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What are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying

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What are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying

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Greater Good

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All 50 U.S. states require schools to have a bullying prevention policy.

But a policy, alone, is not enough. Despite the requirement, there's been a slight uptick in all forms of bullying during the last three years. Bullying can look like experienced basketball players systematically intimidating novice players off the court, kids repeatedly stigmatizing immigrant classmates for their cultural differences, or a middle-school girl suddenly being insulted and excluded by her group of friends.

Bullying occurs everywhere, even in the highest-performing schools, and it is hurtful to everyone involved, from the targets of bullying to the witnesses-and even to bullies themselves. October is National Bullying Prevention Month, so it's a good time to ask ourselves: What are the best practices for preventing bullying in schools? That's a question I explored with my colleague Marc Brackett from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in a recent paper that reviewed dozens of studies of real-world bullying prevention efforts.

As we discovered, not all approaches to bullying prevention are equally effective. Most bullying prevention programs focus on raising awareness of the problem and administering consequences. But programs that rely on punishment and zero tolerance have not been shown to be effective in the U.S.; and they often disproportionately target students of color. Programs like peer mediation that place responsibility on the children to work out conflicts can increase bullying. (Adult victims of abuse are never asked to "work it out" with their tormentor, and children have an additional legal right to protections due to their developmental status.) Bystander intervention, even among adults, only works for some people-extroverts, empaths, and people with higher social status and moral engagement. Many approaches that educators adopt have not been evaluated through research; instead, educators tend to select programs based on what their colleagues use.

We found two research-tested approaches that show the most promise for reducing bullying (along with other forms of aggression and conflict). They are a positive school climate, and social and emotional learning.

Building a positive school climate

School climate can be difficult to define, though possible to measure. It is the "felt sense" of being in a school, which can arise from a greeting, the way a problem is resolved, or how people work together; it is a school's "heart and soul," its "quality and character." Schools with a positive climate foster healthy development, while a negative school climate is associated with higher rates of student bullying, aggression, victimization, and feeling unsafe.

The elements of a positive climate may vary, but may often include norms about feelings and relationships, power and how it is expressed, and media consumption. Social norm engineering is a conscious process that builds a positive culture among student peers and school adults that becomes self-reinforcing. Like a healthy immune system, a positive school climate promotes optimal health and reduces the chances of dysfunction or disease.

Leadership is key to a positive climate. Is bullying minimized as a "normal rite of childhood," or is it recognized as the harmful peer abuse that it is? Do leaders understand that uninterrupted, severe bullying can confer lifelong negative consequences on targets of bullies, bullies, and witnesses? Are school leaders committed to promoting all children's positive psychological health, or do they over-rely on punishing misbehavior? Can they discern between typical developmental processes that need guidance versus bullying that needs assertive intervention? Are educators empathic to their students, and do they value children's feelings?

Next, are teachers prepared to deal with bullying? Students consistently report that teachers miss most incidents of bullying and fail to help students when asked. A majority of teachers report that they feel unprepared to deal with classroom bullying. Some teachers bully students themselves, or show a lack of empathy toward children who are bullied. Teachers report that they receive little guidance in "classroom management," and sometimes default to the disciplinary strategies they learned in their own families growing up.

However, reforming school climate should involve all stakeholders-students and parents, as well as the administrators and teachers-so a school's specific issues can be addressed, and the flavor of local cultures retained. School climate assessments can be completed periodically to track the impact of improvements.

Advancing social and emotional learning

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is well known, and involves teaching skills of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and relationships management. (Full disclosure: Brackett and I are affiliated with the SEL program RULER.)

Evidence-based SEL approaches have been shown to deliver cost-effective, solid results. Numerous meta-analyses, research reviews, and individual studies of hundreds of thousands of K-12 students show that SEL improves emotional well-being, self-regulation, classroom relationships, and kind and helpful behavior among students. It reduces a range of problems like anxiety, emotional distress, and depression; reduces disruptive behaviors like conflicts, aggression, bullying, anger, and hostile attribution bias; and it improves academic achievement, creativity, and leadership.

A study of 36 first-grade teachers showed that when teachers were more emotionally supportive of students, children were less aggressive and had greater behavioral self-control, compared to the use of behavior management, which did not improve student self-control. One meta-analysis showed that developing emotional competence was protective against becoming a victim of bullying; social competence and academic performance were protective against becoming a bully; and positive peer interactions were protective against becoming a bully-victim (one who has been bullied and bullies others). A series of longitudinal studies showed positive effects into midlife (e.g., fewer divorces, less unemployment) and even cross-generational effects of early SEL. Compared to a matched control group, the children of the adults who participated in the Perry Preschool Project had less criminal involvement and higher educational and employment achievement. A cost-benefit analysis of six SEL programs found them to be good investments, with $11 saved for every $1 spent.

Teachers also benefit from SEL. Those with emotional and social skills training have higher job satisfaction and less burnout, show more positive emotions toward their students, manage their classrooms better, and use more strategies that cultivate creativity, choice, and autonomy in their students. Teachers report that they want more SEL support to cultivate their own emotional and social skills, and to better understand their students' feelings. But few teacher training programs focus on growing the teachers' emotion regulation skills.

Bullying at different age levels

SEL approaches should be developmentally wise, since what is salient and possible for children changes at different ages.

For example, preschoolers are expelled from school at the highest rates of all, but the neurological hardware for their self-control is only just developing. Only then are the connections between the emotion circuitry and the more thinking regions of the prefrontal cortex beginning to be myelinated (insulated for faster connectivity), something that will take until the mid 20s to complete. An SEL program like PATHS or RULER that teaches young children language for feelings, and strategies for thinking before acting, can develop better self-regulation.

Sometimes, adults confuse normal developmental processes with bullying. For example, children begin to reorganize their friendships midway through elementary school, something that can naturally create hurt feelings and interpersonal conflict. It should not be misconstrued as bullying, though, which involves intentional, repeated aggression within an imbalance of power. Normal development also includes experimenting with power, and these normal dynamics should be guided safely toward developing a healthy sense of agency, rather than a hurtful exertion of power over someone else.

Finally, the onset of puberty marks the beginning of heightened sensitivity to social relationships, an especially important time to cultivate skills for kinder, gentler relationships. Unfortunately, this is the period when bullying spikes the highest. And while some strategies work well for younger children (for example, advising them to "tell a trusted adult"), this option may fail with teens, and the breakpoint seems to be around the eighth grade. Older teens require approaches that are less didactic and leverage their need for autonomy, while affirming their values and search for meaning. Physiologically, the brain changes during puberty confer a second chance for recalibrating their stress regulation system. That opportunity should be constructively seized.

Approaches should also take into account individual differences between children. Even SEL programs can stumble here, over-relying on just one or two emotion regulation strategies, like breathing or mindfulness. But children vary in their temperaments, sensitivities, strengths, and vulnerabilities. The best SEL approaches guide students toward discovering strategies that work best for them-strategies that are emotion- and context-specific, personalized, and culturally responsive. This approach requires unconventional flexibility on the part of the educators.

And, finally, approaches work best if they are not standalone pedagogies or from kits that end up in the classroom closet at the end of the year. In order to be effective, skills should become fully embedded across the curricula and the entire day, in all settings, and implemented by all adults-in other words, infiltrating the ecosystem. Only approaches used and taught as intended are successful.

Schools can't do this alone

Families matter, too. Bullying in schools sometimes arises from harsh parenting practices or sibling bullying at home.

Even parents' workplaces matter. Adults experience bullying in their workplaces at about the same rate as children in schools, and it's even found among teachers and in senior living communities. In other words, bullying is not just a childhood problem; it is a pervasive human problem. And children are not buffered from the wider social world-bullying of children who belong to groups targeted in the national political discourse has spiked on playgrounds nationwide.

Ultimately, we need a substantial shift in our mindsets about the importance of children and their feelings. Children are more likely to thrive when we nurture their humanity, and offer them language and strategies and values to help them identify, express, and, thus, regulate their feelings. When parents, teachers, and administrators gain new awareness into the complex roots of bullying and adopt new strategies for addressing it, schools can lead the way. The kids are counting on us.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in Schools?

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All 50 U.S. states require schools to have a bullying prevention policy. But a policy, alone, is not enough. Despite the requirement, there's been a slight uptick in all forms of bullying during the last three years.

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12 Indicators of Restorative Practices Implementation

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12 Indicators of Restorative Practices Implementation

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12 Indicators of RP Impementation_Checklists 2019.8.21

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NOTE REGARDING DOCUMENT LINKS: Depending on your computer and browser settings, clicking the document links may or may not immediately launch the document. If the document does not launch you will need to locate it in your internet downloads folder and open it from there.
ELECTRONIC VERSIONS of RESOURCES PRINTED IN DELTA KINDERGARTEN KITS

Routine Based Support Guide (weblink)

Peer Conflict, Mean Behaviour and Bullying (PDF)

Peer Conflict, Mean Behaviour and Bullying (DOC)

Crisis Management (PDF) Crisis Management (DOCX)

Tips for Successful Transitions (PDF)

Behaviour as Communication and Crisis Prevention Model (PDF)

Tips for Increasing Compliance (PDF) Tips Increasing Compliance (DOCX)

Roles and Responsibilities of Teachers and Education Assistants (weblink)

OTHER RESOURCES CURRENTLY IN USE IN DELTA:

1. Second Step: A research based Social Emotional Learning program published by the non-profit Committee for Children, the newest version of Second Step offers an excellent base for teaching Skills for Learning/Self-regulation, Empathy/Emotion Recognition, Emotion Management, and Problem Solving. It is highly recommended as a foundation for Social Emotional Learning because it offers constructive ideas to teach the language, processes and skills needed for a positive, empathic classroom. The lesson activities are appropriate for Kindergarten students with visuals, puppet plays, movement games and breaks, music, and lots of opportunities to pretend and practice.
http://www.cfchildren.org/second-step/kindergarten-grade-5/kindergarten.aspx
For teachers with access to a Second Step kit, don't forget to register your kit online at http://www.secondstep.org/ to access the many online materials including videos, posters, parent letters and more.

2. Fun Friends: A different SEL curriculum focused on developing resiliency that offers a nice complement to Second Step. Particularly useful are lessons on Being brave, and positive thinking (using the language of Red and Green thoughts). The Fun Friends framework of good friends is also very useful Friends Listen, Friends Help, Friends Smile). A focus on Friendship following Second Step implementation can really build students Social skills Teachers who have attended the training workshop are also able to distribute copies of a family book that is highly recommended, especially for families of children with anxiety, or challenges with emotion management.
http://www.friendsrt.com/funfriends.html
3. Mind Up: Teaches social and emotional learning skills that link cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training. Students learn about how their brains and some strategies to self-regulate and mindfully engage in focused concentration. Kindergarten classrooms will find the Core Practice of Deep Breathing and Relaxation a helpful addition to their daily routine. However, most of the lessons rely heavily on class discussion which poses a challenge to full implementation with young children.
http://thehawnfoundation.org/
4. First Step to Success: A research validated early intervention program designed to divert at-risk children from a path leading to antisocial behaviour. The program has two components - the school intervention involves the target child, peers, and teachers It teaches an adaptive prosocial pattern of school behaviour. The second component is a home intervention program that teaches parents key skills for supporting and improving their child's school adjustment and performance
http://www.firststeptosuccess.org/index.htm
5. Circles Curriculum - Intimacy and Relationships and Stop Abuse are two different programs which we have in Delta for loan. This program was developed for children and young adults with developmental disabilities. These curricula include real-life demonstrations. Circles: Intimacy and Relationships teaches students social and relationship boundaries and relationship-specific social skills, using a simple multi-layer circle diagram to demonstrate the different relationship levels students will encounter in daily life. Circles: Stop Abuse teaches students how to recognize and avoid threatening or potentially abusive situations.
https://www.stanfield.com/products/family-life-relationships/social-skills-circles-curriculum-intimacy-relationships/
6. Kids in My Class This resource has been developed by Delta School District Special Programs staff to support teachers. It includes practical strategies and resources on many topics including: Special Programs FAQs, Aboriginal, ESL, Special Needs and Behaviour.

Kids In My Class III (PDF)

7. Kindergarten Learning Project Observation Rubrics - These assessment frameworks emphasizes the teacher's role in supporting learning. It includes Social responsibility, as well as 4 other developmental continua: Oral Language, Emergent/early Reading and Viewing, Emergent/early Writing and Representing and Numeracy
https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/early_learning/fdk/klp/welcome.php
Draft Self-Regulation Continuum is also available for teachers to try

Self Regulation Continuum (PDF)

OTHER WEB RESOURCES

1. Technical Assistance Centre on Social Emotional Interventions for young children: takes the research that shows which practices improve the social-emotional outcomes for young children with, or at risk for, delays or disabilities and creates FREE products and resources to help decision-makers, caregivers, and service providers apply these best practices in the work they do every day. Most of these free products are available right here on their website immediate viewing, downloads and use.
http://www.challengingbehavior.org/
Includes Teaching Tools For Young Children and many more resources on programming for children with challenging behaviours.

2. The Canadian Self-Regulation Initiative -the work of Stuart Shanker, this website has been established first and foremost to help parents and educators 'reframe' a child's behaviour: to understand the reasons why a child might be having trouble paying attention, ignoring distractors, inhibiting his impulses, modulating his emotions, and overall, maintaining a state of being calmly focused and alert."
http://www.self-regulation.ca
3. Canadian Self-Regulated Learning Consortium are researchers who actively collaborate with educators, schools, and learners to improve learning, collaboration, and student engagement.
http://srlcanada.ca/
4. Dr. Dan Siegel: Explore the neuroscience behind and the theoretical framework of Interpersonal Neurobiology. Includes some free vides and other resources.
http://drdansiegel.com/

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NOTE REGARDING DOCUMENT LINKS: Depending on your computer and browser settings, clicking the document links may or may not immediately launch the document. If the document does not launch you will need to locate it in your internet downloads folder and open it from there.

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What Teachers Need to Know about Restorative Justice

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What Teachers Need to Know about Restorative Justice

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weareteachers.com

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Most schools use punitive discipline systems: Break a rule and you're punished with detention or even suspension. But these systems can interrupt a student's education and lead to further bad behavior. They also don't provide kids with any skills for working through issues with others. That's why some schools are trying restorative justice instead. Here's what you need to know about it.

What is restorative justice in schools?

Restorative justice is a theory of justice that focuses on mediation and agreement rather than punishment. Offenders must accept responsibility for harm and make restitution with victims. Indigenous people like the Maori have used this system successfully in their communities for generations.

In recent years, various countries have tried the practice in an effort to make their criminal justice systems more effective. This led to the exploration of restorative justice in schools, especially those with high rates of student misbehavior.

In California, Oakland Unified School District began using the program at a failing middle school in 2006. Within three years, the pilot school saw an 87% decrease in suspensions, with a corresponding decrease in violence. The practice was so successful that by 2011 OUSD made restorative justice the new model for handling disciplinary problems.

What are the basic practices of restorative justice?

"Restorative justice is a fundamental change in how you respond to rule violations and misbehavior," said Ron Claassen, an expert and pioneer in the field. "The typical response to bad behavior is punishment. Restorative justice resolves disciplinary problems in a cooperative and constructive way." Schools like OUSD use a three-tiered approach focused on prevention, intervention, and reintegration.

Restorative Justice Tier I: Prevention

The first tier is all about community-building as a preventive measure. Teachers or peer facilitators lead students in circles of sharing, where kids open up about their fears and goals. "The circles are based on indigenous practices that value inclusiveness, respect, dealing with things as a community, and supporting healing," explains David Yurem, OUSD's first program manager. "Kids really resonate with this process. I've seen kids share things that I was extremely surprised by, like eighth grade boys talking about what scares them. To seem weak in their world is a life-threatening thing, so I was really impressed."

Students play an integral part in creating the climate of Tier I. The teacher and students start the year by creating a classroom respect agreement. Everyone agrees to be held accountable. The contract is an extremely effective way of maintaining harmony in the classroom. "Teachers can't say, 'Here are my rules, sign them,'" says Yurem. "That doesn't work. There's no ownership for the students in that. If the children help create the rules, then they have ownership. And if they break them, they can be referred back to them."

Restorative Justice Tier II: Intervention

Tier II comes into play when students break rules and someone has caused harm to someone else. In traditional justice, this is when punishments are meted out. Restorative justice instead turns to mediation. The offending student is given the chance to come forward and make things right. They meet with the affected parties and a mediator, usually a teacher.

The mediator asks nonjudgmental, restorative questions like What happened? How did it happen? or What can we do to make it right? Through their discussions, everyone learns about what happened, why it happened, and how the damage can be fixed. "They'll talk about what can be done to repair the harm," Yurem shares. "They'll come up with a plan and fulfill that plan. And hopefully, the relationship will be stronger. It's really all about relationships-building and repairing them."

Restorative Justice Tier III: Reintegration

Tier III aims to help kids who've been out of school due to suspension, expulsion, incarceration, or truancy. Returning to school life can be a real challenge in those cases. Many students in traditional environments quickly re-offend or drop out again. Restorative-justice practices seek to reduce this recidivism by providing a "wraparound" supportive environment from the start. They acknowledge the student's challenges while promoting accountability and achievement.

Does restorative justice really work in a classroom?

So what does all this look like in a real-world school or classroom? Roxanne Claassen was one of the first teachers to try restorative justice in school. She'd seen the success her husband, Ron, had using it in his work with the juvenile criminal justice system. Roxanne decided to try the model in her Fresno, California, elementary school classroom.

Claassen worked with students to write a respect agreement. Together they determined how they would treat each other to create a positive classroom community. If a student violated the agreement, Roxanne reminded them of it and asked if they wanted to honor it. Ninety percent of the time, the student did, and the problem ended there.

If the problem continued, Claassen worked together with the student to try to find a solution. "You say, 'Here's the problem. What can we do to fix it?' The message you're sending the child is, 'I'm not against you, I'm for you. I want you to succeed,'" emphasizes Claassen.

A Real-Life Example

In one instance, two of Claassen's eighth grade boys broke a paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. At first, no one admitted responsibility. Claassen told them, "We have a restorative discipline system here, so we accept responsibility and can make things as right as possible. But we can't do that unless someone accepts responsibility."

The boys admitted they'd done it. Claassen called a meeting with all the people involved or affected by the incident-the boys, their parents, and the custodian. They talked about what happened, and everyone had a voice. "In that process, the custodian had a chance to let the students know how difficult it is to replace a dispenser," said Claassen. "It gave the students incredible knowledge of a real-world situation in a way a suspension never could, and relationships improved instead of being damaged."

One of the students couldn't afford to pay to replace the dispenser. So the student himself suggested that he could work with the custodian to pay his debt. He enjoyed it so much that he continued to help the custodian long after he'd finished his restitution!

Does restorative justice address racial justice?

OUSD's Restorative and Racial Justice homepage is clear: "There is no restorative justice without racial justice." To begin with, this means honoring the indigenous roots of the practice. It also means encouraging program participants to consider how racial privilege and prejudice affect them all.

The Center for Court Innovation runs restorative justice programs in five underserved Brooklyn schools. They're trying to address the subject through a racial justice lens. "Restorative justice is about accountability and repairing harm," they note. "What about accountability for the system that has produced these underserved and essentially segregated schools and then punishes the kids for reacting to that neglect?"

In other words, schools must address racist policies and practices along with restorative justice efforts. They can use the system to help historically privileged students make amends to the victims of long-standing prejudices. This is an extremely tricky topic and a fairly new one. Try these resources to learn more:

What are the potential benefits of restorative justice?

If you're thinking that this sounds like a lot of work, especially up front, you're right. But many teachers and administrators who use these programs say the benefits far outweigh the effort.

Less stress

Teachers who use restorative discipline practices find that behavior in their classrooms improves dramatically. They have better relationships with their students and, therefore, less stress from unresolved conflicts. "Restorative discipline improved my relationships with students," states Claassen. "Instead of making the relationships more difficult, it brought us together and improved our interactions."

More time for teaching

"You spend less time ... on discipline and have more time available for teaching and interaction when you use restorative practices," Claassen observes. "Students aren't afraid to admit when they've done something wrong as they are in a punitive environment, so you save a lot of time investigating who did what."

Ron adds, "When you have a punitive system, the automatic response is to deny responsibility because you know you'll get punished. With a restorative justice system, the incentive is to admit what you did because you know there's going to be a restorative process to make things right."

Better outcomes for students

Statistics show that using restorative practices keeps kids in school. Punitive systems often remove students from the classroom, even for minor offenses. With restorative justice, everyone works together to keep kids in the classroom where they can learn. Children who are expelled often end up in what education reform activists call the school-to-prison pipeline. Restorative justice tries to stop this cycle and keep kids on track with their education.

Addressing root causes

Restorative justice encourages kids to explore the reasons and effects of their offenses. "Restorative justice addresses the harm caused by the offense and the harm revealed by the offense," says Yurem. "When you get these kids talking, you learn about the traumas they have faced. Maybe their brother was killed, or their father was sent to prison. If you can get to the root of the cause of the offense, you're truly stopping the cycle."

Real-life skills

Even if there isn't a major underlying problem, talking about an issue is an important skill for students to learn. "The restorative process teaches students how to resolve conflict in a positive way," Ron Claassen says. "It helps them develop rational skills-to understand a situation, follow a process, and resolve it. These are life skills they can take with them into the world."

What are the drawbacks of restorative justice in schools?

For restorative justice to work, it requires engagement from all involved parties. If the offender isn't willing to take responsibility and make meaningful restitution, the program can't help. Schools using this system find they still need traditional disciplinary actions available for circumstances like this.

More than this, restorative justice in schools requires a pledge of time and money from the district and its administration. There are multiple examples of schools that set aside funds to implement the program but leave the money unspent. Other districts encourage teachers to use restorative discipline but provide little or no training or support. And busy teachers are understandably leery of trying yet another program that's supposed to solve all their problems.

Schools that dedicate themselves fully to the system, like Oakland USD and Chicago Public Schools, see real change and benefits. But the time, money, and enthusiasm required to make it work can be prohibitive for others.

What do real educators think about restorative justice in schools?

When this topic pops up for debate in our We Are Teachers HELPLINE and Principal Life Facebook groups, educators tend to have a lot of opinions about it. Here are some of their thoughts:

"We started RJ this year, and since it was so new there was a STEEP learning curve for everyone involved, despite numerous trainings. Just remember that some students will respond to it right off the bat, some take time, and others are just not going to participate in circles and things, and that's OK. My opinion is this: In theory, RJ is an excellent idea. I really think it can help build student-teacher relationships. In practice, the school must go '"'all in' in order for it to work."

"I love this approach. It has been highly successful for me and my colleagues who took it seriously. I have seen improvements at tough schools that I've worked in. ... By the way, this isn't just for minority children. It isn't just for Caucasian teachers. It's for all people. These practices can also resolve issues with teacher and admin, parents and schools, etc."

"I find that many kids don't open up in the circle and are afraid to share because the other kids don't always respect what is said there. Not sure how to change that, but because they aren't genuine in the circle, they are not reaping the benefits of genuine communication."

"Restorative justice cannot be rushed. It does not work when those participating have a time limit of 20 minutes and back to class."

"It takes time to build the culture. Have someone come in and give an overview of the philosophy and to share a circle. This gets everyone thinking. Don't demand that everyone must do it ... but request that everyone begins building relationships with their students and colleagues. Start with a team of teacher leaders who practice it and share their experience and celebrations. It will catch on! It takes about 3 years to build the culture!"

How can schools implement restorative justice?

On their own, teachers can use some aspects of the restorative justice system in their classrooms. "Respect agreements" are a good place to start, giving students a stake in making the classroom successful. Then, spend some time learning about sharing circles and mediation (see resources below).

School-wide or system-wide restorative justice takes the full commitment of everyone involved in the education process-teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Schools can spend months or even years fully rolling out a program. It's not the right option for everyone, as it requires an extensive dedication of time and money. Teachers interested in bringing a program to their schools should work with their administrators to explore the process. Oakland USD offers a particularly useful Restorative Justice Whole-School Implementation Guide that provides a comprehensive look at what it takes to make it work.

Get additional restorative justice resources.

Institutes and organizations

Books

Does your school use restorative justice, or are you looking to start? Come join the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook and chat with other teachers about your experiences.

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What Teachers Need To Know About Restorative Justice

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Restorative justice in schools uses mediation and community building to shift away from a punitive discipline model.

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From the authors of Restorative Justice—Maisha T. Winn, Hannah Graham, and Rita Renjitham Alfred

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An excerpt from this text appears in the September 2019 issue of The Council Chronicle.

In Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom (NCTE, 2019), the authors show how English teachers can think and plan using a restorative justice lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation; adult and youth well-being in schools; and inequity and racial justice through writing, reading, speaking, and action.

In this post the authors of Restorative Justice -Maisha T. Winn, Hannah Graham, and Rita Renjitham Alfred-share some hows and whys about coming together to produce their book.

How did this book come to be?

Maisha: In 2015 I spent time learning about restorative justice (RJ) from a team of attorneys at Impact Justice who insisted I take Rita Alfred's restorative justice training. Rita's training was powerful and she and I discussed how we were trying to bridge the work we do with teachers with the work we do with restorative justice practitioners. We found ourselves collecting materials prior to our trainings for teachers and trying to assemble them in a cohesive and coherent way. We started dreaming and imagining a book like Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom.

Hannah and I worked closely at UW Madison where she was my advisee in the graduate program; she had a lot of experience as a curriculum developer and I asked her to join the English Education team as a supervisor.

Rita: My friends at Impact Justice were very excited to have met Maisha and have heard me say how much I was wanting to collaborate with the professors teaching in the teacher's credential programs. I wanted to work with the educators of teachers to understand how to provide what teachers needed to be able to practice restorative justice in classrooms. And I wanted help to notice and see how restorative justice philosophy, principles, and practices were already somewhat related to their disciplines.

I have been in trainings where I have met amazing educators who demonstrated how they would use restorative justice in the classrooms to relate what they taught even with mathematics and science. I believe that people who enter teaching are doing so because of their love for their discipline and hopefully also a great love for children.

However, the way our education system is in this country, there has not been space or time for teachers to reflect on their practices when it comes to what and how they are affirming their relationships with the young people they teach, because of the stress of meeting the standards and class sizes that stressed teachers out, such that it was hard for them to prioritize the needs of both teachers and young people in classrooms.

So when I meet Maisha and then was introduced to Hannah, I got very excited because my hope was answered. Our writing this book together has really confirmed that we can continue to do this work for all the disciplines and invite teachers to use restorative justice with as much support as possible. Teachers are precious people and I want to add to their joy and health in the classroom and life.

You come from different backgrounds. How do your differences strengthen your positionality in this work?

Maisha: The common thread throughout all of our work is that we are about doing the right thing when it comes to children. All of us are very strong in our racial/cultural/ethnic identities and this-I believe-makes it easier for us to respect and honor others' way of knowing and building.

Rita: I appreciate Maisha's brilliance with the discussions of the realities of racism, her understanding of youth voices, and her creativity of including the young people as the people most affected and most familiar with what is needed in the classroom. I appreciated and learned so much from Hannah about what it means to be a skillful writer. I was so elated to be writing with her and appreciated her expertise about how to express and organize the many ideas we had for this book. I definitely felt the love we all felt for young people and for the special people who were called to the profession of teaching.

The marriage of personal and professional experiences and skills within this collaboration was very helpful for me when I remember that we have found ourselves in a new normal in this racist and dangerous time in our country and I was grateful for the honesty and openness, from my co-writers, to not shy away from the hard facts of the truth we were seeing around us. And we were able to spend time expressing our grief about the black lives lost and the power issues that we were experiencing constantly.

Why restorative justice? Why now?

Maisha: Rita always says "restorative justice is old." Indigenous communities throughout the world engage in relationship building. We can learn from them. We must learn from them.

Rita: We talked in 2015; there was a presidential election in 2016; black lives were being targeted and murdered blatantly; our youth were either getting killed, lost in systems-from child welfare to detention. We needed schools to be a safe space for our young people and to be the greatest youth development organization, one that intervenes when we, as the adults in charge of this world, are not attending to how we are leaving it for the seven generations coming after us. I understand that this has been going on from the very beginning of our country's history, however, in the recent past, the urgency has been rising to an emergency, and restorative justice allows for our peacemaker voices and actions to be heard and seen.

The justice-or more truthfully the "injustice"-system that we have in place continues to destroy people of color. Our nation is in a time when we are peeling off band-aids we have put on racism. I am grateful for the truth. And now the work is hard and real. There is evidence that restorative justice works in schools, in the justice/injustice system, and in the communities, so why are we not using it more? And why are we continuing to use the methods and thinking that produced the disaster we are experiencing now?

There are proven and noted data that the systems we are using now are not working to stem loss of our youth, or the increasing the number of people of color in detention when crime numbers are falling. We are in a time when we have to step up, and restorative justice provides the structure and healing so we can actually grapple with what's going on without losing ourselves in the process.

Can you talk a little about the power of linking restorative justice to content specific goals/objectives?

Maisha: Being in community and valuing relationships does not take the place of creating learning spaces for intellectual engagement. Both must be done together. We want educators to have powerful and dynamic relationships with students to expand opportunities to learn deeply.

Rita: Our schools touch the most number of youth who are the future and our future. If we want our future to look different from what we are experiencing now, we have to learn from our indigenous relatives of how to be wise elders and seek out ways to embed the restorative justice philosophy and practices into our schools.

If we do not push to consider how RJ is linked to content goals and objectives, it will end up becoming a "program," versus a way of being to change this world we are experiencing now. School improvement programs come and go, however, if RJ is introduced as tied to content specific objectives, it will become embedded and difficult to see it "go," like so many expensive programs that come and go in two years or less.

Hannah: Understanding restorative justice as an ethos of care and responsibility in the classroom means that content goals always hold an opportunity to restore and build. Every content area has opportunities to use the tools of their discipline to transform community. In our book we focus on English language arts, and how reading and writing can be used as tools to listen, co-create, understand, and question.

What do you want educators to take with them after reading Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom?

Maisha: We hope educators will seek out restorative justice community-building training AND think about how they can engage in an RJ mindset, to set up their classroom in such a way that everyone can cultivate a sense of purpose and belonging.

Rita: We hope that they will be intrigued and seek out restorative justice training and examine their beliefs and practices so that we all can have the lives we want where all people can be treated with dignity and respect. We hope readers will understand that RJ work isn't a programmatic intervention or a single-strategy professional development training; it is much more. We hope they will realize that restorative justice work involves an embodiment of the philosophy and praxis by doing. Practicing restorative justice enables us to reframe our very profession, existence, how we relate to others, and to articulate and enact ways of being that center worthiness, accountability, well-being and justice in the ways we practice and produce a culture of relating.

It requires humility and self-reflectiveness around power, class, educational and racial privilege, and this book encourages readers to see how they can use this in their classroom. We hope that this book will encourage readers to do restorative justice work in the classroom in line with their ELA curriculum to fundamentally challenge our assumptions around professional practice, time, and the centrality of expertise, not relationship, so pervasive in our society. Finally we hope that they will be encouraged to practice restorative justice and realize that young people are gifts to us, to treat all of them as gifts, and to experience a richer work environment.

Hannah: We hope educators will consider how the everyday reading and writing practices they facilitate in their classrooms hold opportunities to call all students into community, and engage in the (career-long) process of auditing the extent to which their space, pedagogy, and approach is set up to do just that. In each chapter we walk through possible avenues for (re)assessing and altering classroom dialogue, atmosphere, and power dynamics (including a section on educators building their own syllabus for personal expansion). Moreover, we contend that our book is just the beginning; throughout our text we offer multiple suggestions for continued reading and action educators can take to explore the exclusionary history of schooling/literacy practices and means to redress these in English language arts community.

Rita Renjitham Alfred has dedicated many years to serving youth and families in the Bay Area. She started her career in restorative justice as the restorative justice coordinator at Cole Middle School in the Oakland [California] Unified School District (OUSD) and later with Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. She interfaced with the various system stakeholders, including school site and district administration, teachers, students and families, school and city police, and community-based organizations, to lead a successful program. The pilot program at Cole was so effective in reducing suspensions, expulsions, and violence that staff at approximately 20 additional schools sought training and technical assistance to bring restorative practices to their sites. Due in large part to these efforts, in January 2010, Renjitham Alfred and others helped the OUSD School Board pass a resolution adopting restorative justice district-wide as official policy. Since that time, she has trained more than 4,000 people in schools, coaching and consulting with six other school districts to adopt restorative justice practices at their schools. As an independent contractor, she founded the Restorative Justice Training Institute, which holds RJ trainings and consults and coaches in schools. Renjitham Alfred collaborates with teachers to integrate RJE elements in daily academic classes. She has two sons and two grandchildren and lives in the Bay Area.

Maisha T. Winn is Chancellor's Leadership Professor at the University of California, Davis, and codirector (with Torry Winn) of UC Davis's Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center. Her program of research examines the ways in which teachers and/or adult allies for youth in schools and in out-of-school contexts practice "justice" in the teaching of literacy. Winn was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow in 2016, received the William T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellowship in 2014, and received the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award in 2012. She has authored several books, including Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Schools (2007, published under "Fisher"), Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2009, published under "Fisher"), Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (2011), and most recently Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education through Restorative Justice (2018), and is coeditor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (with Django Paris). Winn is also the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Review of Research in Education; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Race Ethnicity and Education; Research in the Teaching of English; Race and Social Problems; and Harvard Educational Review.

Hannah Graham is a curriculum consultant and professional development leader who works with schools and nonprofit organizations interested in enhancing classroom literacy instruction. A former secondary ELA teacher, Graham's work focuses on advancing the power of educators and their students to transform classroom communities using reading and writing as central tools. She is currently director of professional learning for WebbAlign and a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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More from the Authors of Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom - NCTE

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An excerpt from this text appears in the September 2019 issue of The Council Chronicle. In Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom (NCTE, 2019), the authors show how English teachers can think and plan using a restorative justice lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation; adult and youth well-being in schools; and inequity and racial justice through writing, reading, speaking, and action.

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neatoday.org

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A few Mondays ago, a Denver third-grader named Luca sat down in a circle with his classmates and started a conversation like this: "If you were an animal for a day, based on your mood and feelings today, what animal would it be?"

It was the best conversation, say classmates Ellie and Lina. "I said I'd be a monkey because I was feeling silly," says Ellie. "And I said I'd be a panda!" says Lina. "Because I was feeling lazy and hungry, and pandas are lazy and they eat all the time!"

Funny! But the point of the circle conversations, also known as "peace circles," which take place every Monday morning in every classroom at the K-8 Dora Moore School in Denver, isn't giggles. It's to build community and to foster the kind of student-to-student and educator-to-student relationships that lead to supportive classrooms.

"When you go to school here, you get to know each other," says fifth-grader Trinity. "At my old school, we never got to know each other - or to understand each other."

Classroom circles are just one of the restorative practices that Dora Moore's educators have adopted over recent years. Many of their students also practice their conflict-resolution skills in "peace walks," and get regular, positive feedback through daily, one-on-one check-ins with dedicated, full-time restorative practices specialists on their campuses.

Often, this all takes place under the eyes of visiting educators who want to see and hear what happens in public schools where educators care more about creating a community built upon kindness, not consequences.

Dora Moore's schoolwide enthusiasm and experience with restorative practices has made it one of three model schools in Denver, which, thanks to a three-year, $663,000 NEA Great Public Schools grant to the Restorative Justice Partnership (RJP), have welcomed hundreds of visiting educators from Minnesota to Mississippi.

In addition to NEA, the partnership includes the national Advancement Project and a local advocacy group called Padres y Jóvenes Unidos that in 2008 won a historic commitment from Denver Public Schools to eliminate racial disparities in discipline and focus on keeping kids in schools, plus the Colorado Education Association, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the University of Denver, and Denver Public Schools.

"These are organizations that haven't always seen eye to eye," notes RJP project manager Lindsay Lee. "But they are in agreement on this issue."

As well as coordinating the school visits, RJP also has put together an online library of educator guides and resources, including webinars on restorative language and culture, how to align trauma-sensitive practices, and more.

Says Maryland high school teacher Erika Chavarria, who last year visited Denver's North High School, another RJP model school: "The main thing that struck me, the thing that sums it all up, is the level of trust and respect in the building. It was very clear that students were trusted and respected [by educators], and it was very clear that-because the students received that level of trust and respect and love-they gave it in return."

Taking on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Adopting restorative practices doesn't mean no more suspensions, ever. Even at Dora Moore, North, or the third RJP school, Skinner Middle School, students still get suspended for serious offenses. But suspensions have decreased, as the petty disrespect that escalates into red-faced standoffs, or the squabbles that explode into violence, often are avoided or headed off by restorative practices.

More traditional punishments don't work to change the root cause of misbehavior, or to keep students on a path to college and careers. "When I got here, the culture was to suspend and 'kick 'em out of my room,'" says Dora Moore principal Karen Barker, who arrived five years ago. But what do kids learn from that, she asked.

And who exactly is kicked out? "Zero tolerance" policies- suspensions, expulsions, and the more recent trend to police referrals or arrests-often are nourished by implicit biases and institutionalized racism, and aimed unevenly at black, Latino male, and American Indian students, as well as students with disabilities.

For example, while black students accounted for 15 percent of students in 2016, they accounted for 31 percent of school-related arrest and referrals to law enforcement, according to federal data. This forced march by students of color-from classrooms into courtrooms-is what's known as the "school-to-prison pipeline," and NEA members have committed to dismantling it.

At the RP schools, suspensions are a last resort. And, as they have decreased, an Advancement Project report has found that "indicators of achievement" have increased.

Inside an RJP School

When visitors come to Dora Moore, the first thing they see is the "tone-setting" that takes place in all classrooms, says Lee. In fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Sandra Lins' classroom, this looks like Lins pulling a chair to the front of her classroom, sitting down to face her students, and saying, "Let's get ready for the day." It sounds like the quiet huffs of deep, calm breathing and the faint strains of classical music.

Last year, Dora Moore's restorative practices coordinator, Morgan Isaacs, drew footprints and conversation prompts onto butcher paper that she rolled up and toted around school. This was the first "peace walk." Since then, her template has been printed on dozens of vinyl tarps and distributed to classrooms, the playground, and the cafeteria.

The way it works is both parties in conflict-either two students, typically K-3, or an adult and student-step onto the mat and engage in a guided conversation. It always begins with an "I feel" statement, and ends with an agreed-upon plan to avoid future conflict.

Says fifth-grader Bradley: "I've noticed a lot of people have the same feelings as me."

Meanwhile, at North, visitors observe students entering school, walking past a Black Music Matters poster through the front office, where staff smile and greet every student, asking about their weekends, or after-school activities, or well-being. "They do that intentionally," says Chavarria. "Right off the bat, you can see the level of love."

She also observed trust: Every North student can leave campus for lunch, and has a longer-than-typical time for lunch. They also have free blocks of time that they can use as they see fit-maybe to visit North's college center, or hole up in the art room with some therapeutic clay.

At North, students also have hands-on involvement in school discipline, doing peer-mediation and low-level restorative conferencing. They even sit on employee interview committees and if they feel like a job candidate wouldn't be a good fit on their campus, they say so.

Sound too idyllic to be real? Both Dora Moore and North, as well as Skinner, have been engaged in restorative practices for several years. The changes to their school's culture have not come overnight, and they require whole-school staff commitment-plus training, re-training, and funding for dedicated restorative practice coordinators. Building real relationships with students has to be top priority.

But it can be done, they say.

Check out NEAEdjustice to learn moreabout restorative practices and get the RJP implementation guide.

Go to NEA EdCommunities and join one of the many groups of educators dedicated to improving their practices, such as the "Trauma-Informed Restorative Practice" group or the "Eradicating School to Prison Pipeline" group.

Also visit the RJPartnership site for links to the webinars and more.

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How Restorative Practices Work for Students and Educators - NEA Today

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A few Mondays ago, a Denver third-grader named Luca sat down in a circle with his classmates and started a conversation like this: "If you were an animal for a day, based on your mood and feelings today, what animal would it be?" It was the best conversation, say classmates Ellie and Lina.

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A Handful of Quiet - Happiness in Four Pebbles (Thich Nhat Hanh)

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A Handful of Quiet - Happiness in Four Pebbles (Thich Nhat Hanh)

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cultofpedagogy.com

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Listen to my interview with Victor Small (transcript):
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A student threw a chair at a teacher.
That's the story I heard. It was a story meant to illustrate how bad a particular group of kids was, and now I can't even remember who the teacher was or where the school was located, or even the gender of the teacher or the student. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've heard two or three different stories about students throwing things at teachers, each one told with the intent of showing just how bad those kids were.

But every time I've heard a story like that, my first thought has always been, Holy crap. What kind of a relationship did that teacher have with those students? What was going on in the minutes, days, and weeks leading up to that chair being thrown?

And I know how that sounds. It sounds like I'm blaming the teacher. Or that I don't think a student should be held responsible for doing something as awful as throwing a piece of furniture at another human being.

I don't think that. But here's what I think probably happened in all of those schools: The student was removed from class and promptly suspended, maybe even expelled. And if and when that student returned to school, nothing much was done to repair that student's relationship with the teacher. Or to really address the other issues that may have been going on leading up to that chair being thrown. And if that kind of work isn't done, if we focus only on making our punishments stricter, then things like chair throwing will keep happening. And nobody wants that.

Getting students to behave in a way that is conducive to learning is a perennial challenge for teachers. On this site I have dealt with the topic a number of times. And every piece of advice-the tips and hacks and bits of wisdom-they are all useful.

But one approach to addressing problematic behavior-restorative justice-really stands on its own, because it focuses on building relationships and repairing harm, rather than simply punishing students for misbehavior.

I have wanted to share more about restorative justice on my site for years, but every time I started, I found that the topic was just too big, too complex to handle all at once. Usually, I try to share things that teachers can understand and apply right away, and the concept of restorative justice just wasn't letting me package and deliver it in a tidy little bundle.

So rather than try to do that, I'm going to just start with an overview. This will not be a comprehensive study of restorative practices, but an introduction designed for teachers who are just starting to get interested in this approach.

Helping me do that is Victor Small, Jr., a middle school administrator in Oakland, California. He has been using restorative practices for several years and supports other teachers through a Twitter chat-using the hashtag #RJLeagueChat -and a Voxer group called the Restorative Justice League, where educators talk about the challenges they're facing in implementing restorative practices and help each other work through tough situations.

In our interview, Small walks me through some of the basics of restorative justice-called RJ by many of its practitioners-and talks about how teachers can get started. You can listen to the interview in the player above, read a full transcript, or review the key takeaways here.

What is Restorative Justice?

The philosophy of restorative justice has its roots in the criminal justice system. When a crime is committed in a modern society, the typical response is to punish the offender, and that's about it. But societies all over the world have started to recognize that this approach doesn't repair the harm that was done; it also does nothing to address underlying problems that may have led to the offense in the first place. So they are starting to replace-or at least supplement-the standard approach with restorative justice practices, which focus on repairing harm for all parties involved. This process may include some form of punishment for the offender, but the lens is much wider than that.

"Say you stole a car," Small says. "Instead of you necessarily doing jail time, really what you would have to first do is make sure that you restore the situation to the person who you actually harmed, which would be the person whose car you stole, right? So you would have to restore that in some way. Either you'd have to get them their car back or get them a new car and apologize or something like that. Basically, the debt that you owe to society is to that person that you harmed."

This shift toward restorative justice has led to reduced recidivism (repeat offenses), greater satisfaction with the outcomes from all stakeholders, and reduced post-traumatic stress caused by the crime. (These results are summarized in this overview from the University of Wisconsin.)

Encouraged by these successes, educators in some schools have started using restorative practices to address disruptive or harmful behavior. With this shift, schools hope to see improved behavior and to reverse a disturbing trend: The zero-tolerance discipline policies of the past few decades have dramatically increased suspension rates in many districts, which can in turn lower graduation rates and ultimately push more students into the juvenile justice system. And again, those suspensions do nothing to repair harm.

Common Restorative Practices

The thing about restorative justice is that unlike a typical discipline program, it is not a cut-and-dried system with prescribed steps to follow in every situation. If done correctly, schools that shift to restorative justice will approach it holistically, looking at preventing wrongdoing as much as-if not more than-how to address it when it occurs.

"What we're essentially teaching students is your behavior affects people," Small explains, "and so in order to pay it forward or to deal with the consequences of that, you're going to have to figure out how to make things right. When we talk about restorative justice practices, we're talking about the things you're doing to ensure that students are recognizing when they're doing something wrong and finding a way to make it right."

Although restorative justice models vary somewhat from school to school, Small says schools that are doing it right have the following practices at their core.

Building Relationships

Schools that get interested in restorative justice may be tempted to jump right to the alternative punishments, but a true RJ program puts heavy emphasis on relationships. These relationships go in all directions: teacher to student, student to student, teacher to teacher, and between the school and the larger community.

These bonds are not forged overnight. Daily conversations, team-building exercises, telling our own stories and making time and space for students to tell theirs helps build relationships over time. "You've got to give them time to grow with one another," Small says.

And if you do, it pays off. "If you've got everybody in the school liking and getting along with one another, well when they do something wrong, it's a lot easier for that kid to apologize. The reason I'm really a very big proponent of RJ is if you're doing it right, you're going to prevent a whole lot of issues from occurring."

A Mindset Shift

To be effective with restorative justice, teachers need to adopt a restorative mindset, a way of looking at wrongdoing and punishment through a different lens.

"Everything that a kid does shouldn't have to have a consequence," Small says. "I mean if a kid gets angry and says something to another kid, and that kid gets mad, do they need detention for that, or do they need to just fix the problem and not be mad at each other? Probably just fix the problem, not be mad at each other, and go on about their lives. If they didn't do anything wrong to the class or the community and they just did something messed-up to another student, they can handle that between the two students. You could facilitate that. It teaches them, hey, you have to be accountable for your actions, because your actions do have impact on other students, without having them sit in detention, right?"

Circles

Pulling groups of people together into circles for conversation is one of the most recognizable features of schools that have adopted restorative practices. These circles can take many forms: mediation circles when a problem needs to be addressed, healing circles when group members are hurting or grieving, or circles that form just for dialogue and storytelling. When circles are a regular part of the school culture, they give students a vehicle for communicating when problems arise, rather than handling them in less constructive ways.

Where to Start

Small offers this advice for educators who want to get started with restorative justice:

Read about RJ

A lot of excellent books have been written about restorative practices. To make sure you and your colleagues are working from a solid foundation, read up on the history and philosophy before attempting to implement an RJ program. I have listed a few good starter books at the end of this post, and a lot more can be found online that detail specific practices.

Identify Your Biases and Triggers

A big part of addressing student misbehavior and building strong relationships with students is uncovering our own built-in biases. And the first step toward doing that is getting comfortable with the idea that we all have them.

"It's really painful for us to consider this," Small says, "but if we walk into our classrooms and we really try to believe that an approach to colorblindness is one that's effective, we're really shortchanging our kids' lives, because if we're just constantly telling them, 'Hey, I don't see color,' when they leave your classroom, someone's going to see their color. And someone's going to act possibly on the fact that they see their color, so we're setting them up for failure if we don't do our own investigation of, 'Do I have any biases against any particular type of culture, any particular type of culture activity, any of my students? Do I have any things that trigger certain behavior or fears or anger that they do that they do naturally? Taking a step back and wondering, is it me or is it them?'"

Build Culture and Community

If you have a school culture where students feel known, where they feel at home, behavior on the whole will be better and efforts to address wrongdoing will be more productive. Getting to that point will happen if you approach culture-building from a lot of different angles.

"Work on finding ways to include kids in what's going on," Small says, "like allowing more student voice, allowing more student opportunities for them to display their culture, act on their culture, be a part of their culture."

Having caring adults in the building who look like the student body is also more important than many people realize. "You need to give (students) opportunities to learn about people that look like them, that are from their culture, that represent them. If 99 percent of your staff is white and 99 percent of your student body is black and Latino, you're going to need to figure out a way to get more black and Latino staff members in your school." ( This conversation with former teacher of the year Nate Bowling dives more deeply into this topic.)

Finally, schools can work to make the school more integrated into the larger community. "If you can find ways to learn about the neighborhoods, the communities and find ways to bring people from the community and in the neighborhoods into your school, you're creating a school culture that the students can feel more at home in." And when students feel at home, when they know each other, there's less of a need to address misbehavior.

"They just get along better, so they fight less," Small says of his students. "There's less reason for them to fight, because everyone knows everyone else."

Okay, but what about the discipline?

Having finished this overview, I realize I never quite got to the question of How does restorative justice actually deal with the misbehavior?

The answer to this is complicated, because it's not as simple as detention-suspension-expulsion. There are conferences and circles, a lot of discussion about the harm that was done and how it can be repaired. Individual decisions are made on an individual basis. There's more to it than I can cover in one post, but I plan to do more posts later to dig more deeply into the details. I really do believe that restorative justice is the direction we need to be heading to create safer, healthier school communities.

I hope you'll take a step in that direction. ♦

To Learn More

These books offer a great starting point for learning more about restorative practices:

Better than Carrots or Sticks:
Restorative Practices for Positive Classroom Management
Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey

The Little Book of Restorative Justice
Howard Zehr

The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools:
Teaching Responsibility; Creating Caring Climates
Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, Judy H. Mullet

Touching Spirit Bear
(Reader Recommended)
Ben Mikaelsen

You can find Victor Small, Jr., on Twitter at @MrSmall215, and join him every Sunday night at 8pm EST for the #RJLeagueChat.

Come back for more.
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Restorative Justice in School: An Overview

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Instead of looking for ways to make punishments stricter, restorative justice seeks to build relationships and repair harm. Learn more about how this holistic approach works and how you can get started.

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Find out more about John Hattie’s Visible Learning meta-study

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Social justice books for kids develop empathy and build shared background knowledge around topics like refugee and immigrant experiences, racism, bias, poverty, and hunger. Plus, great social justice books highlight for kids the simple power of kind deeds that help others thrive.

Here are more than 25 social justice books for kids in grades K-12 to share in the classroom.

(Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!)

Social Justice Books for Elementary School Kids

When you think of a wolf, what do you picture? Probably not the demure narrator of this book who loves to knit. This book can be enjoyed on many levels and is a great conversation starter about what it's like for those who experience bias.

Introduce so many elements of social justice efforts with this engaging parable. Noodlephant loves pasta-hence her nickname. When the kangaroos start making one unfair law after another, Noodlephant stands up for everyone's right to enjoy pasta. Also, check out the sequel, Okapi Tale.

This true story is so relatable for kids. Learn about Tani's family's experience as Nigerian refugees coming to the United States and how playing chess helped Tani finally feel at home again. Especially inspiring is how this family worked to help others in need as they became able.

In this true story, an Iraqi family brings their beloved family cat when they leave their home as refugees, only to have it get lost during the boat crossing to Greece. A worldwide reunification effort leads to a happy ending. In addition to learning about the resilience of refugees, students will learn how compassionate aid workers and citizens can make a difference by helping one family at a time.

When Farah joins her new American class, she feels alone in a crowd. Then she finds common ground with her classmates over the familiar experience of making apple cider on a field trip. The kindness of new friends helps her feel more at home.

The author, a celebrated LGBTQI rights activist, wrote this story to honor her son Penelope. Penelope knows he's a boy, and, with his family's support, he bravely persisted in showing the world his authentic self. Share this to show students that working for social justice means working to enable all people to thrive-as themselves.

In Missouri in 1847, one teacher uses his passion for education to motivate reluctant James to learn. When a new state law forbids educating African American students, the school community determinedly builds a new floating school just across state lines.

This captivating true story stars Ada Ríos, who lives in a small town in Paraguay built atop a landfill. Her dream of playing the violin seems unlikely until an innovative music teacher helps students build instruments out of trash and changes everything.

This is the powerful story based on From a Name to a Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography by Alter Wiener. During Alter's Nazi imprisonment, surprise displays of kindness alter the course of his experience.

An expensive car repair exhausts Lulu and her mom's food budget. It's so hard for Lulu to concentrate at school with the "Hunger Monster" looming-until she works up the courage to talk to her teacher about it. His referral to a food pantry really helps. This important book can get your class talking about social justice efforts to help those who experience food insecurity.

This collection of poetry teaches students about the experiences of the thousands of children who leave Central America on foot to seek a safer home in the United States.

Every class should hear the tale of Alice Rumphius, who wanted to "do something to make the world more beautiful." This classic book reminds us that everyone deserves to experience beauty. You might pair it with a title about cultivating beauty in a more modern, urban setting, such as Hey, Wall: A Story of Art and Community by Susan Verde.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai is an inspirational and relatable figure for young people. This biography helps students understand her transition from dreaming of a better world as a child to taking action.

14. Thurgood by Jonah Winter

With a unique format and amazing illustrations, this biography of Thurgood Marshall gives older elementary students countless examples of social justice work and the reasons it's needed. It also gives a great introduction to the role of lawyers in social justice work and may inspire kids to join the debate team and pursue a career in law themselves!

This unique social justice book for kids is more than a workbook-it's a framework for introducing kids to the tenets of Black Lives Matter and social justice work in general.

Social Justice Books for Middle and High School Kids

With her strong sense of justice, can-do attitude, and penchant for baking desserts, Zoe Washington is a protagonist for readers to emulate. Readers will learn alongside Zoe about racial justice and the United States criminal justice system as she tries to give her incarcerated father the justice he deserves.

Mia and her friends all face challenges, discrimination, and uncertainty as kids of immigrant families-and they all have tons of heart and positive energy as they work to change what they can. Readers will be rooting for these middle schoolers, who are inspiring examples of how social justice action is for all ages.

This graphic novel tells the story of two brothers from Somalia growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya. Based on the experiences of Somali refugee Omar Mohamed, this book will stay with readers long after they close it.

If you're looking for social justice book club books for kids, these are well-loved by many. Amina, who is Pakistani and Muslim, faces the same challenges many of our students do around balancing her family's culture with her identity as an American. In the first title, vandalism at Amina's family mosque makes this even more challenging. In the inspiring sequel, Amina grapples with how to best share her Pakistani heritage with her American classmates.

This is a modern-day classic and must-read for kids and adults. Justice McAllister is a model student. He's also a student of color with questions about how to apply Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s teachings to the present day. So, he starts writing to him.

22. Refugee by Alan Gratz

Three powerful narratives about the experiences of refugee youth combine to offer students an unparalleled perspective. Josef is a Jewish boy whose family rushes to escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Isabel and her family leave Cuba on a raft in 1994. Mahmoud's family escapes Syria on foot in 2015. Students will be forever changed by these stories and how they unexpectedly converge in the end.

Lily Jo McGrother's gender assigned at birth was male. Navigating eighth grade as a girl who looks like a boy is tough. Dunkin Dorfman is new at school and coping with bipolar disorder. When the two teens meet, they couldn't have predicted the impact they'd have on each other's lives.

The circumstances and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are important social justice case studies for kids. This riveting nonfiction title is a great starting place.

This story of three brothers coming together to cope in challenging times builds students' empathy for so many common circumstances: parental loss, incarceration, the intricacies of life in urban neighborhoods, and more.

This collection of poems gives students an important insight into life for young people of color in the 1960s and 1970s-set against the backdrop of finding one's own identity.

Spark lots of student discussion as they learn about an explosion at a segregated Navy base during World War II. Following the blast, 244 men faced dire consequences after protesting the unjust and dangerous conditions at the docks.

Inspired by actual events, this story introduces students to Jaime, a Guatemalan 12-year-old who bravely flees his dangerous home to try to reach his older brother in New Mexico. Build students' background knowledge about the circumstances that may cause someone to have to flee their home and the harsh experiences of immigrants when they arrive in a new place.

29. Sylvia & Aki by Winifred Conkling

The fight to obtain an education is one all students can (and need to) understand. These two protagonists, Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu, find their stories unexpectedly intertwined due to the discrimination they experience. Age-appropriate historical context builds important background knowledge about WWII Japanese internment camps and the Mendez vs. Westminster School District California court case, a precedent-setting "separate but equal" case to Brown vs. Board of Education.

Try these teaching ideas around social justice inquiry:

Read-alouds: Quite often, a current event might spur questions and discussion in class, revealing a need for a short story or picture book to read aloud together and address the issue in greater depth. For example, a discussion about the fight for equality in education might call for sharing a book like Separate Is Never Equal, which sheds light on the lengths families had to go to for access to equal education.

Book clubs: Middle school students love social-issues book clubs that focus on topics like income equality and fair working conditions ( Uprising) or civil rights ( The Watsons Go to Birmingham). As a culminating activity to such book clubs, my students will book-talk their group's selection to the rest of the class and teach their classmates about the issue.

Opportunities for writing: Last year, we borrowed the "writing to think" idea as envisioned by Katherine Bomer in her book The Journey Is Everything. Using the chart below to anchor our thinking, we wrote about what the social justice books we read made us wonder about. Writing and sharing our ideas in this way allowed my students a way to think about how they would work toward making our world a better place.

Excited to share these social justice books for kids? Also check out:

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25+ Inspiring Social Justice Books for Kids of All Ages

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Social justice books for kids develop empathy and build shared background knowledge around topics like refugee and immigrant experiences, racism, bias, poverty, and hunger. Plus, great social justice books highlight for kids the simple power of kind deeds that help others thrive.

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ELECTRONIC VERSIONS of RESOURCES PRINTED IN DELTA KINDERGARTEN KITS

Routine Based Support Guide (weblink)

Peer Conflict, Mean Behaviour and Bullying (PDF)

Peer Conflict, Mean Behaviour and Bullying (DOC)

Crisis Management (PDF) Crisis Management (DOCX)

Tips for Successful Transitions (PDF)

Behaviour as Communication and Crisis Prevention Model (PDF)

Tips for Increasing Compliance (PDF) Tips Increasing Compliance (DOCX)

Roles and Responsibilities of Teachers and Education Assistants (weblink)

OTHER RESOURCES CURRENTLY IN USE IN DELTA:

1. Second Step: A research based Social Emotional Learning program published by the non-profit Committee for Children, the newest version of Second Step offers an excellent base for teaching Skills for Learning/Self-regulation, Empathy/Emotion Recognition, Emotion Management, and Problem Solving. It is highly recommended as a foundation for Social Emotional Learning because it offers constructive ideas to teach the language, processes and skills needed for a positive, empathic classroom. The lesson activities are appropriate for Kindergarten students with visuals, puppet plays, movement games and breaks, music, and lots of opportunities to pretend and practice.
http://www.cfchildren.org/second-step/kindergarten-grade-5/kindergarten.aspx
For teachers with access to a Second Step kit, don't forget to register your kit online at http://www.secondstep.org/ to access the many online materials including videos, posters, parent letters and more.

2. Fun Friends: A different SEL curriculum focused on developing resiliency that offers a nice complement to Second Step. Particularly useful are lessons on Being brave, and positive thinking (using the language of Red and Green thoughts). The Fun Friends framework of good friends is also very useful Friends Listen, Friends Help, Friends Smile). A focus on Friendship following Second Step implementation can really build students Social skills Teachers who have attended the training workshop are also able to distribute copies of a family book that is highly recommended, especially for families of children with anxiety, or challenges with emotion management.
http://www.friendsrt.com/funfriends.html
3. Mind Up: Teaches social and emotional learning skills that link cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training. Students learn about how their brains and some strategies to self-regulate and mindfully engage in focused concentration. Kindergarten classrooms will find the Core Practice of Deep Breathing and Relaxation a helpful addition to their daily routine. However, most of the lessons rely heavily on class discussion which poses a challenge to full implementation with young children.
http://thehawnfoundation.org/
4. First Step to Success: A research validated early intervention program designed to divert at-risk children from a path leading to antisocial behaviour. The program has two components - the school intervention involves the target child, peers, and teachers It teaches an adaptive prosocial pattern of school behaviour. The second component is a home intervention program that teaches parents key skills for supporting and improving their child's school adjustment and performance
http://www.firststeptosuccess.org/index.htm
5. Circles Curriculum - Intimacy and Relationships and Stop Abuse are two different programs which we have in Delta for loan. This program was developed for children and young adults with developmental disabilities. These curricula include real-life demonstrations. Circles: Intimacy and Relationships teaches students social and relationship boundaries and relationship-specific social skills, using a simple multi-layer circle diagram to demonstrate the different relationship levels students will encounter in daily life. Circles: Stop Abuse teaches students how to recognize and avoid threatening or potentially abusive situations.
https://www.stanfield.com/products/family-life-relationships/social-skills-circles-curriculum-intimacy-relationships/
6. Kids in My Class This resource has been developed by Delta School District Special Programs staff to support teachers. It includes practical strategies and resources on many topics including: Special Programs FAQs, Aboriginal, ESL, Special Needs and Behaviour.

Kids In My Class III (PDF)

7. Kindergarten Learning Project Observation Rubrics - These assessment frameworks emphasizes the teacher's role in supporting learning. It includes Social responsibility, as well as 4 other developmental continua: Oral Language, Emergent/early Reading and Viewing, Emergent/early Writing and Representing and Numeracy
https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/early_learning/fdk/klp/welcome.php
Draft Self-Regulation Continuum is also available for teachers to try

Self Regulation Continuum (PDF)

OTHER WEB RESOURCES

1. Technical Assistance Centre on Social Emotional Interventions for young children: takes the research that shows which practices improve the social-emotional outcomes for young children with, or at risk for, delays or disabilities and creates FREE products and resources to help decision-makers, caregivers, and service providers apply these best practices in the work they do every day. Most of these free products are available right here on their website immediate viewing, downloads and use.
http://www.challengingbehavior.org/
Includes Teaching Tools For Young Children and many more resources on programming for children with challenging behaviours.

2. The Canadian Self-Regulation Initiative -the work of Stuart Shanker, this website has been established first and foremost to help parents and educators 'reframe' a child's behaviour: to understand the reasons why a child might be having trouble paying attention, ignoring distractors, inhibiting his impulses, modulating his emotions, and overall, maintaining a state of being calmly focused and alert."
http://www.self-regulation.ca
3. Canadian Self-Regulated Learning Consortium are researchers who actively collaborate with educators, schools, and learners to improve learning, collaboration, and student engagement.
http://srlcanada.ca/
4. Dr. Dan Siegel: Explore the neuroscience behind and the theoretical framework of Interpersonal Neurobiology. Includes some free vides and other resources.
http://drdansiegel.com/

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Multicultural and Social Justice Books - Social Justice Books

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Curated Booklists Carefully selected multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators on 90+ topics. Reviews of Children's Literature Critical reviews of children's and young adult books from a variety of vetted sources, consolidated here for easy access. Articles & News Articles about selecting children's literature and news about Kid Lit.

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Bookriot: 12 Must Read Social Justice Books

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Bookriot: 12 Must Read Social Justice Books

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For the past several months, Book Riot has been getting a lot of requests for recommendations for books explaining why our political and legal systems are the way they are. (We cannot possibly imagine why...) So for your reading pleasure we present "100 Must-Read Books about the Law and Social Justice."

For this list, I interpreted "law" broadly. Law is not just something that happens in courtrooms and legislatures; it infuses our whole lives. So while you'll find plenty of books about the Supreme Court and its most famous decisions, you'll also find some on the everyday impacts of the criminal justice system, the experiences of people in the workplace, and deep dives into the question of how our laws and legal system became what they are now.

While most of these books about the law are focused on the United States, our neighbors to the north have not been left out, with some stellar examples of Canadian legal history. There are also a few selections from Europe, Latin America, and South Africa, but full coverage will have to wait for a future list.

Without further ado... 100 books about the law and more.

1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by
Michelle Alexander: "With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'"

2. America's Constitution: A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar: "Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this 'biography' of America's framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it."

3. Carnal Crimes: Sexual Assault Law in Canada, 1900-1975 by Constance Backhouse: "Using a case-study approach, Constance Backhouse explores nine sexual assault trials from across the country throughout the twentieth century."

4. Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by Jo Becker: "Focusing on the historic legal challenge of California's ban on same-sex marriage, Becker offers a gripping, behind-the scenes narrative told with the lightning pace of a great legal thriller."

5. The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800 by Manlio Bellomo:
"With a vigor and passion rarely found in a scholarly text, Manlio Bellomo has written a broad history of the western European legal tradition."

6. Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law by Kyla Bender-Baird: "Using personal interviews, legal case histories, and transgender theory, Transgender Employment Experiences combines policy analysis with the lived experiences of twenty transgender-identified employees, showing how worker protections that should exist under the Civil Rights Act are instead systematically undermined in the case of many transgender employees."

8. Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention byMary Sarah Bilder: "James Madison's Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S. Constitution's creation. No document provides a more complete record of the deliberations in Philadelphia or depicts the Convention's charismatic figures, crushing disappointments, and miraculous triumphs with such narrative force. But how reliable is this account?"

9. Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett: "In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular-and biblically sanctioned-view that the whale was a fish. The trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature-and how we know it-was at stake."

10. Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler: "Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight-until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn't commit."

13. The Case Against the Supreme Court by Erwin Chemerinsky: "In this devastating book, Erwin Chemerinsky-"one of the shining lights of legal academia" (The New York Times)-shows how, case by case, for over two centuries, the hallowed Court has been far more likely to uphold government abuses of power than to stop them."

14. King John and the Road to Magna Carta by
Stephen Church: "In this authoritative biography, Church describes how it was that a king famous for his misrule gave rise to Magna Carta, the blueprint for good governance."

15. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Americans have built an empire on the idea of 'race,' a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men-bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion."

16. Sisters in the Struggle : African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin: "Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their indvidiual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality."

20. You Have the Right to Remain Innocent by James Duane: "Using actual case histories of innocent men and women exonerated after decades in prison because of information they voluntarily gave to police, Professor Duane demonstrates the critical importance of a constitutional right not well or widely understood by the average American. Reflecting the most recent attitudes of the Supreme Court, Professor Duane argues that it is now even easier for police to use your own words against you."

22. The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald: "In this gripping account unfolds one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America."

25. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault: "In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul."

26. Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite) edited by Michel Foucault: "With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite."

28. Law in America: A Short History by Lawrence M. Friedman: "In the masterful hands of the subject's greatest living historian, the story of the evolution of our laws serves to lay bare the deciding struggles over power and justice that have shaped this country from its birth pangs to the present. Law in America is a supreme example of the historian's art, its brevity a testament to the great elegance and wit of its composition."

29. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations by Tim Garrison: "This study is the first to show how state courts enabled the mass expulsion of Native Americans from their southern homelands in the 1830s. Our understanding of that infamous period, argues Tim Alan Garrison, is too often molded around the towering personalities of the Indian removal debate, including President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee leader John Ross, and United States Supreme Court Justice John Marshall. This common view minimizes the impact on Indian sovereignty of some little-known legal cases at the state level."

30. Civil Rights Stories edited by Myriam Gilles and Risa Goluboff: "These stories give the students and faculty members a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural background of the cases and an insight into their long term impact on the development of civil rights law."

33. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor by Evelyn Nakano Glenn: "The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II."

35. Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903 by Lawrence Goldstone: "A potent and original examination of how the Supreme Court subverted justice and empowered the Jim Crow era."

36. Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s by Risa Goluboff: "In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-served not only to maintain safety and order but also to enforce conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened?"

37. The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right by Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse: "A revelatory look at the Warren Burger Supreme Court finds that it was not moderate or transitional, but conservative-and it shaped today's constitutional landscape."

40. New York Times v. Sullivan: Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press by Kermit L. Hall and Melvin I. Urofsky: "Illuminating a classic case from the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960s, two of America's foremost legal historians Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky provide a compact and highly readable updating of one of the most memorable decisions in the Supreme Court's canon."

42. A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr: "This true story of an epic courtroom showdown, where two of the nation's largest corporations were accused of causing the deaths of children from water contamination, was a #1 national bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award."

44. The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind-and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy: "Free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States."

45. Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman: "The relationship between Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Republican and Democrat, Christian and Jew, western rancher's daughter and Brooklyn girl-transcends party, religion, region, and culture. Strengthened by each other's presence, these groundbreaking judges, the first and second women to serve on the highest court in the land, have transformed the Constitution and America itself, making it a more equal place for all women."

50. The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution by
Michael J. Klarman: "Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup narrates how the Framers' clashing interests shaped the Constitution-and American history itself."

51. Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America's Free Press by Richard Kluger: "When in 1733 a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized."

54. Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women by Victoria Law and Laura Whitehorn: "As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, this collection of real-life prisoners' stories and analysis of the prison landscape as it is today documents both collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the United States."

56. Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) by Sanford Levinson: "Levinson argues that too many of our Constitution's provisions promote either unjust or ineffective government. Under the existing blueprint, we can neither rid ourselves of incompetent presidents nor assure continuity of government following catastrophic attacks. Less important, perhaps, but certainly problematic, is the appointment of Supreme Court judges for life. Adding insult to injury, the United States Constitution is the most difficult to amend or update of any constitution currently existing in the world today. Democratic debate leaves few stones unturned, but we tend to take our basic constitutional structures for granted. Levinson boldly challenges the American people to undertake a long overdue public discussion on how they might best reform this most hallowed document and construct a constitution adequate to our democratic values."

58. Denial: Holocaust History on Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt: "Denial is Lipstadt's riveting, blow-by-blow account of this singular legal battle, which resulted in a formal denunciation of a Holocaust denier that crippled the movement for years to come. Lipstadt's victory was proclaimed on the front page of major newspapers around the world, such as The Times (UK), which declared that 'history has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.'"

60. Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 by Pauline Maier: "In this splendid new history, Pauline Maier tells the dramatic story of the yearlong battle over ratification that brought such famous founders as Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and Henry together with less well-known Americans who sometimes eloquently and always passionately expressed their hopes and fears for their new country."

61. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence by Bruce Mann: "Debt was an inescapable fact of life in early America. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, its sinfulness was preached by ministers and the right to imprison debtors was unquestioned. By 1800, imprisonment for debt was under attack and insolvency was no longer seen as a moral failure, merely an economic setback. In Republic of Debtors, Bruce H. Mann illuminates this crucial transformation in early American society."

62. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire: "In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer-Rosa Parks-to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change."

64: 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal by Christopher Moore: "From the first chapter, he turns a fresh, perceptive, and lucid eye on the people, the issues, and the political theories of Confederation-from John A. Macdonald's canny handling of leadership to the invention of federalism and the Senate, from the Quebec question to the influence of political philosophers Edmund Burke and Walter Bagehot."

66. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad: "The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies."

68. Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement by Jennifer Nelson: "Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color."

70. Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 by Kunal M. Parker: "Kunal Parker argues that during the earliest stages of American history, being legally constructed as a foreigner, along with being subjected to restrictions on presence and movement, was not confined to those who sought to enter the country from the outside, but was also used against those on the inside. Insiders thus shared important legal disabilities with outsiders."

72. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy by James T. Patterson: "Here, in a concise, moving narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath."

75. Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach: " Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials."

77. Women and the Law: Stories edited by Elizabeth M. Schneider and Stephanie M. Wildman: "This book examines landmark cases establishing women's legal rights, offering accounts of the litigants, history, parties, strategies, and theoretical implications. It will enrich any law school course and can serve as a text for a course on women and the law, gender and law, feminist jurisprudence, or women's studies. This volume utilizes subject areas common to many women and law casebooks: history, constitutional law, reproductive freedom, the workplace, the family, and women in the legal profession."

78. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez: " Undivided Rights presents a textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies."

79. Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voygage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which it Gave Rise by A.W. Brian Simpson: " Cannibalism and the Common Law is an enthralling classic of legal history. It tells the tragic story of the yacht Mignonette, which foundered on its way from England to Australia in 1884. The killing and eating of one of the crew, Richard Parker, led to the leading case in the defence of necessity, R. v. Dudley and Stephens. It resulted in their being convicted and sentenced to death, a sentence subsequently commuted."

80. My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor: "The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself."

81. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith: "Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics for a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity."

84. Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by John Paul Stevens: "By the time of his retirement in June 2010, John Paul Stevens had become the second longest serving Justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Now he draws upon his more than three decades on the Court, during which he was involved with many of the defining decisions of the modern era, to offer a book like none other."

85. Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey R. Stone: "Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times incisively investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone delineates the consistent suppression of free speech in six historical periods from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Vietnam War, and ends with a coda that examines the state of civil liberties in the Bush era."

86. Speaking Freely: Whitney v. California and American Speech Law by Philippa Strum: "Anita Whitney was a child of wealth and privilege who became a vocal leftist early in the twentieth century, supporting radical labor groups such as the Wobblies and helping to organize the Communist Labor Party. In 1919 she was arrested and charged with violating California's recently passed laws banning any speech or activity intended to change the American political and economic systems. The story of the Supreme Court case that grew out of Whitney's conviction, told in full in this book, is also the story of how Americans came to enjoy the most liberal speech laws in the world."

87. Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row by Forrest Stuart: "How did we reach a point where we've cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That's the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out and Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States."

91. Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz: "From Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure. Now, in Uncertain Justice, Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show the surprising extent to which the Roberts Court is revising the meaning of our Constitution."

96. The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Co by Laura Weinrib: "In the early decades of the twentieth century, business leaders condemned civil liberties as masks for subversive activity, while labor sympathizers denounced the courts as shills for industrial interests. But by the Second World War, prominent figures in both camps celebrated the judiciary for protecting freedom of speech. In this strikingly original history, Laura Weinrib illustrates how a surprising coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy."

97. American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction by G. Edward White: "Eminent legal scholar G. Edward White offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues. Rather than offer a straight chronological history, the book instead traces important threads woven throughout our nation's past, looking at how law shaped Native American affairs, slavery, business, and home life, as well as how it has dealt with criminal and civil offenses. White shows that law has not always been used to exemplary ends."

98. The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial by James Q. Whitman: "To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of 'reasonable doubt.' It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one."

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100 Must-Read Books about the Law and Social Justice

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For the past several months, Book Riot has been getting a lot of requests for recommendations for books explaining why our political and legal systems are the way they are. (We cannot possibly imagine why...) So for your reading pleasure we present "100 Must-Read Books about the Law and Social Justice."

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Books shelved as social-justice-issues: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Al...

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From Transitional to Transformative Justice

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From Transitional to Transformative Justice

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Transitional justice has become the principle lens used by countries emerging from conflict and authoritarian rule to address the legacies of violence and serious human rights abuses. However, as transitional justice practice becomes more institutionalized with support from NGOs and funding from Western donors, questions have been raised about the long-term effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms. Core elements of the paradigm have been subjected to sustained critique, yet there is much less commentary that goes beyond critique to set out, in a comprehensive fashion, what an alternative approach might look like. This volume discusses one such alternative, transformative justice, and positions this quest in the wider context of ongoing fall-out from the 2008 global economic and political crisis, as well as the failure of social justice advocates to respond with imagination and ambition. Drawing on diverse perspectives, contributors illustrate the wide-ranging purchase of transformative justice at both conceptual and empirical levels.

'Transitional justice arrived in the 1990s with great promise, but the results achieved to date have generally been modest at best. This excellent and cutting-edge volume convincingly argues for a more deeply transformative approach, and the various contributions are consistently critical, constructive, and thought-provoking. It is the rare volume that combines deep critique with serious engagement with practice.'

Philip Alston - John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights

'This exciting and important volume explores the potential of transformative justice to radically reform transitional justice in ways that are at once imaginative, ambitious and emancipatory. It deserves to be widely read.'

Andrea Cornwall - Head of the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex

'An important shift is underway in the theory and normative practices associated with post-conflict justice, partly in response to the global expansion of neoliberalism and its impact on conflict-affected societies. This very interesting collection is probably the first volume to explore the tensions and dilemmas that are both driving and impeding the expansion of thinking about justice and associated practices into more transformative frameworks in everyday, rather than solely national or global, contexts.'

Oliver Richmond - Associate Dean for Internationalisation, University of Manchester

'This is a courageous and forward thinking book. In this collection of essays, Gready and Robins with their well-respected colleagues, have tackled the question of the definition of transitional justice; its limitations, goals, and future. By its focus on transitional justice as transformational justice with attention to local agency, process, pluralism, power, and structures of exclusion, the authors challenge the status quo and raise important questions about the understandings of justice and how meaningful change can occur. This book is an important step forward in the development of what is still a nascent field.'

Harvey Weinstein - University of California, Berkeley; Co-Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the International Journal of Transitional Justice

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From Transitional to Transformative Justice edited by Paul Gready

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Transitional justice has become the principle lens used by countries emerging from conflict and authoritarian rule to address the legacies of violence and serious human rights abuses.

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Find films, lesson videos, presentations, guided audios, and books helpful for introducing mindfulness to your school.

Are you looking for an overview of mindfulness in education to help parents, staff, and administrators understand the power of this work? Start with these short videos and films. All are free and can be shown at staff meetings and parent education nights.

Just Breathe (4 min)

Watch and listen to young students describe how mindfulness helps them handle difficult emotions in this 4-minute film from Julie Bayer, one of our Mindful Schools graduates. You can learn more about the Just Breathe film here.

Room to Breathe (56 min)

Airing on PBS, Room to Breathe was the first broadcast documentary on mindfulness in education. Raw, authentic and human, it is great for showing people what mindfulness training really looks like in a school community dealing with an array of economic, academic and mental health challenges.

Arrive (2 min)

At the start of class, Ms. O guides her high school students in a simple mindfulness meditation practice. This allows students to quiet their nervous systems and get ready to learn. Arrive was filmed at Gateway High School in San Francisco, CA.

Healthy Habits of Mind (41 min)

Healthy Habits of Mind is a 45-minute overview of Mindfulness in Education. Featuring pioneering neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson, it focuses less on classroom implementation than Room to Breathe but has more contextual information on the neurobiology and research underpinning mindfulness. A great overview piece for administrators.

Download a Starter Lesson

demonstrated in the videos above, that introduces mindful bodies and mindful listening to K-5 elementary school students. Try the lesson in your classroom and notice how your students respond.

Listen to three guided practices to get an introduction of how to practice mindfulness through breathing, body scan, and walking.

Mindful Walking

(Click the red play button above)

Mindful walking cultivates awareness of your body while in motion and it's something you can practice throughout the day. It can help increase your energy level if you are tired or restless and also add variety if you're doing longer periods of seated practice.

(Click the red play button above)

The body scan is a simple, structured way of bringing consciousness to different parts of body. The body scan can be very useful as a grounding mechanism when facing strong emotions, or if you're having trouble stabilizing awareness on the breath or body.

Mindful Breathing

(Click the red play button above)

Awareness of the breath is one of the foundational exercises for learning mindfulness meditation. It's a popular starting point because the breath is something you can always access. It serves as a valuable anchor for other mindfulness practices.

Explore all of these techniques and learn the neuroscience behind mindfulness practice in our Mindfulness Fundamentals course for educators. The training expands on topics such as emotions and interpersonal mindfulness and supports you to cultivate a regular practice. Join our upcoming session.

Why is Mindfulness Fundamentals required before taking the Mindful Educator Essentials course? Because before you formally teach mindfulness to students - your self-care, self-awareness, and personal mindfulness practice serves as an essential model for your students. Learn more about Our Approach.

Mindful Schools community members frequently request examples of how we explain mindfulness to parents, administrators, and other educators. Here are a few presentations and interviews from our archives.

Conference Presentation

Mindful Schools Trainer Megan Cowan speaks at the Practicing Mindfulness & Compassion Conference about how mindfulness programs make schools more compassionate places. Co-hosted by our partners at The Greater Good Science Center and Mindful magazine.

PTA Presentation

Mindful Schools Trainer Megan Cowan speaks to a large PTA audience. An excellent example of a presentation that explains what school-based mindfulness programs are to parents.

Google Talk

This mindful parenting Google Talk by Mindful Schools Trainer Chris McKenna includes neuroscience and practical techniques and strategies. (1 hr)

Presentation by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness pioneer Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes his vision for mindfulness in education at a benefit for Mindful Schools at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, 2012. (1 hr 40 min)

Adult Mindfulness Books

Mindfulness in Education

Mindful Parenting

Teaching Mindfulness to Youth

Explore Mindful Schools' professional development programs to start training your faculty and staff.

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Multimedia Find films, lesson videos, presentations, guided audios, and books helpful for introducing mindfulness to your school. Watch Films About Mindfulness in Education Are you looking for an overview of mindfulness in education to help parents, staff, and administrators understand the power of this work?

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Mindfulness & SEL

Mindfulness teaches students how to pay attention to the present moment. Our comprehensive, mindfulness-based social & emotional learning curriculum equips you and your students with all of the tools you need to reduce the impact of trauma and improve student outcomes. Enhance your teaching practices by using our step-by-step sample lessons in your classroom today.

Empowering Education offers the only fully-integrated mindfulness and SEL curriculum in the industry.

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Mindfulness in Schools - Resources and Curriculum | SEL Curriculum | Empowering Education

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Mindfulness teaches students how to pay attention to the present moment. Our comprehensive, mindfulness-based social & emotional learning curriculum equips you and your students with all of the tools you need to reduce the impact of trauma and improve student outcomes. Enhance your teaching practices by using our step-by-step sample lessons in your classroom today.

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Online & On-Site Calm Classroom Mindfulness Training
Calm Classroom offers mindfulness-based training for educators who are searching for a simple, accessible way to introduce mindfulness into the classroom. Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating present moment awareness of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. By integrating our breathing, stretching, focusing and relaxation techniques into your daily schedule, students will develop emotional resilience and self-regulation skills, leading to a calmer, more engaged classroom.

Our online and on-site training will show you how to incorporate research-based mindfulness and relaxation response techniques into your daily schedule to help students learn how to manage stress and achieve a state of peaceful focus throughout the day.
Benefits of Mindful Awareness Practices in the Classroom
Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPS) like the ones found in Calm Classroom improve executive functioning, which includes working memory, emotion regulation, and self-monitoring. Research shows that participation in a program that utilizes MAPS leads to improvements in behavioral regulation and overall executive functioning in elementary school students.

Our data shows that a consistent daily practice of Calm Classroom techniques leads to positive behavioral and academic outcomes in students, and contributes to a learning-ready classroom environment. Across a sample of 1,400 Calm Classroom teachers, 74% reported that their students are more focused and ready to learn, and 81% said that their students are calmer and more peaceful after practicing Calm Classroom.

Sign up for one of our trainings to learn how to bring mindfulness into your classroom!

Implement Calm Classroom Techniques In Your Classroom

Teacher Training

Calm Classroom Academy is our online introductory training course. In this 3-hour course, teachers, social workers, and administrators will learn how to introduce and manage all aspects of the program for use in classrooms and other learning spaces.

Our 2-hour on-site training supports teachers, administrators and school support staff in learning how to introduce, implement and sustain the Calm Classroom program school-wide.

Our Train-the-Trainer certification enables school staff to serve as on-site Calm Classroom facilitators in addition to providing ongoing program support.

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Online & On-Site Classroom Mindfulness Training Courses

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Online & On-Site Calm Classroom Mindfulness Training Calm Classroom offers mindfulness-based training for educators who are searching for a simple, accessible way to introduce mindfulness into the classroom. Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating present moment awareness of thoughts, emotions and physical sensa

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A teacher shares how she implements daily mindful moments and their positive impact on classroom culture.

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Use Mindfulness in Your Classroom Tomorrow

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Use Mindfulness in Your Classroom Tomorrow

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Can Meditation Help with ADHD?

"Extensive research has proven that mindfulness training integrates the brain and strengthens the important executive functions that support emotional and social intelligence, as well as academic success," says Daniel J. Siegal, neurobiologist and author of The Mindful Brain. (#CommissionsEarned)

What Are the Benefits of Meditation for Students?

Classmates who practice mindful meditation together every day are more likely to trust and support one another. In addition, students who meditate often experience the following benefits:

Increase attention span

Harness energy in healthy ways

Tap into creativity

Improve self-regulation, confidence, problem solving, focus, compassion and empathy

Learn to pause, slow down, and be calm in times of stress

"Meditation is very, very, very peaceful, relaxing, and it makes me feel calm when I do meditation," said one student. "If I am sad, angry or disappointed meditation makes me feel better. That's why I love meditation!"

Indeed, teachers and parents report that students are ready to process new information and actively learn following meditation and yoga sessions, particularly physically active ones.

"Without mindfulness, my daughter cannot absorb what is being taught and she doesn't have the interest in learning," said one parent. "She is clouded with anxiety, but with daily meditation and some yoga she is able to clear her mind of these distractions and move into a state of reception and intrigue. Meditation was the most talked about learning tool during her second-grade year. She taught us how to do it and would practice it on her own as well. To this day, she uses meditation to calm herself when she is frustrated with her sister or me. These sorts of skills are imperative life skills that help her to feel confident, centered, and ready to take on the world."
[Free Download: Kid-Friendly Mindful Meditation Exercises]
How Can I Teach Mindfulness to a Child?

Integrate mindful meditation into your curriculum using these 10 exercises:

1. Set the stage for mindfulness by watching, "Teaching the ABCs of Attention, Balance, and Compassion by Susan Kaiser Greenland" together as a class. Assign books about mindfulness, like Imaginations by Carolyn Clarke, as well.

2. Put meditation and yoga on the daily schedule. Practice yoga poses in the morning, and meditation at the end of the day. Start with the "Take 5" method where students take five slow breaths inhaling through the nose, then exhaling through the mouth. From there, build up to longer activities.

3. Take a "noticing walk" around the school or playground. Tell students to silently tap into all of their senses. Stop to look at pebbles, or listen to the sound of leaves blowing in the breeze. Then, at the end of the walk, ask each student to share one observation. Talk about how you walk by these things every day, and rarely pause to take them in. On a rainy day, dim the lights and ask students to breathe in time to color-changing LED lights. Play soothing music and use a diffuser with lavender, orange, cinnamon, or lemon scent to create a peaceful atmosphere. Help students practice mindful listening by cataloging how many different noises they can notice in one minute.

4. Team up with the art teacher on a project to craft a glitter jar where students choose three colors of glitter - one each to represent thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Fill a container with water and a few pinches of each glitter, seal the jar, and ask students: What shakes up your emotions in positive and negative ways? Is it winning a sports game? Fighting with a sibling? Ask the kids to swirl the jar with each thought. Then tell them to be still, practice the "take 5" method, and set down the jar. As the glitter slowly settles to the bottom, so too will their thoughts and feelings come under control.

5. Buy a yoga card deck, like Yoga Pretzels. Let students take turns picking a pose and practicing it as a class. Challenge them to learn the Sanskrit name of each pose. Try changing from pose to pose in slow motion. After your students have mastered all of the poses in a deck, ask them to invent a new pose, and give it a name. As a bonus, let your students use chimes, a singing bowl, or a gong to signal the end of meditation.
[Your Child's Brain on Mindful Meditation]
6. Practice mindful eating during snack or lunch time. Give a few raisins to each student, telling them to pretend they are aliens who have just landed on earth. Ask them to look at each wrinkle and fold, to touch the fruit and notice its plumpness. Give the raisin a squeeze to see if it makes a sound. Smell it. Then ask your students to place one raisin in their mouths, and notice how it feels when they chew and swallow. Ask the children to answer three questions: Was anything surprising? What did you notice about the raisin that you never did before? Did any thoughts not related to raisins pop into your head? For homework, students can demonstrate this activity to their families.

7. Use a "peace rock" for meditation. Hand out smooth rocks you gathered over the summer, or take students on a walk to find a special rock on the playground. Instruct them to hold the rocks in their hands and stare at them while completing a breathing exercise. Then, use the rocks to build cairns in small groups. This exercise builds patience as each rock is carefully balanced atop another, and teaches frustration tolerance when the rocks fall down in a heap.

8.Create a gratitude circle. Ask your students to sit together and send peaceful thoughts to a person or a pet they really love. Then, stop and ask each child to send peaceful thoughts to himself or herself. Next, ask them to take turns sharing a reflection of thanksgiving or a kindness about another student. Write down their words and create a gratitude jar filled with the notes. Pull them out throughout the year.

9. Play the marble roll game. Give each student an empty paper towel or toilet paper roll, and have the class stand in a line. Give the student at the head of the line a marble, and instruct your students to pass it down the line using only the rolls - not their hands. If the marble falls to the ground, the activity starts over.

10. Ask students to write their own guided meditation scripts once the class is familiar with meditation practice. Start by asking students to imagine a special place they love. Ask them to describe it in great detail using each of their five senses. Include breathing techniques throughout the meditation, and then close with some form of relaxation. Share the first draft with classmates, then get suggestions (and compliments), revise, test it out, and create a final piece. Students can then go "on tour" and give guided meditations to other classes. You can even use Vocaroo to record the meditation to share with family and friends. Listen to a sample guided meditation here.
[Expert Webinar: How Meditation Helps Students with ADHD Thrive]
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10 Mindfulness Exercises for Stronger School Focus

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"Extensive research has proven that mindfulness training integrates the brain and strengthens the important executive functions that support emotional and social intelligence, as well as academic success," says Daniel J. Siegal, neurobiologist and author of The Mindful Brain . (#CommissionsEarned) Classmates who practice mindful meditation together every day are more likely to trust and support one another.

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We know mindfulness is good for us. Mindfulness allows us to be present in our parenting, choosing the skillful response instead of succumbing to our visceral reactions.

Mindfulness is also good for our kids. There is an emerging body of research that indicates that mindfulness can help our children improve their abilities to pay attention, to calm down when they are upset, and to make better decisions. In short, it helps with emotional regulation and cognitive focus. Do I even need to ask if you want that for your kids? 🙂

So where do we start? How can we teach mindfulness to kids?

Establish your own practice. You would have trouble teaching your children ballet if you had never danced. To authentically teach mindfulness to your children, you need to practice it yourself. You can read my guide to establishing a meditation practice here, or my popular post 40 Ways to Bring Mindfulness to Your Days here for some ideas to get started. Don't let this step intimidate you - you're probably practicing a lot of mindful habits already!

Check your expectations. A core principle of mindfulness is letting go of expectations, and this certainly applies to teaching mindfulness to kids. Are you expecting mindfulness to eliminate tantrums? to make your active child calm? to make your house quiet? If so, you are likely to be disappointed. While feeling calm or being quiet are nice side-effects of mindfulness, they are not the ultimate purpose.

The purpose of teaching mindfulness to our children is to give them skills to develop their awareness of their inner and outer experiences, to recognize their thoughts as "just thoughts," to understand how emotions manifest in their bodies, to recognize when their attention has wandered, and to provide tools for impulse control. It is not a panacea, and it will not completely get rid of what is, frankly, normal kid behavior, like tantrums and loudness and whining and exuberance and arguing...

Don't force it. If your kids aren't interested in your lesson or activity, drop it. This is a good time for you to practice non-attachment to outcomes!

Don't make mindfulness a punishment. This shouldn't be, "You hit your sister! Go sit in the mindful corner!" 'nuff said.

Now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way, here are my suggestions for how you can begin to introduce mindfulness to your children.

10 Ways to Teach Mindfulness to Kids

1. Keep it simple. With older kids, you can share the widely-used definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn in the image above. But those are a lot of big words for little kids. I prefer to use the words awareness or noticing with my children {ages 5 and 7, for reference}. Mindfulness is noticing our thoughts, what our body feels like, what our ears are hearing, and anything else that is around us and happening right now.

2. Listen to the bell. An easy way for children to practice mindfulness is to focus on paying attention to what they can hear. I've used a singing bowl, like the one on the right, for this exercise, but you could use a bell, a set of chimes, or a phone app that has sounds on it. Tell your children that you will make the sound, and they should listen carefully until they can no longer hear the sound (which is usually 30 seconds to a minute). I find that this exercise does have a calming effect on my children, and it's a fun way to teach them to pay attention to their surroundings.

3. Create a mindful bedtime ritual. Bedtime is a great time to introduce mindfulness to kids. My daughter loves to do a short body-scan meditation before bed - she closes her eyes, and I tell her to bring her attention to her toes, to her feet, to her legs, etc. It is a calming way to return to the body at the end of the day. You can find several downloadable meditation scripts (including body scans) here, and you can read about the bedtime ritual my daughter and I created here.

4. Practice with a breathing buddy. For young children, an instruction to simply "pay attention to the breath" can be hard to follow. In this Edutopia video, Daniel Goleman describes a 2nd-grade classroom that does a "breathing buddy" exercise: each student grabs a stuffed animal, and then lies down on their back with their buddy on their belly. They focus their attention on the rise and fall of the stuffed animal as they breathe in and out. {You should definitely check out the video - it's less than 2 minutes and explains the exercise and all the good stuff that it teaches kids!}

5. Make your walks mindful. One of my children's favorite things to do in the summer is a "noticing walk." We stroll through our neighborhood and notice things we haven't seen before. We'll designate one minute of the walk where we are completely silent and simply pay attention to all the sounds we can hear - frogs, woodpeckers, a lawnmower. We don't even call it "mindfulness," but that's what it is.

6. Establish a gratitude practice. I believe gratitude is a fundamental component of mindfulness, teaching our children to appreciate the abundance in their lives, as opposed to focusing on all the toys and goodies that they crave. This post describes my family's nightly gratitude practice - each night at dinner we each share one thing we are thankful for. It is one of my favorite parts of the day.

7. Try the SpiderMan meditation! My five-year-old son is in to all things superheroes, and this SpiderMan meditation is right up his alley. This meditation from Kids Relaxation teaches children to activate their "spidey-senses" and their ability to focus on all they can smell, taste, and hear in the present moment. Such a clever idea!

8. Meditate with your children. I cannot even tell you how many times my meditation sessions have been interrupted by my children. They know by now what mommy is doing when she meditates, so I will try to continue with my meditation even as they play around me. Sometimes, my daughter will sit down and join me for a few minutes. It's beautiful.

9. Check your personal weather report. In Sitting Still Like a Frog, Eline Snel encourages children to "summon the weather report that best describes [their] feelings at the moment." Sunny, rainy, stormy, calm, windy, tsunami? This activity allows children to observe their present state without overly identifying with their emotions. They can't change the weather outside, and we can't change our emotions or feelings either. All we can change is how we relate to them. As Snel describes it, children can recognize, "I am not the downpour, but I notice that it is raining; I am not a scaredy-cat, but I realize that sometimes I have this big scared feeling somewhere near my throat."

10. Practice mindful eating. The exercise of mindfully eating a raisin or a piece of chocolate is a staple of mindfulness education, and is a great activity for kids. You can find a script for a 7-minute mindful eating exercise for children here. This is a fun way to teach children to pay attention to and savor their food, and by extension, the present moment.

*****

Above all, remember to have fun and keep it simple. You can provide your children with many opportunities to add helpful practices to their toolkit - some of them will work for them and some won't. But it's fun to experiment!

Teach mindfulness to your kids - it can help them develop emotional regulation and cognitive focus. Tweet

Want more resources? You may find the following posts helpful:

Mindful Mantras for Kids {with coloring sheet downloads}

Learn to make a Mind Jar {this is the all-time most-read post on my blog!}
Teaching Mindfulness to Teens: 5 Ways to Get Buy-In 5 Strategies for Teaching Mindfulness t The Totally Obvious Thing a Mindful Mama Overlooked

o Children

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10 Ways to Teach Mindfulness to Kids - Left Brain Buddha

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We know mindfulness is good for us. Mindfulness allows us to be present in our parenting, choosing the skillful response instead of succumbing to our visceral reactions. Mindfulness is also good for our kids.

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The ultimate guide to the research on the effects of mindfulness and meditation for our health, psyche, and overall quality of life.

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A weekly tip about everyday mindful moments.

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Mindfulness is the state of mental calmness, often achieved by focusing your awareness on the present moment and accepting any feelings, thoughts, and sensations.

Regular practice enhances your overall health and reduces stress levels significantly. These videos delve into the science and joy of mindfulness, with several examples of how to begin or continue your practice.

I hope this list of mindfulness TED talks encourages you to try mindfulness for yourself and experience its numerous benefits.

Before you start reading this article, I recommend you to download Week 1 of Mindfulness X. It is free and will help you understand mindfulness on a theoretical level. Mindfulness X also includes tools to apply mindfulness in your work with clients, students, staff, and yourself.

You can download the package with PDF's for free on this page: https://bit.ly/2OUGkwI

All It Takes Is 10 Mindful Minutes

Do you know how much time you have spent lost in your own thoughts? In his talk, Puddicombe asks how many people in the audience have ever looked after their mind.

Meditation, as Puddicombe says, can be the aspirin for the mind. He also tells about some of his wonderful experiences as a monk in the Himalayas.

The Art of Stillness

Pico Iyer offers an astonishing amount of information about meditation that he's learned from visiting many of the top social network institutions.

By observing his thoughts during his journey all over the word, Pico found out that, "There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in 'Hamlet', but thinking makes it so." Do you agree? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Practice of Mindfulness

Diana Winston takes us through some of the research into the benefits of mindfulness.

Winston also explains why suffering from physical symptoms of stress has been helpful, and why people are happier if they pay attention to the present moment.

The Mindful Way Through Depression

Depression is episodic and recurrent. In working with people with mood disorders, Zindel faced the challenge of helping them recover from depression and continue with a healthy mindset.

Zindel wanted to understand the triggers that could make people fall into depression again and again. He found that mindfulness plays an important role in preventing depression.

Mindfulness and Healing

When Shannon Paige's cancer was gone, her battle with depression began. She proposes that yoga built her own mind-body connection, and can help in combatting depression.

Shannon was diagnosed with cancer when she was 21. She has been through lots of battles throughout the entire process but eventually beat it.

Mindfulness in Schools

Richard Burnett tells us that the second mode of mind-apart from thinking-is sensing. He then shows how training in sensing can help children cope with the depression and anxiety of over-thinking.

Do you think mindfulness is too boring for youngsters? Burnett launched his project "dot B," aiming to provide fun and memorable uses of meditation.

How Mindfulness Meditation Redefines Pain, Happiness, and Satisfaction

Dr. Kasim Al-Mashat tells us of his hilarious and joyful experiences in a forest-and explains why mindfulness meditation is not a quick-fix.

Even when we have everything we want, why is it sometimes not enough? And how "should" we look at pain? Did you agree with Dr. Kasim Al-Mashat insight to these questions?

Which one of these videos do you find most inspirational? How can you incorporate mindfulness into your daily life?

Let us know in the comments section below. We'd love to hear from you.

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Top 7 Most Inspirational Mindfulness TedTalks

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Mindfulness is the state of mental calmness, often achieved by focusing your awareness on the present moment and accepting any feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Regular practice enhances your overall health and reduces stress levels significantly. These videos delve into the science and joy of mindfulness, with several examples of how to begin or continue your practice.

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What is happening

Sharings from the Heart

Over 300 educators from Europe and afar gathered for this one week retreat in late August to rest, renew, and connect within and with each other.

Thich Nhat Hanh Memorial

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US TOUR 2023 : Nourishing Ourselves, Caring for Others

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The Upper Hamlet Community and Happy Farm offer a two week immersive retreat in Mindfulness, Deep Ecology and Nature Connection.

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Blue Cliff Monastery - North America

Once again this winter, Blue Cliff Monastery will hold a Three-Month Peaceful Dwelling Retreat (Winter Retreat) for its monastic and lay residents.

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Library

A flower held up speaks wonderfully. Its five petals have a special fragrance. The Dharma Treasure is transmitted from India and continued in the Mind-Seal school in China. May all generations of Ancestral Teachers, residing in the Nirvana of the Wonderful Mind, seated high on the precious Dharma throne,...

Discover more Dharma Talks in our Library or our Listen podcast.

Over 300 educators from Europe and afar gathered for this one week retreat in late August to rest, renew, and connect within and with each other.

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US TOUR 2023 : Nourishing Ourselves, Caring for Others

Magnolia Grove Monastery - North America, Worldwide / Online

Join the monastics at Magnolia Grove Monastery, Mississippi, for a five day retreat for Healthcare Professionals, First responders, and Caregivers (Online & In-person).

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Coming Home to Mother Earth

Plum Village France - Europe, Upper Hamlet

The Upper Hamlet Community and Happy Farm offer a two week immersive retreat in Mindfulness, Deep Ecology and Nature Connection.

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Rains Retreat 2023-24

Plum Village France - Europe

Join us for our 90-day Rains Retreat (2023-24) where we simplify our lives and deepen our mindfulness practice.

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The Plum Village Tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

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A global community of mindfulness practice centers and monasteries offering retreats and teachings on engaged Buddhism and the art of mindful living.

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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama | The 14th Dalai Lama

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Welcome to the official website of the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. His Holiness is the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.

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Original Language English

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

View All Poems by Kahlil Gibran

Isn't this wonderful? Each time I return to this poem and reread its lines, I feel as if I am greeting old friends in the phrases. They continue to stay with me.

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

Especially that middle section...

The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea...

Gibran is giving us a tangible image of self as a sea of infinite depths. And it is our very nature to seek self-knowledge, ultimately to pour ourselves into it, to discover treasure within its depths.

I like his assertion that we should not attempt to weigh or measure what we discover.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.

It is as if when we measure, we think we have comprehended and possessed it, but we have in some way externalized it and defined artificial boundaries. By quantifying, we have limited what is, by nature, limitless.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

And his final lines--

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Recommended Books: Kahlil Gibran

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Original Language English And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.And he answered saying:Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.You would

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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies [Menakem, Resmaa] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

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"The trauma caused by childhood neglect, sexual or domestic abuse and war wreaks havoc in our bodies, says Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score . . . . Van der Kolk draws on thirty years of experience to argue powerfully that trauma is one of the West's most urgent public health issues. . . . Packed with science and human stories, the book is an intense read. . . . [T]he struggle and resilience of his patients is very moving."-Shaoni Bhattacharya, helps us understand how life experiences play out in the function and the malfunction of our bodies, years later." is a seminal work by one of the preeminent pioneers in trauma research and treatment. This essential book unites the evolving neuroscience of trauma research with an emergent wave of body-oriented therapies and traditional mind/body practices that go beyond symptom relief and connect us with our vital energy and here-and-now presence." we share the author's courageous journey into the parallel dissociative worlds of trauma victims and the medical and psychological disciplines that are meant to provide relief. In this compelling book we learn that as our minds desperately try to leave trauma behind, our bodies keep us trapped in the past with wordless emotions and feelings. These inner disconnections cascade into ruptures in social relationships with disastrous effects on marriages, families, and friendships. Van der Kolk offers hope by describing treatments and strategies that have successfully helped his patients reconnect their thoughts with their bodies. We leave this shared journey understanding that only through fostering self-awareness and gaining an inner sense of safety will we, as a species, fully experience the richness of life. body, and learn about the exciting new approaches that allow people with the severest forms of trauma to put all the parts back together again." is, simply put, brilliant." articulates new and better therapies for toxic stress based on a deep understanding of the effects of trauma on brain development and attachment systems. This volume provides a moving summary of what is currently known about the effects of trauma on individuals and societies, and introduces the healing potential of both age old and novel approaches to help traumatized children and adults to fully engage in the present." eloquently articulates how overwhelming experiences affect the development of brain, mind, and body awareness, all of which are closely intertwined. The resulting derailments have a profound impact on the capacity for love and work. This rich integration of clinical case examples with ground breaking scientific studies provides us with a new understanding of trauma, which inevitably leads to the exploration of novel therapeutic approaches that 'rewire' the brain, and help traumatized people to (re)-engage in the present. This book will provide traumatized individuals with a guide to healing and permanently change how psychologists and psychiatrists think about trauma and recovery." is a cutting-edge offering for the general reader to comprehend the complex effects of trauma, and a guide to a wide array of scientifically informed approaches to not only reduce suffering, but to move beyond mere survival-and to thrive." leaves us with both a profound appreciation for and a felt sense of, the debilitating effects of trauma, along with hope for the future through fascinating descriptions of novel approaches to treatment. This outstanding volume is absolutely essential reading not only for therapists but for all who seek to understand, prevent, or treat the immense suffering caused by trauma." is masterful in bringing together science and humanism to clearly explain how trauma affects the whole person. Bessel van der Kolk brings deep understanding to the pain and chaos of the trauma experience. The treatment approaches he recommends heal the body and the mind, restoring hope and the possibility of joy. One reads this book with profound gratitude for its wisdom."
New Scientist Nature -European Journal of Psychotraumatology -Medical Library Association, Consumer Connections - Henry Strick van Linschoten, European Society For Trauma And Dissociation Newsletter Booklist Library Journal (Starred Review) -Judith Herman, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; author of Trauma and Recovery The Body Keeps the Score -Vincent J. Felitti, M.D., chief of preventative medicine, emeritus, Kaiser Permanente San Diego; co-principal investigator, ACE study -Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and neuroscience; director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY The Body Keeps the Score -Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., author of In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness The Body Keeps the Score -Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation

"This is an absolutely fascinating and clearly written book by one of the nation's most experienced physicians in the field of emotional trauma. -Alexander McFarlane AO, MB BS (Hons) MD FRANZCP, director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies, The University of Adelaide, South Australia. -Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine emeritus, UMass Medical School; author of
Full Catastrophe Living. -Richard Schwartz, originator, Internal Family Systems Therapy The Body Keeps the Score is clear, fascinating, hard to put down, and filled with powerful case histories. Van der Kolk, the eminent impresario of trauma treatment, who has spent a career bringing together diverse trauma scientists and clinicians and their ideas, while making his own pivotal contributions, describes what is arguably the most important series of breakthroughs in mental health in the last thirty years. We've known that psychological trauma fragments the mind. Here we see not only how psychological trauma also breaks connections within the brain, but also between mind and

"Breathtaking in its scope and breadth, -Norman Doidge, author of
The Brain That Changes Itself -Stephen Cope, founder and director, Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living; author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self The Body Keeps the Score -Onno van der Hart, Ph.D., Utrecht University, The Netherlands; senior author,
The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization "The Body Keeps the Score -Jessica Stern, policy consultant on terrorism; author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror -Glenn N. Saxe, M.D., Arnold Simon Professor and chairman, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; director, NYU Child Study Center, New York University School of Medicine -Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., originator of EMDR therapy, senior research fellow, Emeritus Mental Research Institute, author of Getting Past Your Past -Ed Tronick, distinguished professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston, author of Neurobehavior and Social Emotional Development of Infants and Young Children The Body Keeps the Score -Ruth A. Lanius, M.D., Ph.D., Harris-Woodman chair in Psyche and Soma, professor of psychiatry, and director PTSD research at the University of Western Ontario; author of The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease The Body Keeps the Score -Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., clinical professor, UCLA School of Medicine, author of Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain
; Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation; and The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are The Body Keeps the Score -Pat Ogden Ph.D., Founder/Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute; author of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment

"Bessel van der Kolk is unequaled in his ability to synthesize the stunning developments in the field of psychological trauma over the past few decades. Thanks in part to his work, psychological trauma-ranging from chronic child abuse and neglect, to war trauma and natural disasters-is now generally recognized as a major cause of individual, social and cultural breakdown. In this masterfully lucid and engaging tour de force, van der Kolk takes us -both specialists and the general public- on his personal journey and shows what he has learned from his research, from his colleagues and students, and, most importantly, from his patients. -Jack Kornfied, author of A Path with Heart
The Body Keeps the Score -Alicia Lieberman, Ph.D., Professor of Medical Psychology UCSF, Director of the Child Trauma Research Project, San Francisco General Hospital; author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler

"When it comes to understanding the impact of trauma and being able to continue to grow despite overwhelming life experiences, Bessel van der Kolk leads the way in his comprehensive knowledge, clinical courage, and creative strategies to help us heal.

"In this magnificent book, Bessel van der Kolk takes the reader on a captivating journey that is chock full of riveting stories of patients and their struggles interpreted through history, research, and neuroscience made accessible in the words of a gifted storyteller. We are privy to the author's own courageous efforts to understand and treat trauma over the past 40 years, the results of which have broken new ground and challenged the status quo of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma [van der Kolk M.D., Bessel] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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"Mindfulness offers a way for us to tap into the inner resilience, focus and wellbeing that are already inside us. Teach, Breathe, Learn is a key that unlocks this inner potential. This book makes mindfulness accessible for teachers everywhere and is a great resource for sharing mindfulness with young people. It is a helpful tool for parents and educators of all backgrounds. As an accomplished international educator and dedicated mindfulness practitioner, Meena Srinivasan brings these two worlds together in this compelling book, showing how to embed mindfulness into teaching and life."

- Congressman Tim Ryan, A Mindful Nation

"Meena is a precious ambassador of mindfulness, concretely showing us how to bring mindfulness to the 'front lines' of the classroom, the staffroom, and all throughout our day. The wisdom in this book is grounded in Meena's personal experience of applying mindfulness and compassion to respond rather than react to situations, in order to nurture what is best in us and in our students and skillfully take care of difficult moments."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee

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"Mindfulness offers a way for us to tap into the inner resilience, focus and wellbeing that are already inside us. Teach, Breathe, Learn is a key that unlocks this inner potential. This book makes mindfulness accessible for teachers everywhere and is a great resource for sharing mindfulness with young people.

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NY Times: 2 States, 8 Textbooks, 2 American Stories

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NY Times: 2 States, 8 Textbooks, 2 American Stories

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We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here's how political divides shape what students learn about the nation's history.

The textbooks cover the same sweeping story, from the brutality of slavery to the struggle for civil rights. The self-evident truths of the founding documents to the waves of immigration that reshaped the nation.

The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation's deepest partisan divides.

Hundreds of differences - some subtle, others extensive - emerged in a New York Times analysis of eight commonly used American history textbooks in California and Texas, two of the nation's largest markets.

In a country that cannot come to a consensus on fundamental questions - how restricted capitalism should be, whether immigrants are a burden or a boon, to what extent the legacy of slavery continues to shape American life - textbook publishers are caught in the middle. On these questions and others, classroom materials are not only shaded by politics, but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters.

Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a "radical left" that wants to "erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology."

The left has pushed for students to encounter history more from the ground up than from the top down, with a focus on the experiences of marginalized groups such as enslaved people, women and Native Americans.

The books The Times analyzed were published in 2016 or later and have been widely adopted for eighth and 11th graders, though publishers declined to share sales figures. Each text has editions for Texas and California, among other states, customized to satisfy policymakers with different priorities.

"At the end of the day, it's a political process," said Jesús F. de la Teja, an emeritus professor of history at Texas State University who has worked for the state of Texas and for publishers in reviewing standards and textbooks.

The differences between state editions can be traced back to several sources: state social studies standards; state laws; and feedback from panels of appointees that huddle, in Sacramento and Austin hotel conference rooms, to review drafts.

Requests from textbook review panels, submitted in painstaking detail to publishers, show the sometimes granular ways that ideology can influence the writing of history.

A California panel asked the publisher McGraw-Hill to avoid the use of the word "massacre" when describing 19th-century Native American attacks on white people. A Texas panel asked Pearson to point out the number of clergy who signed the Declaration of Independence, and to state that the nation's founders were inspired by the Protestant Great Awakening.

All the members of the California panel were educators selected by the State Board of Education, whose members were appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. The Texas panel, appointed by the Republican-dominated State Board of Education, was made up of educators, parents, business representatives and a Christian pastor and politician.

McGraw-Hill, the publisher whose annotated Bill of Rights appears differently in the two states, said it had created the additional wording on the Second Amendment and gun control for the California textbook. A national version of the pages is similar to the Texas edition, which does not call attention to gun rights, the company said in a written statement.

Pearson, the publisher whose Texas textbook raises questions about the quality of Harlem Renaissance literature, said such language "adds more depth and nuance."

Critical language about nonwhite cultural movements also appears in a Texas book from McGraw-Hill. It is partly a result of debates, in 2010, between conservative and liberal members of the Texas Board of Education over whether state standards should mention cultural movements like hip-hop and country music. Their compromise was to ask teachers and textbook publishers to address "both the positive and negative impacts" of artistic movements.

Texas struck that requirement in 2018, but its most recent textbooks, published in 2016, will reflect it for years to come.

Publishers are eager to please state policymakers of both parties, during a challenging time for the business. Schools are transitioning to digital materials. And with the ease of internet research, many teachers say they prefer to curate their own primary-source materials online.

How Textbooks are Produced

Still, recent textbooks have come a long way from what was published in past decades. Both Texas and California volumes deal more bluntly with the cruelty of the slave trade, eschewing several myths that were common in textbooks for generations: that some slave owners treated enslaved people kindly and that African-Americans were better off enslaved than free. The books also devote more space to the women's movement and balance the narrative of European immigration with stories of Latino and Asian immigrants.

"American history is not anymore the story of great white men," said Albert S. Broussard, a history professor at Texas A&M University and an author of both the Texas and California editions of McGraw-Hill's textbooks.

Here is how the politics of American history play out in California and Texas textbooks, on subjects like race, immigration, gender, sexuality and the economy.

California and Texas textbooks sometimes offer different explanations for white backlash to black advancement after the Civil War, from Reconstruction to housing discrimination in the 20th century.

Southern whites resisted Reconstruction, according to a McGraw-Hill textbook, because they "did not want African-Americans to have more rights." But the Texas edition offers an additional reason: Reforms cost money, and that meant higher taxes.

Whole paragraphs on redlining and restrictive deeds appear only in the California editions of textbooks, partly as a result of different state standards. Texas' social studies guidelines do not mention housing discrimination at all.

Nevertheless, Kerry Green, a high school social studies teacher in Sunnyvale, Tex., a small town east of Dallas, said she discussed redlining with her 11th graders, adding it as a counterpoint to lessons about postwar prosperity - the optimistic story of consumerism, television and the Baby Boom that is emphasized by her state's standards.

Ms. Green said she preferred to assign primary sources that "encourage students to explore history on their own." But she said she would welcome textbooks that contain more historical documents and a greater diversity of voices and themes from the past.

"The textbook companies are not gearing their textbooks toward teachers; they're gearing their textbooks toward states," she said.

In Texas textbooks, mentions of L.G.B.T.Q. issues tend to be restricted to coverage of events in recent decades, such as the Stonewall uprising, the AIDS crisis and debates over marriage rights.

But for recent California editions, publishers wrote thousands of words of new text in response to the FAIR Education Act, a law signed by Governor Brown in 2011. It requires schools to teach the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and disabled Americans.

Peppered throughout California books are passages on topics like same-sex families under slavery and early sex reassignment surgery in the 1950s - text that does not appear in Texas versions.

Stephanie Kugler, an eighth-grade history teacher in West Sacramento, Calif., said she had expanded an idea mentioned briefly in her classroom's textbook, about women who dressed as men to fight in the Civil War and continued to live as men, into an entire lesson on troops who today would be considered transgender. The students read accounts of those soldiers' lives alongside more traditional sources, such as letters written by a black Union soldier and a Confederate soldier.

Her goal, Ms. Kugler said, was to "make it really authentic" to talk about diversity in the context of each historical period.

While both states devote many pages to the women's movement, Texas books, in general, avoid discussions of sex or sexuality.

Michael Teague, a Border Patrol agent, is featured in the Texas edition of McGraw-Hill's 11th grade textbook. He discusses his concerns about drug trafficking and says, "if you open the border wide up, you're going to invite political and social upheaval."

Mr. Teague's story is featured at the end of a chapter on recent immigration, alongside accounts from a Vietnamese immigrant and a second-generation Mexican-American.

That section in the California edition of the same book is devoted to a long excerpt from the novel "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents," by Julia Alvarez. It deals with intergenerational tensions in a Dominican-American family.

In a written statement, McGraw-Hill said the full-page Border Patrol narrative was not included in the California edition because it would not fit beside the literary excerpt. And at the time the Texas edition was produced, six years ago, state standards called for students to analyze both "legal and illegal immigration to the United States."

In contrast, California textbooks are more likely to note when a historical figure was an immigrant. And they include more detail on the role immigrants such as Japanese and Filipino farmworkers played in labor movements.

California is one of many states to ask teachers and textbooks in recent years to cover the contributions of specific immigrant groups, including Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, European-Americans and Mexican-Americans.

These additions are part of the reason California books are almost always longer than their Texas counterparts.

California's Board of Education adopted an expansive 842-page social studies framework in 2016. Two years later, Texas' school board streamlined its social studies standards, which are now laid out in 78 tightly compressed pages.

Critics of California's approach say that making state standards and textbooks longer and more inclusive can be overwhelming to teachers trying to move quickly through hundreds of years of material.

Texas policymakers feel strongly about giving students a positive view of the American economy; since 1995, state law has required that high school economics courses offer an "emphasis on the free enterprise system and its benefits." That emphasis seems to have made its way into the history curriculum as well.

California's curriculum materials, by contrast, sometimes read like a brief from a Bernie Sanders rally. "The yawning gap between the haves and have-nots and what is to be done about it is one of the great questions of this time," says the state's 2016 social studies framework.

As a result, California textbooks are more likely to celebrate unionism, critique the concentration of wealth and focus on how industry pollutes the environment.

Both the California and Texas 11th-grade textbooks from Pearson state, "The main argument against environmental legislation is that it hurts the economy and the nation's industries."

The Texas edition goes further to highlight criticism of federal efforts to subsidize the green energy industry: "Republicans accuse the government of wasting taxpayers' money, for example by supporting the failed solar manufacturer Solyndra." The Solyndra controversy was a fixation for conservatives in 2011, when the company went bankrupt after accepting half a billion dollars in federally guaranteed loans.

The Texas book also states that American action on global warming may not make a difference if China, India, Russia and Brazil do not also act.

The California edition does not mention Solyndra or the other nations. However, it does include a section on the threat to American states and cities from rising sea levels, noting that the impact on tourism in Florida could hurt that state's economy, and that transportation networks and buildings could be threatened.

Pearson said in a written statement that the differences between the books could be attributed mostly to the fact that the California book was published several years later, and that concerns over coastal flooding have become "more heightened in recent years."

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Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories.

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We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here's how political divides shape what students learn about the nation's history. The textbooks cover the same sweeping story, from the brutality of slavery to the struggle for civil rights.