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Use to plan your circles

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Affect and Compass of  Shame Excerpt from the IIRP book

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Affect and Compass of  Shame Excerpt from the IIRP book

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From the Restorative Practices Handbook

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From the Restorative Practices Handbook

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Social Discipline Window Excerpt from IIRP book

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Social Discipline Window Excerpt from IIRP book

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From the Restorative Practices Handbook

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Excerpt from The Restorative Practices Handbook

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"Human beings are happier, more cooperative and productive, and more likely to make positive changes in their behavior when those in positions of authority do things with them, rather than to them or for them."

- Ted Wachtel

The Social Discipline Window describes four basic approaches to addressing behavior that needs to be changed. Restorative practitioners use this tool to gauge the best response to a specific incident or ongoing issue. The four strategies are represented as different combinations of high or low control and high or low support. The word "control" never seems like quite the right fit to me, so I instead use "expectations of behavior" or "accountability." The restorative domain combines high expectations of behavior and high support and is characterized by doing things with people, rather than to them or for them. A restorative approach allows us to address the problematic behavior, while also practicing empathy and maintaining a strong relationship.

Take, for example, a student who is repeatedly disruptive in class, speaking over the teacher and making loud comments and jokes.

The Neglectful strategy is to not do anything, to hope that the student will just eventually stop.

The Punitive strategy is punishment, doing something to the person who is misbehaving. The teacher might give the student detention or remove privileges like being able to come on a field trip. The strategy holds the student to a high expectation of behavior, but has very little support. This strategy may result in animosity between the teacher and student, and will not address the core issues or needs contributing to the problematic behavior.

The Permissive strategy is when we do things for someone. We accept their excuses or make excuses for them. The teacher might tell herself that the student is just trying to be liked by the other students because he has been having trouble making friends, or that his unrestrained enthusiasm is a sign that he is enjoying the class. A possible outcome is that other students, seeing that a high expectation of behavior is not upheld, will similarly begin to speak out of turn, and the teacher will slowly lose the respect of the class and the ability to facilitate an effective learning space.

The Restorative strategy is when we work with the person to resolve the issue. The teacher would speak with the disruptive student one-on-one, explain the impacts his disruptive behavior, and respectfully ask the student about his experience and what is going on. This keeps communication open and allows the teacher to find out what needs are contributing to the student's misbehavior. Is the student having trouble making friends? Are there troubles at home that are impacting the student's behavior at school? Are there other more productive ways that the student would like to be an outgoing leader in the classroom? Does the student need additional material to challenge him and keep him on task? The teacher and student would work together to understand what are the barriers to meeting the behavior expectations and how can those barriers be addressed.

What strikes me about the restorative strategy for addressing behavior issues is the humility it requires on the part of the teacher, facilitator, parent or other person of authority. Rather than thinking that we know best and approaching the problem with an already formed answer (as is the case in both the punitive and the permissive strategies), the restorative strategy approaches the issue by asking questions, with a humble and compassionate desire to better understand. It is the only strategy that allows us to actually get to the core of the issue.

There are a few strategies you can use to address conflicts and issues in your own life restoratively.

1. Ask questions! Don't assume that you know why a person is doing something, what their needs are, or the best strategy for making things right. Remember to make questions open-ended (so they can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no") and to use a tone of respect and non-judgment.

2. In approaching an issue, follow the framework of the three central restorative questions.

1. What happened?

2. Who was affected and how?

3. What is needed to repair the harms and make things right?

Commit some time to self-reflection and identify which strategy in the Social Discipline Window is your default response. Are you prone to avoiding conflict and doing nothing, to jumping straight to punishment, or to making or accepting excuses for poor behavior? Knowing this about yourself will help you to know which direction you need to push yourself. Do you need to remind yourself to hold high expectations of behavior with the people in your life or do you need to remember to take a step back and show support?

In each of the communities and interactions that make up our lives, the Social Discipline Window offers us a tool for thinking about how to approach issues and conflicts more restoratively.

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Learning to Work "With" (The Social Discipline Window)

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"Human beings are happier, more cooperative and productive, and more likely to make positive changes in their behavior when those in positions of authority do things with them, rather than to them or for them." - Ted Wachtel The Social Discipline Window describes four basic approaches to addressing behavior that needs to be changed.

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7 Steps to Circles

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A technique for proactively building the skills and relationships students will need when challenges arise.

Our students come to school with many issues on their minds and in their hearts. As educators, we can help them process their thoughts and feelings so they can better handle their situations and be more present in class.

Restorative circles are a useful practice to do just that. While frequently used to replace punitive forms of discipline, restorative circles are equally important in proactively building the relationships and skills students need to support one another and collectively address the challenges they face.

Restorative circles are most effective when they're an integral part of school culture. After all, you can't "restore" a community that you haven't built or sustained.

7 Steps for Facilitating Meaningful Circles

1. Cocreate a safe, supportive space: Circles work best if teachers invest time up front to build relationships, skills, and practices to draw on throughout the school year-especially if the going gets tough.

Early in the process, teachers and students together explore values-like empathy, patience, kindness, courage, and open-mindedness-that need to be respected for people to be willing to share openly and honestly in circle. They also determine best ways of working together (circle practices). These include honoring the talking piece, which goes around the circle as an invitation to share while everyone else listens (participants may pass if they don't wish to talk). People are encouraged to speak and listen from the heart. And what is shared in circle, stays in circle, though educators should let students know at the outset that we are mandated by law to report when a student threatens to harm themselves or others, or when students divulge abuse.

2. Be prepared: Make sure that you, the facilitator, are well rested, calm, and focused.

To hold the circle space effectively, it's important to be fully present and able to sit with other people's stories and feelings as well as your own. Center yourself. If you're exploring sensitive issues that may require follow up, consider alerting support staff.

3. Plan ahead: Decide together on a topic or theme that sustains students' interest.

Find a relevant opening ceremony to open the circle space, such as a poem, quote, or piece of music. A mindfulness activity can also be used to bring students into the space after a particularly stressful class or noisy hallway experience.

Look for information to ground the conversation, and develop questions and prompts to invite student perspectives into the circle.

Keep in mind that the bigger the circle, the more time you'll need for the talking piece to go around. Think about how things might unfold and be ready to adapt to what comes up.

Make sure to leave time for a closing ceremony, giving students a chance to transition into spaces that may be less conducive to being vulnerable. A closing ceremony can be a commitment to safeguarding the stories shared in circle, or a breathing exercise in which we provide students with prompts and time to put themselves back together again.

4. Invite student experiences into the space: Encourage students to connect with the circle content by sharing stories from their own lives.

Include storytelling rounds by asking students to talk about "a person in your life who..." or "a time when...." Share authentically of yourself. This gives others permission to do the same. Model good listening as the talking piece goes around the circle. Be fully present as others speak. Remind everyone that listening is the key ingredient in circles. True listening can create the kind of welcoming space that encourages even the quietest voices to speak.

5. Acknowledge, paraphrase, summarize, and practice empathy: Listen closely to what students share so that you can build on their experiences.

When the talking piece comes back to you, touch on what you felt, noticed, or heard. If you sense that there's more than surfaced in the first round, send the talking piece around a second or third time, asking students for their connections, reflections, or additions.

If challenging or painful issues come up, model agreed-upon circle practices for students to follow. Listening mindfully and being present with other people's ordeals and hardships can create supportive, healing experiences that strengthen community connections and build empathy.

If needed, let students know you're available to check in with them later in the day or week. You might also have them consider speaking with other supportive adults or students to find solace if they're troubled.

6. Explore what it means to be an effective ally: Beyond creating a supportive listening environment, ask what else, if anything, students need from you and from each other.

Explore how to be better allies in circle so that students know they don't need to face their challenges alone. Invite them to talk about a person in their lives who is a good friend or ally, or a person they'd like to be a better friend or ally. Discuss the qualities these people have (or lack) and how they make us feel. Invite students to talk about a time they've been a good friend or ally themselves, and what gets in the way of being our best selves with one another.

7. Zoom out to promote understanding on the systems level: Explore whether there are larger systemic forces that underlie the challenges students have touched on (such as racism, sexism, or lack of access to resources). Introduce information, stories, and voices that might shed light on how these systems operate. Look for examples of people who took action to interrupt these and other oppressive systems.

Invite students to connect to this information by sharing their thoughts, feelings, and related experiences.

Studying larger, systemic forces in society can help students better understand their situation, and can be a useful starting point for students to become more active themselves. Action and activism can inspire hope, connection, and healing.

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Building Community With Restorative Circles

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A technique for proactively building the skills and relationships students will need when challenges arise.

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What is RP and what is it NOT?

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Mark Medley - One Minute (Official Music Video)

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Observations, Feelings, Need, Request Model

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If you are working to implement restorative practices in your school or youth focused organization, one of the many informal practices you may have learned is using " affective statements." I agree that affective statements can be a powerful way of modeling to kids and youth better ways to express our feelings. I also agree that using affective statements is a better way of pointing out behavior issues in a way the creates more connection between student and teacher. Here's where I have a problem, the current books, toolkits, and even some workshops give examples of affective statements that sound more like blame statements than connection statements. I think we can do better.

What are Affective Statements?

They are often described as personal expressions of feelings in response to others' positive or negative behaviors. The idea is for teachers to connect students with how their behavior is "affecting" or impacting self or others. "Using affective statements helps us to specify the behavior that a student is exhibiting and encourage or discourage that behavior while improving or maintaining the relationship between the teacher and student."

Many sources trying to teach affective statements give examples like this one from the Fix School Discipline Toolkit:

"It makes me sad when I have to keep telling you to keep your arms by your sides when we're walking in a line."

A few examples from the IIRP published book, The Restorative Practices Handbook for Teachers, Disciplinarians, and Administrators say:

"Lisa, I am frustrated that you keep disrupting class today"

"Don, I was shocked when I graded your paper. You are capable of doing much better"

When we say to others that our feelings are being caused by their behaviors, it will most likely be heard as blame and fault. "I am feeling this way because of YOU" and if you change your behavior, you will "MAKE ME" feel better. The statements above and the other examples I have seen fit the formula of state feelings and then explain how the feeling is the fault of the student. I am very uncomfortable with what this teaches kids. I am even more uncomfortable we haven't changed this belief in our teachers.

First off, kids need to understand that nobody causes other people's feelings or theirs. Kids benefit from learning that feelings are caused by needs being met or not met, not the actions of others. If other people's actions caused our feelings, then each time they make that action, the same feeling would come for us. Except we know that isn't true. On one day your student coming past the agreed time might leave us happy because we had a need for some privacy to catch up on emails. The next day, the same action of coming past the agreed time could leaving us feeling angry because we are needing more structure in our day. Our needs in the moment bring about our feelings not the actions of others. As Marshall Rosenberg would say, "Other people may be the stimulus for our feelings but they are never the cause."

In the example above, Lisa is being sent the message that the teacher is feeling frustrated because of her actions. In reality, I would think the teacher is frustrated because she has a need for order, respect, or cooperation from her students. It isn't Lisa's "fault" the teacher is frustrated, it is the teacher's needs. ( Maybe Lisa has a need for more excitement and activity in the lesson!!)

We want students to look at their inner world more so they can learn emotional regulation. If they learn that their feelings are owned by and originate from themselves, they can then learn to get out of the blame game. Feelings are never someone's "fault." On the other hand, if we teach them (possibly through these type of blame statements) that they are the cause of other's behavior, they are also learning the myth that other's control their feelings. When you see others as the source of your pain, you increase the likelihood you will want to punished them when the feelings hurt or cause pain. This continues the cycle of violence.

In the example above with Don, not only is the statement full of blame, it is also laced with a tinge of diagnosis of Don and his capabilities. If Don disagrees, this statement is likely to cause shame and disconnection, not connection. If he agrees he will only feel disappointed rather than motivated for change. These types of statements are better than the alternative of criticizing students behavior as good or bad, right or wrong. They still could be made to be more connecting for both students and teachers. That connection or relationship based classroom style could be much impacting than the model being used.

I would like to see RP practitioners move toward Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model of Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests (OFNR) as the new and improved way of doing affective statements. The formula is fairly simple and with practice will be far more "affective" than the typical statements currently being taught in the RP models. Of course, I would like to see RP practitioners combining all of Rosenberg's materials and ideas into the work they do. I still believe starting with OFNR is a nice first step if you are not ready in your life for everything Marshall proposed.

Observations: If we want to point out to students exactly what behavior we want to address, we are best to do that in ways that don't drudge up shame, defensiveness, or resistance to our feedback. I suggest starting with an observation of the behavior free of judgments, criticism, blame, or diagnosis. Looking at the examples above, it is point about what Lisa is doing to "disrupt" the class rather than judging the behavior as disruptive. "Lisa, when I hear you talking at the same time I am talking" would be an example. Another example from the above quotes would be "This is the 3rd time I have seen you with your hands in the air" as opposed to "I have to keep telling you" which sounds more like judgment. Observations are about separating what happened from the story we tell ourselves about what happened.

Feelings: It is first and most important that we follow the words "I fe el" with a word that describes physical emotions when doing affective statements. We want to model for students how to express their emotions using their words rather than acting out their emotions in negative ways. Most of us remember our first grade teacher saying "use your words" as opposed to having us act out our feelings. It becomes important for teachers to develop a strong vocabulary of feeling words. Be careful of following "I feel" with thoughts. (I feel like, I feel as if, I feel that you) We also want to steer clear of pseudo-feelings. These tend to be words that evaluate or accuse others of a behavior. (Examples: disrespected, threatened, bullied, misunderstood) Make sure you express your feelings and emotions with words that actually express a physical experience you are having.

Needs: It is important to follow a feeling with a need and not a blame statement about other people. We need to own our feelings and the best way to do that is to learn to associate our feelings with the needs behind them. Our feelings act much like the dashboard in a car. Your car's dashboard has a light that comes on to tell you it needs gas, another that tells you you need air in your tires, mine is constantly telling me to service engine soon. Our emotions do something similar for us. We we feel tired, it is our bodies way of telling us we need rest. When we feel hungry, we most likely need food. When we feel scared, it may mean we have a need for safety. This is the best way of making an affective statement. "I feel.....because I need......" as opposed to "I feel because you...."

Requests: If we are going to go through the trouble of pointing out the behavior, expressing our feelings and needs, we might as well ask for what would make life more wonderful! Ask for what would meet your needs. Be as direct and clear as possible with something doable. Ask for what you DO want rather than what you DON'T want. Honor choice by starting with "Would you be willing.....?" Be prepared and welcome to hear NO.

Let's take a look at what these statement would look like using the examples written in the Restorative Practices Handbook from IIRP and then what they would look like if we used Marshall's NVC approach of OFNR:

I truly believe we could transform schools, organizations for youth, and our families by implementing restorative practices. We just need to make sure we can model the discipline we are trying to get from our students. If we want students who can "use their words" rather than violent actions to express themselves, we need to model how it is done. It is also import for us to model what a blame free world looks like.

I also focused this article on the use of affective statements to address negative behaviors. I also think we can use affective statements following the same formula to express gratitude instead of praise. Trading praise for gratitude is another powerful way of allowing youth and kids to see the "impact" of their actions rather then hear judgements about their actions. More to come on that in future articles!

Lastly, I don't intend to slam anyone with this article and I highly recommend the book listed below. I learned tons from it and continue to use it as a resource. I simply want us to make our practices better!

Download a helpful free 18 x 24 inch poster to help you with your honest expression statements (affective statements)

Sources not otherwise linked:

Costello, Bob; Wachtel, Joshua; Wachtel, Ted (2013-12-11). The Restorative Practices Handbook for Teachers, Disciplinarians and Administrators (Kindle Location 216). International Institute for Restorative Practices. Kindle Edition.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT AFFECTIVE STATEMENTS AND RESTORATIVE DIALOGUE, JOE BRUMMER WILL BE PRESENTING A DAY LONG INTENSIVE AT SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY JANURY 26, 2017. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS

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Making "Affective Statements" More Effective in Restorative Practices - Joe Brummer

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If you are working to implement restorative practices in your school or youth focused organization, one of the many informal practices you may have learned is using "affective statements." I agree that affective statements can be a powerful way of modeling to kids and youth better ways to express our feelings.

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Harvard Busines Review article on Fair Process

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Harvard Busines Review article on Fair Process

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When employees don't trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than ever, because knowledge-based organizations are totally dependent on the commitment and ideas of their employees.

Unfortunately, neither integrity nor good judgment can be magically conferred on all the managers in an organization. But it is possible for top executives to create processes that help keep managers honest-and that also help build employees' trust. In this article, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe one such process, which grew out of their research into the links between trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance. Their central finding is that employees will commit to a manager's decision-even one they disagree with-if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair. Sounds simple, but most organizations don't practice fair process. And because they don't, they never know what they've lost in the way of ideas and initiatives.

A London policeman gave a woman a ticket for making an illegal turn. When the woman protested that there was no sign prohibiting the turn, the policeman pointed to one that was bent out of shape and difficult to see from the road. Furious, the woman decided to appeal by going to court. Finally, the day of her hearing arrived, and she could hardly wait to speak her piece. But she had just begun to tell her side of the story when the magistrate stopped her and summarily ruled in her favor.

How did the woman feel? Vindicated? Victorious? Satisfied?

No, she was frustrated and deeply unhappy. "I came for justice," she complained, "but the magistrate never let me explain what happened." In other words, although she liked the outcome, she didn't like the process that had created it.

For the purposes of their theories, economists assume that people are maximizers of utility, driven mainly by rational calculations of their own self-interest. That is, economists assume people focus solely on outcomes. That assumption has migrated into much of management theory and practice. It has, for instance, become embedded in the tools managers traditionally use to control and motivate employees' behavior-from incentive systems to organizational structures. But it is an assumption that managers would do well to reexamine because we all know that in real life it doesn't always hold true. People do care about outcomes, but-like the woman in London-they also care about the processes that produce those outcomes. They want to know that they had their say-that their point of view was considered even if it was rejected. Outcomes matter, but no more than the fairness of the processes that produce them.

Never has the idea of fair process been more important for managers than it is today. Fair process turns out to be a powerful management tool for companies struggling to make the transition from a production-based to a knowledge-based economy, in which value creation depends increasingly on ideas and innovation. Fair process profoundly influences attitudes and behaviors critical to high performance. It builds trust and unlocks ideas. With it, managers can achieve even the most painful and difficult goals while gaining the voluntary cooperation of the employees affected. Without fair process, even outcomes that employees might favor can be difficult to achieve-as the experience of an elevator manufacturer we'll call Elco illustrates.

Good Outcome, Unfair Process

In the late 1980s, sales in the elevator industry headed south as overconstruction of office space left some large U.S. cities with vacancy rates as high as 20%. Faced with diminished domestic demand for its product, Elco knew it had to improve its operations. The company made the decision to replace its batch-manufacturing system with a cellular approach that would allow self-directed teams to achieve superior performance. Given the industry's collapse, top management felt the transformation had to be made in record time.

Lacking expertise in cellular manufacturing, Elco retained a consulting firm to design a master plan for the conversion. Elco asked the consultants to work quickly and with minimal disturbance to employees. The new manufacturing system would be installed first at Elco's Chester plant, where employee relations were so good that in 1983 workers had decertified their own union. Subsequently, Elco would roll the process out to its High Park plant, where a strong union would probably resist that, or any other, change.

Under the leadership of a much beloved plant manager, Chester was in all respects a model operation. Visiting customers were always impressed by the knowledge and enthusiasm of Chester's employees, so much so that the vice president of marketing saw the plant as one of Elco's best marketing tools. "Just let customers talk with Chester employees," he observed, "and they walk away convinced that buying an Elco elevator is the smart choice."

But one day in January of 1991, Chester's employees arrived at work to discover strangers at the plant. Who were these people wearing dark suits, white dress shirts, and ties? They weren't customers. They showed up daily and spoke in low tones to one another. They didn't interact with employees. They hovered behind people's backs, taking notes and drawing fancy diagrams. The rumor circulated that after employees went home in the afternoon, these people would swarm across the plant floor, snoop around people's workstations, and have heated discussions.

During this period, the plant manager was increasingly absent. He was spending more time at Elco's head office in meetings with the consultants-sessions deliberately scheduled away from the plant so as not to distract the employees. But the plant manager's absence produced the opposite effect. As people grew anxious, wondering why the captain of their ship seemed to be deserting them, the rumor mill moved into high gear. Everyone became convinced that the consultants would downsize the plant. They were sure they were about to lose their jobs. The fact that the plant manager was always gone-obviously, he was avoiding them-and that no explanation was given, could only mean that management was, they thought, "trying to pull one over on us." Trust and commitment at the Chester plant quickly deteriorated. Soon, people were bringing in newspaper clippings about other plants around the country that had been shut down with the help of consultants. Employees saw themselves as imminent victims of yet another management fad and resented it.

In fact, Elco managers had no intention of closing the plant. They wanted to cut out waste, freeing people to enhance quality and produce elevators for new international markets. But plant employees could not have known that.

The Master Plan.

In March 1991, management gathered the Chester employees in a large room. Three months after the consultants had first appeared, they were formally introduced. At the same time, management unveiled to employees the master plan for change at the Chester plant. In a meeting that lasted only 30 minutes, employees heard how their time-honored way of working would be abolished and replaced by something called "cellular manufacturing." No one explained why the change was needed, nor did anyone say exactly what would be expected of employees under the new approach. The managers didn't mean to skirt the issues; they just didn't feel they had the time to go into details.

The employees sat in stunned silence, which the managers mistook for acceptance, forgetting how many months it had taken them as leaders to get comfortable with the idea of cellular manufacturing and the changes it entailed. The managers felt good when the meeting was over, believing the employees were on board. With such a terrific staff, they thought, implementation of the new system was bound to go well.

Master plan in hand, management quickly began rearranging the plant. When employees asked what the new layout aimed to achieve, the response was "efficiency gains." The managers didn't have time to explain why efficiency needed to be improved and didn't want to worry employees. But lacking an intellectual understanding of what was happening to them, some employees literally began feeling sick when they came to work.

Managers informed employees that they would no longer be judged on individual performance but rather on the performance of the cell. They said quicker or more experienced employees would have to pick up the slack for slower or less experienced colleagues. But they didn't elaborate. How the new system was supposed to work, management didn't make clear.

In fact, the new cell design offered tremendous benefits to employees, making vacations easier to schedule, for example, and giving them the opportunity to broaden their skills and engage in a greater variety of work. But lacking trust in the change process, employees could see only its negative side. They began taking out their fears and anger on one another. Fights erupted on the plant floor as employees refused to help those they called "lazy people who can't finish their own jobs" or interpreted offers of help as meddling, responding with, "This is my job. You keep to your own workstation."

Chester's model workforce was falling apart. For the first time in the plant manager's career, employees refused to do as they were asked, turning down assignments "even if you fire me." They felt they could no longer trust the once popular plant manager, so they began to go around him, taking their complaints directly to his boss at the head office.

The plant manager then announced that the new cell design would allow employees to act as self-directed teams and that the role of the supervisor would be abolished. He expected people to react with excitement to his vision of Chester as the epitome of the factory of the future, where employees are empowered as entrepreneurial agents. Instead, they were simply confused. They had no idea how to succeed in this new environment. Without supervisors, what would they do if stock ran short or machines broke down? Did empowerment mean that the teams could self-authorize overtime, address quality problems such as rework, or purchase new machine tools? Unclear about how to succeed, employees felt set up to fail.

Time Out.

By the summer of 1991, both cost and quality performance were in a free fall. Employees were talking about bringing the union back. Finally, in despair, the plant manager phoned Elco's industrial psychologist. "I need your help," he said. "I have lost control."

The psychologist conducted an employee opinion survey to learn what had gone wrong. Employees complained, "Management doesn't care about our ideas or our input." They felt that the company had scant respect for them as individuals, treating them as if they were not worthy of knowing about business conditions: "They don't bother to tell us where we are going and what this means to us." And they were deeply confused and mistrustful: "We don't know exactly what management expects of us in this new cell."

What Is Fair Process?

The theme of justice has preoccupied writers and philosophers throughout the ages, but the systematic study of fair process emerged only in the mid-1970s, when two social scientists, John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker, combined their interest in the psychology of justice with the study of process. Focusing their attention on legal settings, they sought to understand what makes people trust a legal system so that they will comply with laws without being coerced into doing so. Their research established that people care as much about the fairness of the process through which an outcome is produced as they do about the outcome itself. Subsequent researchers such as Tom R. Tyler and E. Allan Lind demonstrated the power of fair process across diverse cultures and social settings.

We discovered the managerial relevance of fair process more than a decade ago, during a study of strategic decision making in multinational corporations. Many top executives in those corporations were frustrated-and baffled-by the way the senior managers of their local subsidiaries behaved. Why did those managers so often fail to share information and ideas with the executives? Why did they sabotage the execution of plans they had agreed to carry out? In the 19 companies we studied, we found a direct link between processes, attitudes, and behavior. Managers who believed the company's processes were fair displayed a high level of trust and commitment, which, in turn, engendered active cooperation. Conversely, when managers felt fair process was absent, they hoarded ideas and dragged their feet.

In subsequent field research, we explored the relevance of fair process in other business contexts-for example, in companies in the midst of transformations, in teams engaged in product innovation, and in company-supplier partnerships. (See the sidebar "Making Sense of Irrational Behavior at VW and Siemens-Nixdorf.") For companies seeking to harness the energy and creativity of committed managers and employees, the central idea that emerges from our fair-process research is this: Individuals are most likely to trust and cooperate freely with systems-whether they themselves win or lose by those systems-when fair process is observed.

Economic theories do a good job of explaining the rational side of human behavior, but they fall short in explaining why people can act negatively in the face of positive outcomes. Fair process offers managers a theory of behavior that explains-or might help predict-what would otherwise appear to be bewilderingly noneconomic, or irrational, behavior.

Consider what happened to Volkswagen. In 1992, the German carmaker was in the midst of expanding its manufacturing facility in Puebla, Mexico, its only production site in North America. The appreciation of the deutsche mark against the U.S. dollar was pricing Volkswagen out of the U.S. market. But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became law in 1992, Volkswagen's cost-efficient Mexican facility was well positioned to reconquer the large North American market.

In the summer of 1992, a new labor agreement had to be hammered out. The accord VW signed with the union's secretary-general included a generous 20% pay raise for employees. VW thought the workers would be pleased.

But the union's leaders had not involved the employees in discussions about the contract's terms; they did a poor job of communicating what the new agreement would mean to employees and why a number of work-rule changes were necessary. Workers did not understand the basis for the decisions their leaders had taken. They felt betrayed.

VW's management was completely caught off guard when, on July 21, the employees started a massive walkout that cost the company as much as an estimated $10 million per day. On August 21, about 300 protesters were attacked by police dogs. The government was forced to step in to end the violence. Volkswagen's plans for the U.S. market were in disarray, and its performance was devastated.

In contrast, consider the turnaround of Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme (SNI), the largest European supplier of information technology. Created in 1990 when Siemens acquired the troubled Nixdorf Computer Company, SNI had cut head count from 52,000 to 35,000 by 1994. Anxiety and fear were rampant at the company.

In 1994, Gerhard Schulmeyer, t he newly appointed CEO, went out to talk to as many employees as he could. In a series of meetings large and small with a total of more than 11,000 people, Schulmeyer shared his crusading mission to engage everyone in turning the company around. He began by painting a bleakly honest picture of SNI's situation: The company was losing money despite recent efforts to slash costs. Deeper cuts were needed, and every business would have to demonstrate its viability or be eliminated. Schulmeyer set clear but tough rules about how decisions would be made. He then asked for volunteers to come up with ideas.

Within three months, the initial group of 30 volunteers grew to encompass an additional 75 SNI executives and 300 employees. These 405 change agents soon turned into 1,000, then 3,000, then 9,000, as they progressively recruited others to help save the company. Throughout the process, ideas were solicited from managers and employees alike concerning decisions that affected them, and they all understood how decisions would be made. Ideas would be auctioned off to executives willing to champion and finance them. If no executive bought a proposal on its merits, the idea would not be pursued. Although 20% to 30% of their proposals were rejected, employees thought the process was fair.

People voluntarily pitched in-mostly after business hours, often until midnight. In just over two years, SNI has achieved a transformation notable in European corporate history. Despite accumulated losses of DM 2 billion, by 1995 SNI was already operating in the black. In the same period, employee satisfaction almost doubled, despite the radical and difficult changes under way.

Why did employees of Volkswagen revolt, despite their upbeat economic circumstances? How, in the face of such demoralizing economic conditions, could SNI turn around its performance? What is at issue is not what the two companies did but how they did it. The cases illustrate the tremendous power of fair process-fairness in the process of making and executing decisions. Fair process profoundly influences attitudes and behavior critical to high performance.

Fair process responds to a basic human need. All of us, whatever our role in a company, want to be valued as human beings and not as "personnel" or "human assets." We want others to respect our intelligence. We want our ideas to be taken seriously. And we want to understand the rationale behind specific decisions. People are sensitive to the signals conveyed through a company's decision-making processes. Such processes can reveal a company's willingness to trust people and seek their ideas-or they can signal the opposite.

The Three Principles.

In all the diverse management contexts we have studied, we have asked people to identify the bedrock elements of fair process. And whether we were working with senior executives or shop floor employees, the same three mutually reinforcing principles consistently emerged: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity.

Engagement means involving individuals in the decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another's ideas and assumptions. Engagement communicates management's respect for individuals and their ideas. Encouraging refutation sharpens everyone's thinking and builds collective wisdom. Engagement results in better decisions by management and greater commitment from all involved in executing those decisions.

Explanation means that everyone involved and affected should understand why final decisions are made as they are. An explanation of the thinking that underlies decisions makes people confident that managers have considered their opinions and have made those decisions impartially in the overall interests of the company. An explanation allows employees to trust managers' intentions even if their own ideas have been rejected. It also serves as a powerful feedback loop that enhances learning.

Expectation clarity requires that once a decision is made, managers state clearly the new rules of the game. Although the expectations may be demanding, employees should know up front by what standards they will be judged and the penalties for failure. What are the new targets and milestones? Who is responsible for what? To achieve fair process, it matters less what the new rules and policies are and more that they are clearly understood. When people clearly understand what is expected of them, political jockeying and favoritism are minimized, and they can focus on the job at hand.

Notice that fair process is not decision by consensus. Fair process does not set out to achieve harmony or to win people's support through compromises that accommodate every individual's opinions, needs, or interests. While fair process gives every idea a chance, the merit of the ideas-and not consensus-is what drives the decision making.

Nor is fair process the same as democracy in the workplace. Achieving fair process does not mean that managers forfeit their prerogative to make decisions and establish policies and procedures. Fair process pursues the best ideas whether they are put forth by one or many.

"We Really Screwed Up."

Elco managers violated all three basic principles of fair process at the Chester plant. They failed to engage employees in decisions that directly affected them. They didn't explain why decisions were being made the way they were and what those decisions meant to employees' careers and work methods. And they neglected to make clear what would be expected of employees under cellular manufacturing. In the absence of fair process, the employees at Chester rejected the transformation.

A week after the psychologist's survey was completed, management invited employees to meetings in groups of 20. Employees surmised that management was either going to pretend that the survey had never happened or accuse employees of disloyalty for having voiced their complaints. But to their amazement, managers kicked off the meeting by presenting the undiluted survey results and declaring, " We were wrong. We really screwed up. In our haste and ignorance, we did not go through the proper process." Employees couldn't believe their ears. There were whispers in the back of the room, "What the devil did they say?" At more than 20 meetings over the next few weeks, managers repeated their confession. "No one was prepared to believe us at first," one manager said. "We had screwed up too badly."

At subsequent meetings, management shared with employees the company's dismal business forecast and the limited options available. Without cost reduction, Elco would have to raise its prices, and higher prices would further depress sales. That would mean cutting production even more, perhaps even moving manufacturing offshore. Heads nodded. Employees saw the bind the company was in. The business problem was becoming theirs, not just management's.

But still there were concerns: "If we help to cut costs and learn to produce elevators that are twice as good in half the time, will we work ourselves out of a job?" In response, the managers described their strategy to increase sales outside the United States. They also announced a new policy called proaction time: No one would be laid off because of any improvements made by an employee. Instead, employees could use their newly free time to attend cross-training programs designed to give them the skills they would need to work in any area of operations. Or employees could act as consultants addressing quality issues. In addition, management agreed not to replace any departing employees with new hires until business conditions improved. At the same time, however, management made it clear that it retained the right to let people go if business conditions grew worse.

Employees may not have liked what they heard, but they understood it. They began to see that they shared responsibility with management for Elco's success. If they could improve quality and productivity, Elco could bring more value to the market and prevent further sales erosion. To give employees confidence that they were not being misled, management pledged to regularly share data on sales, costs, and market trends-a first step toward rebuilding trust and commitment.

Elco's managers could not undo past mistakes, but they could involve employees in making future decisions. Managers asked employees why they thought the new manufacturing cells weren't working and how to fix them. Employees suggested making changes in the location of materials, in the placement of machines, and in the way tasks were performed. They began to share their knowledge; as they did so, the cells were redesigned and performance steadily improved, often far exceeding the expectations originally set by the consultants. As trust and commitment were restored, talk of bringing the union back died out.

High Park's Turn.

Meanwhile, management worried about introducing the new work methods at Elco's High Park plant, which, unlike the Chester plant, had a history of resisting change. The union was strong at High Park, and some employees there had as much as 25 years' service. Moreover, the plant manager, a young engineer new to High Park, had never run a plant before. The odds seemed to be against him. If change had created animosity at Chester, one could only imagine how much worse the situation could become at High Park.

But management's fears went unrealized. When the consultants came to the plant, the young manager introduced them to all employees. At a series of plantwide meetings, corporate executives openly discussed business conditions and the company's declining sales and profits. They explained that they had visited other companies' plants and had seen the productivity improvements that cellular manufacturing could bring. They announced the proaction-time policy to calm employees' justifiable fears of layoffs. At the High Park plant, managers encouraged employees to help the consultants design the new manufacturing cells, and they encouraged active debate. Then, as the old performance measures were discarded, managers worked with employees to develop new ones and to establish the cell teams' new responsibilities.

Every day, the High Park plant manager waited for the anticipated melt-down, but it never came. Of course, there were some gripes, but even when people didn't like the decisions, they felt they had been treated fairly and, so, willingly participated in the plant's eventual performance turnaround.

Three years later, we revisited a popular local eatery to talk with people from both plants. Employees from both Chester and High Park now believe that the cellular approach is a better way to work. High Park employees spoke about their plant manager with admiration, and they commiserated with the difficulties Elco's managers had in making the changeover to cellular manufacturing. They concluded that it had been a necessary, worthwhile, and positive experience. But Chester employees spoke with anger and indignation as they described their treatment by Elco's managers. (See the sidebar "The Price of Unfairness.") For them, as for the London woman who had been unfairly ticketed, fair process was as important as-if not more important than-the outcome.

Historically, policies designed to establish fair process in organizations arise mainly in reaction to employees' complaints and uprisings. But by then it is too late. When individuals have been so angered by the violation of fair process that they have been driven to organized protest, their demands often stretch well beyond the reasonable to a desire for what theorists call retributive justice: Not only do they want fair process restored, they also seek to visit punishment and vengeance upon those who have violated it in compensation for the disrespect the unfair process signals.

Lacking trust in management, employees push for policies that are laboriously detailed, inflexible, and often administratively constricting. They want to ensure that managers will never have the discretion to act unjustly again. In their indignation, they may try to roll back decisions imposed unfairly even when the decisions themselves were good ones-even when they were critical to the company's competitiveness or beneficial to the workers themselves. Such is the emotional power that unfair process can provoke.

Managers who view fair process as a nuisance or as a limit on their freedom to manage must understand that it is the violation of fair process that will wreak the most serious damage on corporate performance. Retribution can be very expensive.

Fair Process in the Knowledge Economy

Fair process may sound like a soft issue, but understanding its value is crucial for managers trying to adapt their companies to the demands of the knowledge-based economy. Unlike the traditional factors of production-land, labor, and capital-knowledge is a resource locked in the human mind. Creating and sharing knowledge are intangible activities that can neither be supervised nor forced out of people. They happen only when people cooperate voluntarily. As the Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek has argued, "Practically every individual . . . possesses unique information" that can be put to use only with "his active cooperation." Getting that cooperation may well turn out to be one of the key managerial issues of the next few decades. (See the sidebar "Fair Process Is Critical in Knowledge Work.")

It is easy to see fair process at work on the plant floor, where its violation can produce such highly visible manifestations as strikes, slowdowns, and high defect rates. But fair process can have an even greater impact on the quality of professional and managerial work. That is because innovation is the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy, and innovation requires the exchange of ideas, which in turn depends on trust.

Executives and professionals rarely walk the picket line, but when their trust has not been won, they frequently withhold their full cooperation-and their ideas. In knowledge work, then, ignoring fair process creates high opportunity costs in the form of ideas that never see daylight and initiatives that are never seized. For example:

A multifunctional team is created to develop an important new product. Because it contains representatives from every major functional area of the company, the team should produce more innovative products, with less internal fighting, shortened lead times, and lower costs. The team meets, but people drag their feet. Executives at a computer maker developing a new workstation, for example, thoughtfully deploy the traditional management levers. They hammer out a good incentive scheme. They define the project scope and structure. And they allocate the right resources. Yet the trust, idea sharing, and commitment that everyone wants never materialize. Why? Early in the project, manufacturing and marketing representatives on the team propose building a prototype, but the strong design-engineering group driving the project ignores them. Subsequently, problems surface because the design is difficult to manufacture and the application software is inadequate. The team members from manufacturing and marketing are aware of these issues all along but remain passive in sharing their concerns with the powerful design engineers. Instead, they wait until the problems reveal themselves-at which time they are very expensive to fix.

Two companies create a joint venture that offers clear benefits to both parties. But they then hold their cards so close to their chests that they ensure the alliance will create limited value for either partner. The Chinese joint-venture partner of a European engineering group, for example, withholds critical information from the field, failing to report that customers are having problems installing the partner's products and sitting on requests for new product features. Why do the Chinese fail to cooperate fully, even if it means hurting their own business?

Early in the partnership, the Chinese felt they had been shut out of key product and operating decisions. To make matters worse, the Europeans never explained the logic guiding their decisions. As the Chinese withhold critical information, the increasingly frustrated European partner responds in kind by slowing the transfer of managerial know-how, which the Chinese need badly.

Two companies create a supplier partnership to achieve improved value at lower cost. They agree to act in a seamless fashion, as one company. But the supplier seems to spend more energy on developing other customers than on deepening the partnership. One consumer goods manufacturer, for example, keeps delaying the installation of a joint electronic consumer-response data system with a major food retailer. The system will substantially improve inventory management for both partners. But the supplier remains too wary to invest. Why? The retailer has a history of dropping some of the supplier's products without explanation. And the consumer company can't understand the retailer's ambiguous criteria for designating "preferred suppliers."

Voluntary cooperation was not what Frederick Winslow Taylor had in mind when at the turn of the century he began to develop an arsenal of tools to promote efficiency and consistency by controlling individuals' behavior and compelling employees to comply with management dictates. Traditional management science, which is rooted in Taylor's time-and-motion studies, encouraged a managerial preoccupation with allocating resources, creating economic incentives and rewards, monitoring and measuring performance, and manipulating organizational structures to set lines of authority. These conventional management levers still have their role to play, but they have little to do with encouraging active cooperation. Instead, they operate in the realm of outcome fairness or what social scientists call distributive justice, where the psychology works like this: When people get the compensation (or the resources, or the place in the organizational hierarchy) they deserve, they feel satisfied with that outcome. They will reciprocate by fulfilling to the letter their obligation to the company. The psychology of fair process, or procedural justice, is quite different. Fair process builds trust and commitment, trust and commitment produce voluntary cooperation, and voluntary cooperation drives performance, leading people to go beyond the call of duty by sharing their knowledge and applying their creativity. In all the management contexts we've studied, whatever the task, we have consistently observed this dynamic at work. (See the exhibit "Two Complementary Paths to Performance.")

Two Complementary Paths to Performance

Consider the transformation of Bethlehem Steel Corporation's Sparrows Point, Maryland, division, a business unit responsible for marketing, sales, production, and financial performance. Until 1993, the 106-year-old division was managed in the classic command-and-control style. People were expected to do what they were told to do-no more and no less-and management and employees saw themselves as adversaries.

That year, Bethlehem Steel introduced a management model so different at Sparrows Point that Taylor-who was, in fact, the company's consulting engineer about 100 years ago-wouldn't have recognized it. The new model was designed to invoke in employees an active sense of responsibility for sharing their knowledge and ideas with one another and with management. It was also meant to encourage them to take the initiative for getting things done. In the words of Joe Rosel, the president of one of the division's five unions, "It's all about involvement, justification for decisions, and a clear set of expectations."

At Sparrows Point, employees are involved in making and executing decisions at three levels. At the top is a joint-leadership team, composed of senior managers and five employee representatives, that deals with companywide issues when they arise. At the department level are area teams, consisting of managers like superintendents and of employees from the different areas of the plant, such as zone committee people. Those teams deal with day-to-day operational issues such as customer service, quality, and logistics. Ad hoc problem-solving teams of employees address opportunities and obstacles as they arise on the shop floor. At each level, team-mates share and debate their ideas. Thus, employees are assured a fair hearing for their points of view on decisions likely to affect them. With the exception of decisions involving major changes or resource commitments, the teams make and execute the decisions themselves.

Sparrows Point uses numerous processes and devices to ensure that all employees can understand why decisions have been made and how such decisions need to be executed. There is, for example, a bulletin board where decisions are posted and explained, allowing employees who haven't been directly involved in those decisions to understand what's going on and why. In addition, in more than 70 four-hour seminars, groups ranging in size from 50 to 250 employees have met to discuss changes occurring at the division, learn about new ideas under consideration, and find out how changes might affect employees' roles and responsibilities. A quarterly newsletter and a monthly "report card" of the division's strategic, marketing, operational, and financial performance keeps each of the unit's 5,300 employees informed. And the teams report back to their colleagues about the changes they are making, seeking help in making the ideas work.

Fair process has produced significant changes in people's attitudes and behavior. Consider, for example, the tin mill unit at Sparrows Point. In 1992, the unit's performance was among the worst in the industry. But then, as one employee explains, "People started coming forward and sharing their ideas. They started caring about doing great work, not just getting by. Take the success we've had in light-gauge cable sheathing. We had let this high value-added product slip because the long throughput time required for production held up the other mills in the unit. But after we started getting everyone involved and explained why we needed to improve throughput, ideas started to flow. At first, the company was doubtful: If the product had created a bottleneck before, why should it be different now? But people came up with the idea of using two sequential mills instead of one to eliminate the bottleneck. Did people suddenly get smarter? No. I'd say they started to care."

The object in creating this new way of working at Sparrows Point was to improve the intellectual buy-in and emotional commitment of employees. It has apparently been successful. Since 1993, Sparrows Point has turned a profit three years in a row, the first time that has happened since the late 1970s. The division is becoming a showcase demonstrating how a declining industry can be revitalized in today's knowledge economy. In the words of one Sparrows Point employee, "Since we know now everything that's going on in the company, we have more trust in management and are more committed to making things happen. People have started doing things beyond the normal call of duty."

Overcoming Mental Barriers

If fair process is such a simple idea and yet so powerful, why do so few companies practice it? Most people think of themselves as fair, and managers are no exception. But if you ask them what it means to be a fair manager, most will describe how they give people the authority they deserve, or the resources they need, or the rewards they have earned. In other words, they will confuse fair process with fair outcomes. The few managers who focus on process might identify only one of the three fair-process principles (the most widely understood is engagement), and they would stop there.

But there are two more fundamental reason, beyond this simple lack of understanding, that explain why fair process is so rare. The first involves power. Some managers continue to believe that knowledge is power and that they retain power only by keeping what they know to themselves. Their implicit strategy is to preserve their managerial discretion by deliberately leaving the rules for success and failure vague. Other managers maintain control by keeping employees at arm's length, substituting memos and forms for direct, two-way communication, thus avoiding challenges to their ideas or authority. Such styles can reflect deeply ingrained patterns of behavior, and rarely are managers conscious of how they exercise power. For them, fair process would represent a threat.

The second reason is also largely unconscious because it resides in an economic assumption that most of us have grown up taking at face value: the belief that people are concerned only with what's best for themselves. But, as we have seen, there is ample evidence to show that when the process is perceived to be fair, most people will accept outcomes that are not wholly in their favor. People realize that compromises and sacrifices are necessary on the job. They accept the need for short-term personal sacrifices in order to advance the long-term interests of the corporation. Acceptance is conditional, however, hinged as it is on fair process.

Fair process reaches into a dimension of human psychology that hasn't been fully explored in conventional management practice. Yet every company can tap into the voluntary cooperation of its people by building trust through fair processes.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy

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When employees don't trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than ever, because knowledge-based organizations are totally dependent on the commitment and ideas of their employees.

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Restorative Practices and Schoolwide SEL

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Restorative Practices and Schoolwide SEL

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Explains the alignment

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Mindful inquiry

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The Experience 2.0 Prompts Mindful Inquiry NEW

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Problem Solving Restorative Questions for young and nonverbal

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Problem Solving Restorative Questions for young and nonverbal

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Restorative Question Poster for K-2 classes

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Restorative Question Poster for K-2 classes

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Use to ensure fidelity and for many situations

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Baltimore Riot Reaction from Kindergarteners in Cirlces

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Baltimore Riot Reaction from Kindergarteners in Cirlces

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Baltimore Riot Reaction From Kindergarteners

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When civil unrest erupted in Baltimore, MD, during the last week of April 2015, schools that had been implementing restorative practices all year employed talking circles to help students feel safe, heard and restored. Unlike their counterparts in many other schools in the city, these schools felt prepared to respond in a way that strengthened their school communities.

"It was a tense few days," says Corey Basmajian, principal of Windsor Hills Elementary/Middle School, in West Baltimore, referring to the feeling not only in his school but throughout Baltimore.

In West Baltimore, protests had begun April 18 over the police's treatment of Freddie Gray, who would die on April 19 of spinal injuries sustained during an arrest April 12. By Friday April 25, some of the protests had turned violent. The unrest peaked the night of Monday April 27, after Gray's funeral. Baltimore City Schools responded by closing on Tuesday April 28. But when students returned to classes on Wednesday, everyone was anxious about how they would act in light of all the unrest taking place in the city.

"We're in West Baltimore; not the heart of it, but that doesn't mean we didn't have kids and family members who were impacted," says Basmajian.

On Tuesday, when schools were closed, Basmajian says he communicated by email with two of his school counselors and a school psychologist to establish a plan for Wednesday. Because the school had been implementing the International Institute for Restorative Practices SaferSanerSchools Whole-School Change program since the beginning of the school year, they looked to restorative practices and circles as the means to talk about what was happening. But before the students "circled up" the teachers held their own circle.

"At 7:30 on Wednesday morning, we had a teacher restorative circle to talk about how we were feeling - what our thoughts were," says Basmajian. "For teachers who said, 'I don't know how to have this conversation,' we deployed support staff to their classrooms."

Basmajian received a lot of good feedback about the staff circle as a way to begin the day. Staff felt prepared to greet their classes and "better about the day and what could happen," he says.

When students arrived, teachers held restorative circles in every single homeroom, from pre-K to 8th grade (age 4 to 15), and extra time was allotted for that to happen. Questions teachers used as prompts included things like "What happened?" "Why?" "What should happen now?" and "What can you do?"

Basmajian says, "We focused on the feelings of the students, which gave us some insight into how they personally felt about the events. There were comments about why people would do this to their community, comments around not trusting the police, particularly white cops. This was a good gauge into how students were feeling and also, for the little ones especially, reflected the types of things they were hearing at home and in their communities."
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Meanwhile, across the city, other schools were trying to find their way. While Basmajian heard that teachers and administrators from other schools said they "didn't feel prepared, didn't feel connected and weren't happy about the outcomes," he says his teachers felt prepared to respond as a school community, that everyone was able to express themselves and that staff members were able to take care of each other as well as their students.

"If we did not have restorative practices, it would have been way harder to pull off what we did," Basmajian says. "I would have had a plan, but it wouldn't have been as effective as circles with the talking piece. I was really happy about how we handled the situation."

At Renaissance Academy, a high school in West Baltimore just a few blocks from the epicenter of the protests, principal Nikkia Rowe says she wanted to give her students a chance to process what was happening all around them. Her staff held circles by grade level after lunch on the Wednesday schools reopened. Although many parents kept their children home that day, Rowe says about 30 to 40 students participated in each circle, along with administrators and other teachers and support staff.

Rowe says students are very familiar with circles because, as at Windsor Hills, the students have experienced proactive circles all during the school year as part of the Whole-School Change program. They started with a quick go-around, asking everyone to simply say one word to describe how they were feeling. Many staff and students, according to Rowe, said they felt "confused" and "disappointed."

When staff then asked students to talk about "What did you see? What did you hear? and What do you know?" Rowe says in the circle she attended it "opened Pandora's box." Although some staff expressed concerns about the civil unrest, Rose says students focused more on the ongoing harm they experienced day to day in their neighborhood.

"I realized the kids were still very, very angry," says Rowe.

Students commented on all the vacant houses they see, the lack of places to get fresh fruit and vegetables and the antiquated state of their schoolhouse. They also expressed fear of police brutality for themselves, their families, their friends and their neighbors. One dismayed student said, "Do you realize that half the kids here haven't had breakfast this morning?"

Rowe was proud that students felt safe enough in the circles to express how they really felt. "Restorative circles provided the safest platform for us to explore these issues," she said. "It was probably the greatest tool we had to deal with the kind of situation where we had a very large number of children who were impacted. I feel like students were restored."

Across Baltimore, in the Northeast part of the city, circles were being employed at another Whole-School Change school, Friendship Academy of Engineering and Technology (FAET) Middle/High School, grades 6 to 12 (ages 11 to 18).

"We had three cousins of Freddie Gray in the school," explains principal Katrice Wiley. One-third of her students are from West Baltimore. "If I didn't have restorative practices, we wouldn't have made it," says Wiley.

Early Wednesday morning, Wiley's administrative team met to make a plan. They began the day with an announcement to the entire school using the school's public address system. They praised their students, whom teachers and administrators believed had not participated in any of the city's rioting, for their positive comments on social media. They also said they understood the issues the community was facing and knew that students needed to have a voice. The answer, once again, was circles.

All day, teachers led discussions with students during each of four 90-minute periods. During first period, students talked about "What happened?" as a prompt for their sequential go-arounds. In second period, teachers asked, "Why did it happen?" During third period, students were asked to talk about what they wanted to see happen as a result of everything that had occurred. Finally, during period four, teachers said, "Now that you know what you want to see happen, what actions, as a student, will you take now?"

Wiley says, "These basic questions caused such a good discussion." Because students and teachers had been participating in circles all year, they knew what to expect."

Some teachers ran circles on subsequent days, as well, and led other related activities, such as making videos and posters, taking photos, writing essays and making bulletin boards on the theme, "Black Lives Matter."

"I have a pretty challenging group of young men and women," says Wiley. "But they really did come together."

Basmajian, of Windsor Hills, echoed the sentiments of all three principals when he credited first his staff, then restorative practices, for the positive outcomes experienced in his school community.

"In our darkest moments, in our most challenged times, we're asked how we will react," Basmajian says. "I'm very proud. Teachers felt so happy to be a part of a community where stuff like this is talked about and plans put in place. People felt supported."

Wiley adds, "Everything is negative in the media about Baltimore. I wanted to share something positive."

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Baltimore students "circle up" to cope with unrest

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When civil unrest erupted in Baltimore, MD, during the last week of April 2015, schools that had been implementing restorative practices all year employed talking circles to help students feel safe, heard and restored. Unlike their counterparts in many other schools in the city, these schools felt p...

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by Lucy Lancheros