some of their free time (recess or after school) discussing the natural consequences of the action with the teacher (e.g. hurting that person’s feeling, possibly getting called a name back) and writing the offended student an apology.

Respectful

Consequences need to be given with empathy in a respectful voice tone. If not, the student will focus more on the feelings of the adult and perhaps their own feelings of anger resulting from being talked to disrespectfully and not reflecting on their choices. The student that is not treated respectfully often becomes aggressive, passive, resentful, and/or uncooperative and may try to get revenge against the teacher.

Reasonable

Reasonable refers to not providing consequences for a student’s inappropriate behavior that is too severe. It is not reasonable to require that a student lose all their recesses for the week for being silly in class or to lose the next month’s field trip for getting in an argument at lunch. A more reasonable consequence may be to eat lunch in a staff member’s office/classroom to practice appropriate behavior.

RESTORATIVE PROCESSES

Restorative Practices utilizes a continuum of processes that range from informal to formal implementation, allowing for flexibility and responsiveness to individual students, behaviors and incidents.

AFFECTIVE STATEMENTS

Affective Statements are the most informal type of response on the “Restorative Practices Continuum.” The term “Affective Statements” is just another way of expressing your feelings regarding how a specific behavior has impacted you. Understanding and using such statements can foster an immediate change in the dynamic between staff and student. When you tell a student how you feel, you are humanizing yourself to students, who often perceive staff as distinct from themselves. It is this open and honest line of communication that allow students to become more, not less, empathetic. As a result, Affective Statements help build relationships based on a student’s new image of the staff member who cares and has feelings, rather than a distant authority figure.

• Expression of how a specific behavior has impacted you!

• Affective Statements can be both Positive and Negative

AFFECTIVE QUESTIONS

Accepting that conflict is an integral part of life is crucial to adopting Restorative Practices. There will always be misunderstandings, competing needs and interests, and differences of opinion. In a school the students will not always behave as we would like. Dealing with conflict is part of an educator’s job, whether we are comfortable with it or not. Restorative Practices helps to revise our thinking so that we see conflict in a school setting as an opportunity to foster learning and build better relationships.

Affective Questions provides a very clear and concise framework that serves as the tool to help foster participants ownership, acknowledgement of impact and repairing of harm.

*Notice that “Why did you do that?” is absent from the questions above. That question is really not helpful or relevant. Students usually do not understand why they did something wrong. In all likelihood they were simply being thoughtless or impetuous, without any reason. And if they have to dig for a reason it often ends up being rationalization or justification.

IMPROMPTU CONFERENCES

Small negative incidents have the potential to accumulate and have an overall impact in both the classroom and school. The purpose of Impromptu Conferences is to address a problem to keep it from escalating and to resolve the problem quickly, but in a way that gets students actively engaged in expressing their feelings and thinking about the impact of their behavior and about how to resolve the conflict.

Common locations where conflict is present and an Impromptu Conference would be applicable:

• Hallways

• Lunchrooms

• Field Trips

• Assemblies

• Classroom Transitions

• Community Meetings

• Etc.

CIRCLES – Rationale

The basic premise of Restorative Practices is that the increasingly inappropriate behavior in schools is a direct consequence of the overall loss of connectedness in the school community. By fostering inclusion, responsibility, support and cooperation, Circles restore these qualities to the community and classroom and facilitate the development of individual character.

Without the need for discussion, the very structure of circles fosters the following values:

CIRCLES – Purposes

CIRCLES – Types

CIRCLES – Agenda

The sequence of events is important. If you establish a Circle Pattern from the beginning, and use it consistently, students will know what to expect. The following sequence works well, although not every element is included in every circle. Each step in the sequence is discussed below.

Step 1: Arrive (before the circle): Check in with yourself prior to starting the circle. Assess your energy level, your emotional state, physical condition, and anything else that will have an impact on how you show up as a circle keeper. The goal is not necessarily to change anything, but simply to be aware. This awareness of your actual condition can be a powerful ally in circle keeping. Once centered, take this time to set up the physical space so it is prepped when students enter.

Step 2: Opening the Circle: After the students are seated in a circle, it is very helpful to have a routine that you use as a ceremony at the beginning of each circle. This marks a transition from regular classroom time into the “special” non-ordinary time of circle.

Step 3: Teach Circle Guidelines: Remind the class of, or ask them to recall, the norms that reliably help circles function well. Write them on the board as students recall or use posters.

Step 4: Make and Remember Agreements: In addition to the intentions, which apply to all circles, each individual class should be given multiple opportunities to make additional agreements, for example about confidentiality, gossip, and so on. Let the group find its own wording. All agreements should be by consensus. Agreements are not imposed by an authority; they are negotiated by the group.

Step 5: Connection: Do a check in Round with the talking piece. Begin every circle with a check-in round, in which all students are invited to respond to a question. This gives students a chance to put their voice into the circle and feel connected. In the first circles, keep this question very low-risk, and make it progressively more personal at a pace the circle can handle. It can be helpful to ask students for ideas about check-in questions. Relevant questions are preferable…meaning those questions that have to do with the actual situation.

Step 6: Core Activities: See descriptions above

Step 7: Closure Question. Ask students to comment on their experience in the circle. If you have very little time (as is often the case) ask for a two-word checkout: “Say two words about your experience in the circle today.” This “rounds out” the circle.

Step 8: Close the circle: In a way that is intentional—perhaps even a bit theatrical—put away the center, ring a bell, or make some other small gesture to signal moving back from circle time into ordinary time.

CIRCLES – Norms

There are standards for behavior in circles. One of the primary tasks of a circle leader is to teach, reinforce, and act as guardian of these standards.

Speak Your Truth: This means speaking for yourself, talking about what is true for you based on your own experiences. When we speak our truth we are speaking from the heart – we are aiming for eloquence, for choosing words that accurately communicate what we hold to be important.

Respect the Response: We are used to judging other people. Sometimes without even knowing anything about another person we will make assumptions about them. These assumptions can keep us from really hearing what they have to say…and what they have to say may be something that is important and helpful. So when we respect the response we are trying to set aside any stories we may hold about the person. This opens up the possibility of making wonderful discoveries about, and surprising connections with, each other.

Say Just Enough: Keep in mind the limits of time and making room for everyone to speak. This intention is also called “lean expression.” It is related to “Speak Your Truth” because we often find that when we speak carefully we can express ourselves with fewer words than we would normally use, and that when we do our words often have more impact. One way to think about this is, when you are considering what to say, ask, “Does it serve this circle in a good way?”

CIRCLES – Prompts High quality prompts are questions that give the circle its energy and focus. The circle keeper asks a question and invites everyone on the circle to respond (including the circle keeper). Some questions are proactive and are about building and maintaining community. Check-in questions are an example of this. Some prompts are about responding to specific challenges. Restorative questions are a sequence of prompts that guide dialogues leading to understanding the consequences of harmful behaviors, and agreements about how to repair those harms. Closure questions invite reflection on what has happened in the circle. High quality prompts have the following characteristics:

• They are relevant: questions about something that is real and meaningful to the lives of students.
• Often a high quality prompt gives voice to existing unspoken questions that are in the social field; consider this.
• Simple and clear language is used.
• They are open-ended: not yes-or-no questions, but worded in a way that invites deeper inquiry.
• They are about inquiry, not advocacy; discovery, not teaching facts or proving a point.
• Often prompts are related to current events for which time is not planned in the curriculum.
• They support re-storying. Re-storying is the process by which we loosen the grip that stories that we have constructed about each other and our world have on us, thus opening up new possibilities for how we see and experience each other.
• They energize the class and get the attention of students.
• They invite deeper follow-up questions.

RESTORATIVE CONFERENCES

Restorative Conferences occur in response to any incident of wrongdoing where harm has resulted and the need for repair is present.

• Objective: repair the harm by attending to the needs of all individuals directly and indirectly involved.  Those needs may include but are not limited to the following:
• Opportunity to express how they feel
• Acknowledgement about what has happened to them
• Assurance that what happened was unfair and underserved
• Direct contact with others involved to hear them express shame and remorse about their actions, answer questions about the incident and assure them that it won’t happen again

Participants:

• Those actively involved or directly impacted by the incident
• Offenders
• Victims
• Staff
• Supporters
• Parents / Guardians
• Family Members
• Friends
• Staff
• Facilitator
• APSC / Dean

Preparation:

• Select and Invite all participants

• Those directly involved in the incident can nominate anyone they choose to accompany them and act as supporters in the conference.

• Facilitators may also invite individuals who were not directly involved but indirectly affected by the incident.

• Upon confirmation of attendance, facilitators must explain the conference process, objective and benefits, answer any outstanding questions, and begin to build trust and rapport with participants.

• Facilitate pre-conference meetings with all participants

• Prior to bringing all parties together, it is vital for the facilitator to gain knowledge of each participant’s level of accountability, needs requesting to be met, and willingness to take an active role in the conference.

• Participants must admit to their actions related to this incident in order to be eligible for a conference – although some may minimize or displace responsibility, it is essential for all participants to have some presence of accountability.

• Identify date, time, location, seating arrangement, and supplemental documents

***Additional note that additional consequences outside restorative process will be at the discretion of the principal and according to district policy.