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The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 89 Transcript

Jennifer Gonzalez, host

See all podcast episodes.

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 podcast I have dealt with the topic a number of times. And every piece of advice-all 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 my guest, Victor Small, Jr. Victor is a middle school administrator in Oakland, California. He's 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, Victor 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.

Over on the site, I've put links to the resources Victor mentions, plus a few book recommendations that can help you learn more. Just go to cultofpedagogy.com, click podcast, then go to episode 89.

Before we get started, I'd like to thank our sponsor, Pear Deck. Every day, teachers present material through PowerPoint or Google Slides presentations while students watch from their seats. The problem with that model is that it doesn't really engage students: Some will tune you out, others might be lost, and not every student wants to speak in front of the class. With Pear Deck, you can take that same presentation, add interactive questions, and send it straight to student devices so they can participate in real time. As students engage with your Pear Deck, you see their responses on your device, so you can tell right away who's getting it and who needs help. Built by experienced educators and tested in the real world, Pear Deck is integrated with G Suite for Education and is a fun way to get every learner participating.

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Okay, let's learn about restorative justice in school.

GONZALEZ: Victor Small Jr., I would like to welcome you to the podcast.

SMALL: Hey, thank you. I'm happy to be in the podcast.

GONZALEZ: And we just got done having a little chat beforehand and we've got a lot to cover, so we're going to just get right into it. Let's just start off by just letting people know sort of what you do and how long you've been practicing restorative justice.

SMALL: Absolutely. Okay. So this year I'm a middle school administrator in Oakland, California. I work at Edna Brewer Middle School. I've taught with RJ for a couple years, but this year I'm bringing a restorative mindset into my role as an administrator that's really in charge of behavior management with the eighth grade at my school.

GONZALEZ: Got it. And I've heard you just now say "RJ," which having been in, I'm lurking in your restorative justice Voxer chat right now, and so I'm used to now hearing that abbreviation RJ, but you say RJ instead of restorative justice, which makes a lot of sense because "restorative justice" is a mouthful.

SMALL: Yeah, it is, it is. It is easier, and it feels, RJ just rolls right off of your tongue, doesn't it?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: It's such a smooth way to say it.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Okay. So our goal here, you know, knowing that RJ is huge and complex and does not have one sort of single, clean, just do it like this and here's what it is. I'm planning on doing more episodes on this, so this is going to be sort of the intro for people who are really just, they've heard about it, they want to get started but they just don't really know where to start, so we're going to try to give people a really good introduction.

SMALL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: And I thought you'd be a good person, since you've been right in it for a couple of years now.

SMALL: Yeah.

What is Restorative Justice?

GONZALEZ: So how would you explain restorative justice to someone who had never really heard of it before or just was starting to hear it. How is it different from the way that schools traditionally handle misbehavior?

SMALL: That's a good question. Okay. So let's start with this. First of all, restorative justice is a system of justice. So what we have rife throughout our country is the criminal justice system, right? And so that's based on assigning punitive measures for messing up. Like if you commit a crime, you know, even if the crime hurts someone else, you still have to pay a fine or you have to go and do time behind bars, something like that. That's really how we deal with issues based on that justice, right? Or those are the consequences, the outcomes. Restorative justice, instead of giving you jail time or a fine, we focus on really the harm that was created to the person.

So say you stole a car, for example if we're applying restorative justice to, you know, the country, right? You stole a car, 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 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.

And so when we apply this system in a school setting, what we're essentially teaching students is your behavior has effects that isn't necessarily out there in the world somewhere. Your behavior affects people, 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. And so when we talk about restorative justice, we're talking about that, the system, that systematic idea. When we talk about restorative justice practices, we're talking about the things you're doing as adults on campus to ensure that students are recognizing that they're doing something wrong when they're doing something wrong and finding a way to make it right.

GONZALEZ: Got it.

SMALL: And so one of the things that is a large misconception when schools start trying to switch to this, you know, they're always really interested in getting kids, trying to make kids be restorative without doing the groundwork. And part of the groundwork is that building the school together as a school culture. So finding ways to get kids to spend time with each other, to get to know one another, to understand who each other is, you've got to give them time to grow with one another, basically you're doing team building, you're doing community building, you're having events going on where kids are putting on the events and they're running the events, and they're working together, and they're learning more about each other, and that's how you're able, only if you're doing that, if you're setting the groundwork like that would you be able to get students to be more able to be restorative, if that makes sense.

GONZALEZ: Right. And so one of the misconceptions you're saying is that people just jumped right to the practices that happen after some wrongdoing has happened as opposed to looking at all the sort of proactive work that happens before you ever get to the point of an incident?

SMALL: Oh yeah. No, this is, you know, the reason why 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.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: And because you've set the groundwork, you've given yourself easy ways to fix them once they start. I mean, point blank, 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.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. If they know each other well, they're going to probably, they'll be less likely to assume a negative intent when there are misunderstandings.

SMALL: Oh yeah, totally.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: But also, you keep them from doing harmful things to one another, because they know one another. We as human beings are like that. You don't usually do mean stuff to your friends all the time, you know?

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: You're less likely to do something messed up to someone that you know. If you know everyone and you mildly get along with everyone, well you're probably not fighting.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And you're probably not bullying a whole lot.

GONZALEZ: So I'm trying to, I'm trying to process this now as if I am one of my listeners, and I'm thinking, okay. If I'm a teacher in a school that uses traditional discipline and they may be thinking, "Well we do a lot of team building stuff already, so what's wrong with suspending a kid if they get out of line?" Like, let's talk for a minute about the whole notion of zero tolerance and what the problem is with exclusionary discipline.

SMALL: Oh, that's easy.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: So point blank, when you tell a kid, when you send a kid home and you tell the kid that they can't come to school, what you're basically communicating to the kid is that we don't want you around.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: And saying that to anyone is hurtful, let's be honest. I don't care who you are. If you're somewhere where you know you have to be because people tell you you have to be there and you're told that you need this to be valued in society and be productive in society, and you're told by that same place that you can't be there because of something you've done, you're being communicated to that we don't want you. That's how it's going to be taken. Also, what is the kid going to be doing at home? I mean let's think about the origins of school in America. School in America wasn't started because we wanted to teach kids necessarily. That's something that developed over time. Originally this was a large-scale babysitting service so that parents could work. And often we have two parents in the household working. So who's going to be there at home monitoring a kid probably in a situation with a TV, with a laptop, with a tablet, with their phone, with video games. Are you seriously believing that you kick that kid out and communicate to that kid that we don't want you here, that that kid's going to be sitting at home the whole time doing their homework? Seriously?

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: You think that's going to happen? I mean, fine. If you think that's going to happen, by all means. But they even don't consider that to be a punishment, but we do for some reason.

GONZALEZ: Right. Well, and then consequently, typically the kid ends up further and further behind in their classes and then they feel more and more not a part of the school, and then it just has a snowball effect, typically, and I think even without somebody knowing the statistics, we've all seen this as teachers that you know, a kid that gets suspended frequently is not going to be a kid who's succeeding in school.

SMALL: And they certainly don't come back to school going, "Hey, I was wrong. Sorry about that."

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: I've never seen that happen.

GONZALEZ: No, no.

SMALL: Never seen that happen. I've been teaching for, before I went to, this is my first year in an administration. I was teaching for like 10, 11 years. I mean it's just, you don't see kids coming back from suspension going, "Hey, my bad." You know? Not very often.

GONZALEZ: Right. And that's the other big piece that RJ addresses is that typical discipline doesn't ever really get to the point where the kid is remorseful about what they did and trying to repair it. It's just push them out and then just reintroduce them to school without much thought.

SMALL: Totally. Yeah.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Again, if you don't do the groundwork. You know, suspension can be done correctly. There can be ways that you do it right, but you have to know the kid, you have to know the situation, and you have to be intentional about setting up systems to make that work. But again, it should be like the absolute total last resort, not the first.

GONZALEZ: I gotcha. Well, and then that's what zero tolerance policies in schools have been shooting for is we need to teach them a lesson, we need to communicate to everybody, "Look we don't tolerate this type of behavior." And so that seems to be, from the reading that I've done on my own, that seems to have been a big motivator toward introducing RJ into schools is that we've just got this system now where kids are getting suspended for defiance, and they're getting kicked out of school.

SMALL: And they're getting arrested.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: I mean, let's think about this. Think about how poor of a job you're doing as an educational system than you have students that are forced to go into the system, right? Like, they're forced to go into the system. We know what happens if students are truant. After awhile, you know, people get taken to jail, people get fined. We know that, right? Students are forced to go to school. And so if they're forced to be there and somehow throughout the system of their lives they end up in jail or in prison as a result of being at school, a place that's supposed to be a place of learning now -

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: - exactly how is that on the kid?

GONZALEZ: Okay. I'm going to answer you like somebody who really believes in zero tolerance, because I want to make sure that those people are not turning this off. I want to make sure that their questions get answered.

SMALL: Yes, please, please.

GONZALEZ: They're going to say, "So you're telling me that a kid who shows up and throws a desk at a teacher, we're just going to talk to him about his feelings and make him apologize and he gets to just come right back to class?"

SMALL: Okay. First of all, there's so much there to that.

GONZALEZ: I know, I know. I wanted to throw it all at you at once.

SMALL: There's so much there to that. I mean I think that's - so if you are intentional as a teacher about creating personal relationships with your individual students, no one's going to throw a chair or desk at you.

GONZALEZ: Right. That's always been my belief too, yes.

SMALL: It's not going to happen. That's the first thing. Like, again, preventative. Right? There are measures to do after we get into that situation, right? So we have to actually sit down and wonder, why did the kid throw the desk or the chair at you? Had you done something to provoke that? If you had not done something to provoke that, why did the kid do that? It doesn't seem, it seems insane to me that anyone with some sort of rational mind would pick up a chair and throw it at someone without being provoked in some way, shape, or form. Maybe the student believed that you did or said something that is completely out of line. We as adults have to own that. You can't just do and say whatever you want to another person that's attempting to become an adult. They have feelings, they have emotions too, and they have less control over them than we do.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: So like when you look at it from the perspective of we know that what's coming into our classrooms at times can be a bundle of emotions, because we have no idea what happened when they went home. We have no idea if they got into a fight with their parents. We have no idea if their parents are getting drunk. We have no idea if they're being beaten or if they had to fight their way, literally, to school or if someone jumped them on their way to school or if - we have no idea of this.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: These kids and individuals are so complex that we can't just say, "Hey, you threw this chair. Goodbye." We've got to figure out exactly what is going on, because I'm guaranteeing you that's not the normal, "Hey, I'm getting up to come to school today. Guess I'm going to throw a chair at someone." No one does that. No one says that. And if you believe that, if you honestly believe that a kid intentionally woke up that morning, came to school with the mindset of, "I'm going to throw a chair at a teacher," then I'm sorry. I'm not sure -

GONZALEZ: You don't need to be teaching.

SMALL: Whoa, let me not get into, I don't need to get into that.

GONZALEZ: No, no. And yet, I think it is that mindset, maybe not necessarily in those words. I think the way that I've seen that mindset more than anything is sort of the "kids today" mindset or "these kids in this neighborhood don't know how to behave" or "their parents aren't teaching them manners." So they don't necessarily think that the kid had that mindset ahead of time, but they think well this child has basically got no training or whatever. And so they just feel like they're a lost cause already.

SMALL: Well that, and that's kind of the other part of this, right? If you dehumanize someone, when you refer to anyone out of their name, right? because they're not "these kids," they're Jeremy or Michael or Matthew or Tayshaun. That's who they are. Right? When you refer to them as "these kids today" and you lump them all there, you're dehumanizing them. You're making it easier for you to look at the kids a certain way rather than investigate what is going on.

GONZALEZ: That's good, Victor.

SMALL: Because if you know what's going on, you know who they respect, you know who's important in their lives, you probably have a better shot of getting them to not throw a chair at you.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Or actually reach them and get them to be a part of the class.

Common Restorative Practices

GONZALEZ: Okay. Let's move to, let's get into some specifics about what RJ actually looks like, sort of on a day-to-day basis. There are some kind of common features and practices that people typically associate with restorative justice. So you can just sort of run down a couple of those that you've used and that you typically see in RJ schools?

SMALL: Yeah. So, I should say not typically in RJ schools. Typically in RJ schools that do it right.

GONZALEZ: There you go. Good.

SMALL: I have to say it like that. Because you have to be intentionally doing these things. So the teachers have to be intentionally trying, working to create personal relationships within their classrooms. So they're doing things like having circles and telling kids about their lives, telling stories about what happens to them, giving the kids a chance to have an insight into their own personal culture. Giving the kids a chance to talk about their own cultures. One of the things that's really huge that I really love is just asking, just take roll, asking a question. It can start really base-level, "Hey, what's your favorite color?" And just work its way deeper each day. And that way, that's a good way to get kids to know each other's personalities. You get to know their personalities. They get to know your personality because you start answering the question. Doesn't take long, maybe it adds an extra five minutes to taking roll, but how long was roll going to take anyway?

GONZALEZ: Yep.

SMALL: They can do that while you're doing a do now or a bell work or whatever you want to call it, real easy stuff. One thing you also want to do is you want to do icebreaker games as well. You know, again, reinforcing them getting to know one another, giving them a chance to get to know you, that's going to be really important going forward. You want to give them challenge type games that are safe, puzzle games to work on together that are safe, because you want to build that growth mindset.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: And that's important with this as well, because if kids know that, if they believe that they can and you've created, by getting, having them get to know one another, you're creating a community of support for the child in your classroom. So it gives them the ability to get some support if they're struggling.

GONZALEZ: Okay, good.

SMALL: And these are things that you want to do, these are all things you want to start doing Day One when you start this, I mean because you always want to, what's really good about restorative justice and it being preventative, you're thinking of the community you want to help create. I mean they're going to, you're going to need to give them opportunities to have input into the rules and all that other stuff, but building the community that you want to impress on them is pretty helpful as well. When things go sour, this is helpful, because then you can have healing circles and you can have mediation circles. Because if you've laid the groundwork, and those type of circles are when things go bad, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: When there's like a death in the family or something happens, God forbid. I've seen schools use healing circles for suicides. I've seen schools use healing circles for loss of a teacher, teacher is being fired, things that go wrong, because we know it could happen.

GONZALEZ: Right. What does the circle actually look like? I mean I'm picturing literally people sitting in a circle. Are they in chairs? Is there a certain structure to the way it's run?

SMALL: I've seen them run a lot of different ways. I like chairs. I don't like desks.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: Because you put something in front of them, it's not really a circle. They need to be, nothing needs to be separating them but air for me. So I like chairs. Some teachers have them standing.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: It really does depend on the configuration of your classroom, really, what you're privy to.

GONZALEZ: Is there like an order that people go in? Do they take turns? Is there a person in charge of who gets to talk?

SMALL: Well there is a circle keeper, and a circle keeper doesn't alway have to be the teacher. That's also important. You've got to, when you're creating a community, you've got to relinquish power. You do. You have to relinquish the power. You don't have to be the person talking all of the time. What's really helpful with this is the talking piece. And so what you want out of a talking piece is you want something that has some significance to you, some value to you or other students. Generally things that have stories attached to it.

GONZALEZ: So not a Koosh ball.

SMALL: No, probably not.

GONZALEZ: I'm thinking that's usually what got passed around in circles when I was in school, it's "Pass the Koosh ball." So it's got to be something more important than that.

SMALL: Yeah. The more significant the story attached to the talking piece, the better.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: And that can come in a lot of different forms, of ways. My wife and I made a Halloween costume one year, and so I have pieces of my Halloween costume that I use as a talking piece sometimes. I have gifts that have been given from students, from parents. I have magnets that I've gotten when I've traveled. It doesn't have to be something sacred to your culture. It can be just something that has a nice story attached.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: What's really big with this is giving, we tell stories to make these different connections with people. So if you, one of the things that makes for easy personal relationship building is telling stories, and any time that you can put something in there that has a story attached to it, that has a connection to your life, you in a sense become more human to your kids.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And they want to learn from someone that they like more often than they want to learn from someone that's cold and distant.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

SMALL: They like learning from people that they like and look up to. The more that they know about you, again, the less possibility that they're going to do something harmful to you intentionally.

GONZALEZ: Absolutely.

SMALL: And that's just what it is. So you need the talking piece.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: That's really up to you then at that point how you want that to manifest.

I'm going to take a quick break to thank this episode's other sponsor, Peergrade. Peergrade is a platform that makes it easy to facilitate peer review in your classroom. Students review each other's work, while Peergrade takes care of anonymously assigning reviewers and delivering all the relevant insights to teachers. With Peergrade, students learn to think critically and take ownership of their learning. They also learn to write kind and useful feedback for their peers. Peergrade is free to use for teachers and students. To learn more visit cultofpedagogy.com/peergrade.

Now let's get back to the interview.

GONZALEZ: I'm noticing something here on the notes that you took that you haven't mentioned, and I'm not sure if you're planning on getting it, but it says reintegrative shaming.

SMALL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: It's a very interesting phrase.

SMALL: Reintegrative shaming, yeah. That's one of my favorite things in the world. It is, it is, because it's a different way of approaching child behavior that I don't think that we utilize a lot. I think what we do is, you know, we're prone as humans to typecast a kid. They develop a reputation and we go with that.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: So what reintegrative shaming is, is it's communicating to the student that I know that you're a good person, I know that you're trying, I know that you're doing the best you can, but that action was shameful. It wasn't a good action. You shouldn't have done that. It's bad. You're not a bad person, but the thing that you did or the choice that you made was bad. So it's the conversation of framing the action or the thing that they've done as not being pleasurable or being shameful rather than communicating to the kid that they are.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So it is, the goal is to make them associate a negative feeling with what they did to feel somewhat shameful about it, but not feel that it is about them as a person. It's the choice they made that was something that they should regret.

SMALL: Right, right, right, which is true. It's true.

GONZALEZ: Yes, yes.

SMALL: You know, if you communicate to a kid over and over again that they're a piece of you-know-what, then guess what they start to become? exactly what you're telling them, right? If you want them to be a good person, you remind them, "Hey, you are a good person, but this choice that you made was bad," and that's really how they should look at it too, right?

GONZALEZ: Right. You've also got something here about restorative mindsets and you mention that actually at the beginning when you said that you practiced RJ and that now you use a restorative mindset in your role. So you want to talk about that a little bit?

SMALL: Yeah. Everything that a kid does shouldn't have to have a consequence. I mean it shouldn't necessarily, unless it's necessary, if that makes sense.

GONZALEZ: It does. That's going to blow a lot of people's minds to hear that.

SMALL: Well I mean let's just, let's call it what it is. I mean if a kid gets angry and says something to another kid and that kid gets mad at that kid, do they need detention for that, or do they need to just fix the problem and not be mad at each other? Probably just the fix the problem and not be mad at each other, go on about their lives.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: It doesn't need a punishment for that.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.

SMALL: Again, they didn't (show up) to school like, "Hey, I'm gonna fight with this kid," unless something's very wrong. Right?

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Because, you know, it's something that kills me. It's that mindset of you remembering what it was like for you to be in school, for you to be a teenager, trying to just get through life, and that awkward stage and that emotional stage. You know, when we were different stages of our lives, we weren't thinking of the things that we notice now as adults, if that makes sense.

GONZALEZ: Oh yeah.

SMALL: And so when you remember that, then it's really easy for you to go, "Well they just made that mistake. They just need to shake hands and move on."

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Maybe it's better that you just say, "Sorry for this one, buddy." You know? Maybe your written apology's a good idea. Maybe you should reflect on this. They don't need to be suspended because they chewed gum in glass. I mean let's be honest. I'm just saying.

GONZALEZ: I know.

SMALL: It's the idea that maybe the punishment or lack thereof should actually kind of fit the crime.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

SMALL: And 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?

GONZALEZ: Right. Well, and do you think that teachers do take things too personally sometimes?

SMALL: Yeah, that's a funny thing, isn't it? I mean I get it, I get it. It's something that we have to work on ourselves about, because it's really easy for us to think that student behavior is about us, but we know it's not. We know psychologically they're not even thinking about us. They're thinking about them.

GONZALEZ: Right. Yes.

SMALL: Their mind is completely on them, 24/7. They're not thinking about us. Their actions aren't happening as an intentional thing to derail our lesson that we spent, that we worked on until about midnight, you know?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Like, I get it, I get it. You spent a lot of time on that unit. You spent a lot of time on that lesson. I get it. But sometimes your kids are going to do things that have nothing to do with you, that have more to do with what's going on in their lives. Again, let's remember they don't have sick days. They don't have bereavement leave. We do.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: If someone dies that's close to us, we can take some days off and we can deal with it. They can't. They don't have that opportunity.

GONZALEZ: No, they just have to show up and push through.

SMALL: Right. If something traumatic happens to them, they don't get a chance, they don't decide they can take the day off. They don't get that opportunity. They have to be there. So with about, out of, most schools are like 500 to 2,000 kids. You gotta figure in America with all the different variables that's happening in different households that one of your kids just had the worst night of their lives.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And they come into school because they have to. And I'm going to guarantee you reacting in the most negative way to them might be the last straw for them.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Absolutely.

SMALL: And that's got nothing to do with your lesson.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

SMALL: Nothing. Or you as a person.

GONZALEZ: Right. So it's been two years at your school now that you've been implementing RJ, correct?

SMALL: Well it was at a different school. I was at a different school.

GONZALEZ: I gotcha.

SMALL: And now I'm at this school.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So can you talk to us a little bit about some of the successes that you've had at either school?

SMALL: Yeah. So I had a student last year, you know, one of the things that these personal relationships create is you give kids someone in their corner when they don't necessarily feel like they have someone in their corner. You the teacher can do that, and that's something I had the pleasure of doing, being the advocate for the kid, because the kid then gains trust and now you're the person that they're in your class and they really want to pass your class. They really want to pass your class. They're now motivated because someone's on their side. And I don't mean "on their side" like "I believe every single thing that happens to them," but I encourage, I learn more about them. The kids that, your toughest kids, you need to become the best friend of, because when you do that, over time you start to see the growth that they have, because they start to trust you, they start to trust that you have their best interest in that when they mess up they'll actually listen to you telling them that.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: So I had some students that they had made some poor choices in their lives, but they also had been dealt a pretty crappy hand in life. And I don't think I would have found that out had I went digging for that.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Because so many people before I got to that child hadn't taken time to do the research and find that out. I mean I was looking at this kid's (discipline) file and they're getting suspended for gum, they're getting suspended for bringing food to school, and I'm thinking to myself, yo. They're eating food at school? So that's bad, because that's - I thought that was something on Maslow's hierarchy of needs really.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Yeah, we're really suspending kids for food? Are we serious? All right. I mean, okay.

GONZALEZ: Wow. That'll make you hate school for sure.

SMALL: I bet, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: So that's this kid. I mean this is, that's the typical kid. They bounced around. I had them, let me tell you, this kid in particular that I'm thinking, I'm not using names because you know, I have to reach out to that kid. I haven't (talked to) that kid's mom in a bit, so I have to, now that I'm thinking about this, I need to check in and see how they're doing, but.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: That kid had, let's see I taught ninth-grade English. That child had transferred multiple times that year, schools, until they got to our school and in my class and they stayed in my class and at our school for the longest period of time.

GONZALEZ: Wow.

SMALL: They had been in the grade and was passing classes and was showing up to classes. So we're talking about a kid that's defiant, we're talking about a kid that was in a gang.

GONZALEZ: Yep.

SMALL: But what we don't realize as adults is that that defiance is them realizing that they have very little control in their lives, and they're trying to take some control of something.

GONZALEZ: Gosh. I'm feeling so guilty listening to this, because I'm thinking about a kid who showed up one of my last years that I was in the classroom, and I had heard the same thing about him that he had been in three different schools that year, and of course he comes in part way through the year, and my first thought was to be irritated because it was going to mess up my roster and it was going -

SMALL: Yep.

GONZALEZ: - you know what I mean? And now I'm just thinking oh gosh. Okay.

SMALL: I've been there. No, no. I understand.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: I've been there. There's a portion of when you get educated on this and you read up on this and you start to look at the mindset that really is a change in shift, you get mad at yourself, because you can think back at that kid that you gave up on or that you were really hard on because they were just such a prick in your class. You just couldn't stand - like, you know? And I know this sounds really terrible, but yes, I'm sure every person listening to this right now, you can name that kid that is just, when they show up in your classroom, you're like, "Oh my God. Oh, you're here today. Geez."

GONZALEZ: Yes.

SMALL: But you know what? That kid is the kid that's there every day. You know why that kid is there every day? Because they don't want to be at home, because something is going terrible in their life. That's why they're a pill to you. They're a pill to you because they are severely hurt and/or damaged, because if they weren't, they'd be just like every other kid in your class, sitting down, paying attention, listening, following directions, because they have a home when they go to that is a loving environment with people that they want to aspire to show that they can do well and they have people that they care about seeing them doing well. And so they have the mindset of, "I'm going to do my best, and I'm going to do well in school." Every kid has that when they show up to school except those kids that need our love.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So I got us off track. So this kid that you're talking about -

SMALL: That's fine.

GONZALEZ: - because you were about to tell me some stuff that's been going on with this kid. He stayed longest at your school. That was the longest period of time that he had been.

SMALL: No, she, she.

GONZALEZ: Oh, okay.

SMALL: Oh yeah. She was a little, yeah, she was getting into the gang life.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: You know, was one of those things where I think what we do is, when I was getting back to that dehumanization we do, because we look at the kid and the colors and then we judge them. We judge them. We think they're dangerous. They're going to do something horrible. We don't realize that there's a reason they joined that gang, because we've done enough to shame, in our society, crime. We've done enough to - like you don't think that they think they're a piece of because they're in a gang? You don't think that they have some sort of self esteem issue because they're in a gang? And those kids are some of the brightest most forethought students. They could be your best kid.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: But they're not because somewhere down the line, something went terribly wrong, and they thought they can find solace in other kids that had something terribly wrong happen to them. So, you know, it's that kind of situation we're talking about. These kids need more love not less, and that's exactly what we give them.

GONZALEZ: So tell me what else has gone well in your school in terms of are you, I'm assuming that you taught in schools prior to this where it was a more traditional model. So what else are liking about being in a more RJ-oriented school? Is it just you or is it the whole school?

SMALL: Ah, okay. So the school that I'm at in Oakland has been using restorative justice for five years. The school that I left in San Jose had just started.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: I was part of the group that really wanted to get it started and implemented. And one of the things that I notice at both of those places that I didn't really notice in traditional settings (was a focus on) mediation. When you start teaching kids that they can talk out their issues rather than fight about them, they stop fighting about them, because they don't really want to fight.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

SMALL: Fighting takes a lot of work.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Fighting is scary too, I mean you know.

GONZALEZ: Oh yeah.

SMALL: You go into it and someone could hurt you and you can get hurt, so if you can talk it out, and you think that's a possibility that someone might also want to talk it out with you, then you're more prone to communicate and talk it out, and I've noticed that happening at both schools. When you emphasize mediation and you have kids, because kids are going talk about it, they're going to talk about it with other kids. They're going to talk about what the process was like and what it was like to sit down and talk out their issues.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And they're going to be more likely to want to seek that out.

GONZALEZ: Do you offer, is it sort of formal mediation services where it's almost like advertised and the kids know what they need to do to request a session or a mediation?

SMALL: God, that's a good question. You know, at the school I'm at now, it's kind of more of that. At the school that I started, we just sniffed out conflicts. We just, because you could tell. I mean when you're in high school, it's not a big surprise who isn't getting along with someone else. I mean it's not a very big secret.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

SMALL: You know, especially in some sparse areas of the country, it's probably easier than others, because they're actively doing something conflicting with each other. They're arguing with one another or they're yelling at one another or they're threatening to fight one another or they're saying something on social media or something. You know, you can find the conflict if you look hard enough.

GONZALEZ: Right. That's part of being in tune with your kids and that being part of the culture -

SMALL: Right.

GONZALEZ: - having a trusting relationship is that they're going to reveal a little bit more of that to you.

SMALL: Oh totally. You're going to know more about your kids. The more that you seek out information about your kids, the more you're going to learn about your kids, so then you're going to know exactly who you need to make, who you need to, when you need to be a mandated reporter, you're going to know when that's going to happen. You're probably going to get more opportunities for that. You're going to know who needs to seek counseling and who needs to see a therapist. It's going to be obvious. You're going to know who needs special services and who needs to get special services. Because you're going to know, you're going to know. You're going to be able to, by learning more about the kids and learning more about their motivations and what makes them tick, you know who's strong, you know who's not strong, you know who's trying their dangdest and they need more help. And that's something that makes our jobs easier to do.

GONZALEZ: So you're seeing at sort of both these schools you're seeing a reduction in physical fighting and I'm assuming a reduction in suspensions and expulsions?

SMALL: Oh totally. Oh yeah. Without question. But again, because the kids get along with -

GONZALEZ: They just along better, yeah.

SMALL: Yeah. They just, they get along better, so they fight less. There's less reason for them to fight, because everyone knows everyone else.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: You know, it's not, "Who's that kid over there? I don't know anything about him." It's, "Ah, man. You know, Tommy yelled at me the other day." "Well you know what's going on with Tommy, right?" "Ah, man. I heard about that. Yeah. Okay." "You should sit down and talk at lunch." "Yeah, let's do that."

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: You know? When you teach them how to fix their problems, they fix their problems. It's pretty incredible.

Where to Start

GONZALEZ: So let's spend these last few minutes, let's talk now to the teachers who are listening. They're like, "This sounds good. I think our school needs this." It might be an administrator, it might be a single teacher. So what advice would you give to people who want to start making that shift from traditional discipline practices to an RJ approach?

SMALL: Oh, I got a list for you.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: Okay. So the first thing, first and foremost, investigate, read more into RJ. The book I always give, I always advise is "The Little Book of Restorative Justice" by Howard Zehr. Because it's a quick read. It's like 100 pages.

GONZALEZ: Yes it is. I just read it.

SMALL: Yeah. No, it's a real quick read too. And keep reading into it, keep reading into it. I've read so far four or five books on it. I have a quest and thirst for knowledge, because you know it's just going to give you more ideas the more you read. Look into getting, there are lesson books for it too. You can always find those on Amazon. They're out there. And a lot of them are really deep and detailed, and they take a lot of the difficulty away from you. But that's first and foremost, right? You've got to dedicate yourself to identifying your biases and your triggers within your classrooms. You have to work on that. That's something I had to work on. It's really painful for us to consider this, 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.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And someone's going to act possibly on the fact that they see their color, so we're not setting them up, 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? Right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Is what they did really that bad? Or is it me? That work is some tough work to do, but it can only happen if you work on that one.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Boy, I didn't really, until somebody has actually embraced that idea, because I hear that all the time, the colorblindness claim. I think that is the most difficult shift to make for somebody. Because I think if somebody is going to start looking at their biases, they feel like what that means is admitting that they are a racist -

SMALL: No, no, it's not.

GONZALEZ: - and they're making a huge leap from saying they're colorblind to saying, "I'm a racist," which is like, no.

SMALL: No.

GONZALEZ: You have to just realize that we all have biases.

SMALL: Right. We do. We do. So here's the realistic thing: We've grown up in a culture that has this stuff in it.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Like let's think about it. Our cartoons when we grew up, Looney Tunes, there were Looney Tunes that had racially insensitive things in it. Like there are things in our TV today that have racially insensitive things. This is embedded into our culture. You're no more racist than, well, the culture that you identify to, so being aware of where these thoughts and these issues and these triggers come from doesn't make you racist.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Right? It's willful ignorance of it that does, if that makes sense.

GONZALEZ: Can you think of an example of a pretty common type of bias that you see a lot of teachers having that end up resulting in sort of discipline issues that if they were to just recognize that thing as a bias it would actually prevent these things from escalating?

SMALL: Well, there is a few. Is it really a big deal that your kid wears a hat? Is it? I mean is it that big of a deal that they wear a hat? I mean I get, maybe they should take it off in class, but is it really a problem for them to wear it on campus? Is there a problem with your kid wearing a do-rag? Really? Is that, that's not a gang thing. I've never seen that be a gang thing. That's really random. I don't get that. Is it a problem for kids to wear hijabs? I don't get that. Is it?

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Those sort of things, you know?

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: Sometimes we make rules without thinking about the kids that are showing up at our schools.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SMALL: So again, but that goes back into understanding who your kids are.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: If you know that it's part of their culture to do that, allow them to do that.

GONZALEZ: Right. Then it's not defiance.

SMALL: Right. It's not defiance, because it's something that they do. It's accepted in their culture. Why not let them do that? Then you're fighting a battle, you're fighting not a battle with the kid, you're fighting a battle with them, their way of being, their livelihood and their connection to their culture and their family and their friends. I mean aren't we supposed to be working with that, not against that? Because I know we're running short, let me make sure I get all this stuff in here. So there's the bias training. You need to dedicate your classroom to building culture. You've got to dedicate to building culture in school. So you have to work on finding ways to include kids in what's going on, 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. You need to give them opportunities to learn about people that look like them, that are from their culture, that represent them. You have to give them opportunities to see people that look like them on campus. You've got to bring more people on campus, adults, caring adults, on campus. Find ways to bring more caring adults on campus that look like your student body. So I'm going to say this. I'm going to make some people feel uncomfortable, but 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.

GONZALEZ: Definitely.

SMALL: Period.

GONZALEZ: Yep. There's a lot of ways to do it. Yeah.

SMALL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: It doesn't mean firing your staff, yeah.

SMALL: No, no. It doesn't mean firing your staff. It means finding ways to give, to bring more of those caring adults on campus. You can find, there are ways to make that happen. You can be intentional about hiring different paras, you can be intentional about hiring aides, you can be intentional about hiring coaches, you can be intentional about hiring mentors and consultants. You can find ways to get more people on your campus that care about kids, that look like your kids, and you should.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: And if you also then 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 probably, you're creating a school culture that the students can feel more at home in, like be connected to so that if you so happen to have a situation where you feel that you have to suspend a kid, there are so many resources around you that you can tap into to really create the type of experience that you want out of that and make it into a consequence that actually would be viable. But again, that's going to take some creativity, and that's going to depend on the student.

GONZALEZ: I have so many more questions to ask you. Everything you're saying I want to follow that thread. I hate that we're out of time.

SMALL: I'm always willing to come back.

GONZALEZ: I know. I also know how much gets, there's so many of these finer threads that get pulled on in the Voxer chat. You all talk constantly about -

SMALL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: - so many. I can't keep up with it. So much, every day. It's funny because when I first sort of joined that group and I started listening, I was like, "Huh, I'm not hearing anything about circles or about the stuff that you associate," because it was a lot more about this relationship-building. I think it's just really interesting. It really contributed to my understanding of RJ as a much more holistic thing.

SMALL: Yeah, because it is, it is.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: I think what people want to do, nine times out of 10, in education is they want to take a thing and put their own spin on it, and they want to just make it easy, and this isn't easy. This has to be intentional. You have to be intentional about the things you're doing with this, otherwise it's not going to work, and then you're - listen. That's why I started off with, "You have to build the personal relationships." Because if you're not, it's not going to work.

GONZALEZ: Yep. I mean that's just, that's not just plug and play.

SMALL: No, no. If you're not building personal relationships, staff to students, staff to staff, students to students, admin to student staff and teachers and all that, if you're not building personal relationship connections throughout the school, it's not going to work.

GONZALEZ: Not going to work.

SMALL: And you have to be intentional about it.

GONZALEZ: Victor, tell us where people can find you online and about the different opportunities for joining up with the RJ community.

SMALL: Oh, well I mean our, I'm blessed that you'd even say that. The RJ community's so much larger than our little Voxer chats and Twitter chats.

GONZALEZ: I know. But you're providing such an important window into that. I really feel like it's a gateway.

SMALL: I like the terminology "gateway." I'm going to roll with that. I like that one.

GONZALEZ: All right.

SMALL: Okay. So you can find me on Twitter, Voxer, Instagram. My name on them is MrSmall215, the same name for Twitter, Voxer, and Instagram. We've got the RJ chat on Twitter every Sunday, and that's 8 p.m. EST, 7 CST, 6 MST, 5 PST West Coast time.

GONZALEZ: The hashtag for the chat, the Twitter chat, is that #RJLeagueChat?

SMALL: That is #RJLeagueChat. There's also the Twitter account that's @RJLeagueChat too that you can follow. That's helpful too.

GONZALEZ: So it's the same thing. It's the at symbol or the hashtag is both, both will get you to that chat?

SMALL: Yeah, yeah.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SMALL: Both will get you there. And then if you want to join the Voxer group it's a little, you can find it in a couple of different ways if you Google it, but the easiest way is just I tweet the link to the Voxer chat.

GONZALEZ: Oh, there you go.

SMALL: Yeah. You could just go to that.

GONZALEZ: Okay. I can also put a link to it on the blog post that'll go with this interview too.

SMALL: Oh yeah. By all means.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Definitely.

GONZALEZ: Victor, thank you so much. This has been really, you're great to talk to. This has been really, really good.

SMALL: Oh well thank you, thank you. I'm happy about that. It's really cool. Thank you. I appreciate that.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. No problem. I hope this helps some schools make this shift and I hope a lot of people who are, I hope that they get the message that this is not something that they're going to just start tomorrow and everything's going to be completely different starting tomorrow, that it's a slow process.

SMALL: Well, okay. So one thing that I will say is that if you start trying to build personal relationships tomorrow, you're going to see the effects of it.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Like I'm not saying that it's going to be perfect, but it's going to be a whole heck of a lot different, definitely.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SMALL: Day One.

For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click podcast, and choose episode 89. To get a weekly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.

This podcast is a proud member of the Education Podcast Network: Podcasts for educators, podcasts by educators. To learn more, visit edupodcastnetwork.com.

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Episode 89: Restorative Justice in School: An Overview

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The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 89 Transcript Jennifer Gonzalez, host See all podcast episodes. 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 ...

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What is Restorative Justice?  Let's Restore Our Broken System

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the little book of restorative justice in education: fostering responsibility

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and hope in schools (justice and peacebuilding)

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education / decision-making & problem solving

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education/decision making & problem solving

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secondary education; school leaders; school wide; traditional approaches; school staff; school culture; inappropriate behaviour; school community; classroom management; school settings; zero tolerance; limited space; acceptable behavior; criminal justice; justice system; zehr; wachtel; peacebuilding; preschoolers; conferencing; preschool; shaping; reintegration; reform; peacemaking; staffs; preventative; kindergarten; textbook; facilitator; restitution; embed; climate; facilitating; leadership; affective; disciplinary

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education / decision-making & problem solving

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education/decision making & problem solving

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The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education: Fostering Responsibility, Healing, and Hope in Schools (Justice and Peacebuilding)

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Buy The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education: Fostering Responsibility, Healing, and Hope in Schools (Justice and Peacebuilding): Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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How to Use RJ with students in conflict 

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How to Use RJ with students in conflict 

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CJSF's Allison R. Brown talks to Jonathan Stith (Alliance for Educational Justice) and Robert Spicer (Restorative Strategies LLC) about restorative practices in schools - how it is used to address conflict between students.

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‎SchoolHouse: Equity in Education: Restorative Justice in Schools on Apple Podcasts

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‎CJSF's Allison R. Brown talks to Jonathan Stith (Alliance for Educational Justice) and Robert Spicer (Restorative Strategies LLC) about restorative practices in schools - how it is used to address conflict between students.

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Restorative Practices - Circle Guidelines Handout.pdf

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Restorative Practices - Affective Statements and Restorative Questions Handout.pdf

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Restorative Practices - Affective Language Handout.pdf

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Restorative Practices - Discussion Prompts and Sentence Starters Handout.pdf

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Wonderful write up on Aligning PBIS, ABA, SEL and RP

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Wonderful write up on Aligning PBIS, ABA, SEL and RP

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Season 3 Episode 307 | 6m 50s |

In many schools around the country, discipline strategies have not changed much over the years. When students get into trouble they can be suspended and even expelled. Researchers say those punishments can be ineffective. Seattle's Garfield High School is trying a different method.

Aired: 10/22/15

Rating: NR

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IN Close | Restorative Justice: A New Approach to School Discipline | Season 3 | Episode 307

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Season 3 Episode 307 | 6m 50s | In many schools around the country, discipline strategies have not changed much over the years. When students get into trouble they can be suspended and even expelled. Researchers say those punishments can be ineffective. Seattle's Garfield High School is trying a different method.

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A recorded webinar to help teams (1) Identify cautions relevant to installing new innovations within a school/district, (2) review recommendations for aligning restorative practices and expanding PBIS systems within the school, (3) learn how to assess the impact of restorative practices within PBIS, and (4) identify recommendations for fidelity and coaching restorative practices within PBIS. This webinar was given to School Climate Transformation Grant recipients originally.

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Center on PBIS | Video: Restorative Practices in PBIS (SCTG Webinar)

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A recorded webinar to help teams (1) Identify cautions relevant to installing new innovations within a school/district, (2) review recommendations for aligning restorative practices and expanding PBIS systems within the school, (3) learn how to assess the impact of restorative practices within PBIS, and (4) identify recommendations for fidelity and coaching restorative practices within PBIS.

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Using Dialogue Circles to Support Classroom Management

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Shaming students is keeping schools from teaching them

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At the start of the 2018-19 school year, every student at Mingus Union High School in Cottonwood, Ariz., was issued a color-coded ID badge. In the past, red badges denoted a student's rank as an underclassman. Juniors and seniors wore gray badges.

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Brené Brown | Daring Classrooms | SXSWedu 2017

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The following are a list of links to videos and films on restorative practices in schools. They cover What It's About, Circles, Conferencing as they are used in schools to build community and repair harm and include brief descriptions of video content. And, at the bottom is the RJ Colorado award winning film Chasing Smoke. Thanks to Nancy Riestenberg from the Minnesota Department of Education for putting together much of this list. This list of resources is intended for informational purposes and the Minnesota Department of Education and Restorative Solutions do not endorse any of the programs, services or training featured in any of the videos.

Introduction to Restorative Practices in Schools

A Restorative Approach to Discipline (5:02)

From the Office of Social & Emotional Learning at Chicago Public Schools comes this short but powerful overview video of restorative practices in schools. It shows how hard CPS is trying to create a culture of belonging and to enforce discipline in a whole new way. (Secondary Schools)

Restorative Justice in Schools - Restorative Resources (10:45)

An excellent introductory video on restorative practices in schools (based in Sonoma County California) using current statistics on suspensions, interviews with school staff, students, parents, community volunteers, and a school resource officer. Excellent for showing to staff as an overview of what restorative practices is all about. (Secondary Schools)

The "Why" "How" and "What" of Restorative Practices (14:39)

In this video, administration and school staff talk about what restorative practices are, why we use restorative practices and what they look like implemented holistically in a school. (Elementary Schools)

Making Things Right - Restorative Justice for School Communities (23:35)

We produced this video awhile back (2000) but it is still a well done, professionally filmed introductory video on restorative practices in schools (filmed in Colorado & Minnesota). The video highlights different program models including a conferencing, circles and a student-run program. This, too, is an excellent video for showing to staff as an overview of what restorative practices is all about. Originally produced by the Colorado School Mediation Project, which has evolved into Restorative Solutions!

Restorative Processes

Restorative Justice in Oakland Schools: Tier 1 - Community Building Circle (9:31)

Students from MetWest High School (Oakland Unified School District) facilitate, participate in and reflect on a Circle in the classroom to build community and relationships. This video highlights the process and elements of a community building Circle.

Using Dialogue Circles to Support Classroom Management (4:04)

At Glenview Elementary School, dialogue circles are part of a program aimed at building collaboration, respect, and positive behavior among students.

Restorative Welcome and Re-Entry Circle (13:59)

This video covers a re-entry Circle to welcome a student back to school following an absence due to incarceration and the process of making a plan to support his education going forward. The Circle takes place at Bunche High School (Oakland Unified School District) and the video is a collaboration between OUSD and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth.

The Circle Film (5:01)

A young girl running from her troubles finds herself in a peacemaking Circle with her friends. This video highlights the foundational elements of a peacemaking Circle and the value of using one.

Conferencing

Restorative Justice Introduction: The Conference (5:44)

This video features an overview of the main elements of a restorative conference and how the process was used to repair harm after Ryan Lewis, a student from East Lansing, MI, was attacked by his teammates after football practice.

Restorative Approach Example - Primary School (5:07)

A teacher demonstrates a restorative-based resolution to conflict in a primary school setting. Many subtle but purposeful aspects of the facilitators approach are highlighted - respectful, effective and quick!

Whole-School Implementation

Restorative Justice: Let's Do It Right! (4:57)

Teachers Unite New York City provides an overview of what restorative justice in schools is and isn't, as well as an overview of the practices and implementation processes.

Restorative Justice and School Culture - The Curley School (11:32)

Co-principal and teachers from Curley K-8 School in Boston, MA discuss the process - challenges and successes - of the whole-school implementation of restorative practices and the power of restorative practices to transform school culture. (Retrieved from Institute for Restorative Initiatives)

Restorative Justice: It's Elementary! (5:22)

This video provides an overview of restorative practices used in the East Lansing School District in Michigan. The video features input from school staff and administration as well as reflections from a student and parents who participated in a restorative process to address conflict.
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) - RP Videos

Introduction to Restorative Practices (15:27)

June 2014 Symposium - Panels on Restorative Justice at SFUSD (3 Parts)

Student Voices (3:56)

SFUSD's overview of whole-school restorative principles and practices, a symposium of teachers, administrators and community members speaking on the implementation process, and student input about their experience with restorative practices.

Kids Rethink Documentary 2010 (9:08)

In summer 2010, Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools participants began advocating for the implementation of restorative justice in schools as an alternative to suspensions and expulsions.

The Transformation of West Philadelphia High School: A Story of Hope (9:03)

This video from the International Institute for Restorative Practices includes interviews with staff and students of West Philadelphia High School.

Ripples of Relationships: Educating with Restorative Justice (16:30)

This video from the New Foundland organization, RELATIONSHIPS FIRST, Restorative Justice in Education, provides examples of restorative practices for every member of the school community.

Specific Applications

Theater and Restorative Practices Circles (5:42)

Natalie Medina, a teacher in Panama, talks about why teens like the combination of theater and Circles, the importance of the talking piece and a play young refugees developed out of a Circle conversation.

Bullying: Should People Meet Face to Face? (3:16)

Bullying is a great area of concern, especially in schools. In this video, IIRP Instructor Lee Rush talks about the way restorative practices dovetails with bullying prevention and how to assess, case by case, whether a restorative process is appropriate.

A Story About Restorative Practice in School (7:13)

A secondary school principal chooses to use a restorative conference rather than punitive measures to address a case of bullying and describes the process including preparation, bringing the parties together and the outcome. (Retrieved from Donegal Mediation Network)

Introducing Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (7:40)

Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) staff and youth discuss restorative justice as a method for interrupting cycles of violence among youth, reducing involvement in the juvenile justice system, suspensions and expulsions, and promoting school engagement and positive youth development.

Peer Jury Reduces Flow of Teens from School to Juvenile Justice System (3:38)

A look at the peer jury program implemented by a high school in Peoria, IL with the intention of reducing the number of youth entering the juvenile justice system from school.

Webinars
Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice - Webinars
The Zehr Institute hosts restorative justice-based webinars which are free to the public and cover a wide range of topics including but not limited to restorative justice in schools, RJ in the community, and RJ and the criminal justice system.
Basic RJ Videos Restorative Justice: Why Do We Need It?
Brave New Films created this animated 3 minute video on RJ. Very nice introduction to the field.
RJ Colorado Award Winning Film 2016 Chasing Smoke
An absolutely beautiful and deeply moving film about RJ in a school community in Austin, TX. "The way we handle discipline, in our schools, prison and even our homes, is like throwing water on smoke. We see the smoke so we attack smoke, completely ignoring the fire that is completely consuming everything around us. This movie is an attempt to get people to look at the fire rather than just chasing smoke."
Other Great Videos Impact of Fresh, Healthy Foods on Learning and Behavior
Food impacts behavior. This is an old film but the message is still worth hearing. The results of offering fresh, healthy foods to students are conclusive and this video shows how one school district changed the way they did business.

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Videos & Films on Restorative Practices in Schools

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The following are a list of links to videos and films on restorative practices in schools. They cover What It's About, Circles, Conferencing as they are used in schools to build community and repair harm and include brief descriptions of video content. And, at the bottom is the RJ Colorado award winning film Chasing Smoke.

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Abstract

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an example of applied behavior analysis implemented at a scale of social importance. In this paper, PBIS is defined and the contributions of behavior analysis in shaping both the content and implementation of PBIS are reviewed. Specific lessons learned from implementation of PBIS over the past 20 years are summarized.

Keywords: Positive behavioral interventions and supports, Whole-school social culture, Applied behavior analysis

Behavior Analysis in Practice is focused on practical demonstrations of behavior analysis in school, community, work, and home contexts. One current example is the emergence of school-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) as a framework for improving the academic and social outcomes for students. In this paper, we describe PBIS, the contributions of behavior analysis to defining, evaluating, and implementing PBIS, and initial lessons learned from the past 20 years of implementing PBIS across over 21,000 schools in the USA. Our goals are to both frame the strong tie between PBIS and ABA and suggest lessons learned that may influence both research and large-scale implementation efforts with other examples of behavioral intervention.

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a framework for delivering both the whole-school social culture and additional tiers of behavior support intensity needed to improve educational and social outcomes for all students. PBIS is an applied example of behavioral theory (Baer et al. 1968; Cooper et al. 2007; Dunlap et al. 2008). As Anderson and Kincaid ( 2005) have noted, the PBIS meets each of the five features used to define applied behavior analysis (applied and behavioral; analytic and conceptual; technological; effective; and generality). Many in the field may in fact argue that positive behavior support is best described simply as an instance of behavior analysis. Others, however, (including Anderson and Kincaid) have argued that elements of PBIS, including person-centered planning (Kincaid et al. 2005), wrap-around mental health supports (Eber et al. 2009), self-determination (Carr et al. 1999; Wehemeyer 2005), prevention science (Catalano et al. 2002; Gordon 1983), and implementation science (Fixsen et al. 2005) include elements that are not yet validated through behavioral science. Regardless of whether PBIS is "only" or "mostly" behavior analysis, a central message is that PBIS grew from and is infused with the principles and technology of behavior analysis.

The impact of behavior analysis on PBIS is most clear in (a) the emphasis on operational definitions of behavior and intervention elements, (b) the logic model used to select environmental manipulations designed to alter student and staff behavior, and (c) an unrelenting commitment to measurement of both implementation fidelity and the impact of PBIS on student outcomes. Two themes that define PBIS are a focus on the whole-school as the unit of intervention (Biglan 1995; Mayer 1995; Mayer and Butterworth 1979), and the simultaneous development of interventions tied to at least three tiers of support intensity (Fuchs and Fuchs 2006). Figure 1 presents the frequently referenced multi-tiered prevention approach borrowed from community health and first introduced to education by Hill Walker (Walker et al. 1996). The logic from this approach starts with defining an organization's most highly valued outcomes (e.g., reading, math, writing, and social behavior), and then selecting the smallest set of research-validated procedures needed to deliver these outcomes with at least 80 % of the target population. In schools, this "Tier I" level focuses on establishing a school-wide positive social culture that includes (a) defining and teaching a small set of behavioral expectations (e.g., be respectful, be responsible, and be safe), (b) establishing a ubiquitous system for reinforcing performance of these expectations, (c) implementing a consistent system for interrupting, correcting, and redirecting behavioral errors, and (d) building an efficient system to collect, summarize, and use data for decision-making (Horner et al. 2010; Putnam et al. 2002; Sugai and Lewis 1999; Sugai et al. 2014).

As symbolized by the Tier I (primary prevention) level in Fig. 1 , all students experience Tier I behavior support. This level of support is not dependent on documented "need" or some formal assessment protocol. Tier I (primary prevention) is proactive and designed to be administered before error patterns develop. Because all students receive Tier I supports, these practices must be highly efficient and logically integrated with all other elements of the environment. The start of each school year begins by teaching and/or reviewing school-wide behavioral expectations before students have had the opportunity to make behavioral mistakes. Primary prevention is intended to both reduce the likelihood of initial problem behaviors and support the sustained shift toward positive behavior when more intense supports are implemented later in the year.

Tier II (secondary prevention) practices focus on moderate intensity supports that address the most common needs of students with ongoing problem behavior. As indicated in Fig. 1 , Tier II supports are added to Tier I supports and are designed for the 10-15 % of students who benefit from additional structure, more overt, and frequent antecedent prompts, a higher rate of positive recognition, and elevated training in both behavioral expectations and self-regulation skills (Crone et al. 2010; Sugai et al. 2014). The elevated level of risk experienced by these students is matched not only by elevated support intensity, but also by the frequency and specificity with which progress monitoring data are collected. Tier II supports typically are packaged and standardized for highly efficient implementation across multiple students (e.g., first step to success Walker et al. 2009; check-in/ check-out Hawken et al. 2006).

Tier III (tertiary prevention) practices are characterized by individualized assessment, individualized support plan design, comprehensive support plan implementation, and the management of support by a team uniquely organized to meet the preferences and needs of individual student (Scott et al. 2008). The establishment of Tier III supports is an overt commitment by the system to include a full range of students in the school. An important addition to Tier III support practices is a formal process for monitoring both if a support plan is being implemented as well as if it is being effective (Pinkelman 2014). Tier III supports are not new to schools. Special education expectations for individualized support have been required since 1975. The value of this approach, however, now extends beyond special education to all students requiring higher intensity supports. When implementing Tier III behavior supports, teams consider behavioral, academic, mental health, physical, social, and contextual variables (Crone et al. 2010). This is a high-intensity approach to support, intended for 5 % or fewer students within a school. As symbolized within Fig. 1 , Tier III supports are expected to be (a) needed less often than Tier I and Tier II supports and (b) more effective when they are implemented within schools that simultaneously offer Tier I and Tier II supports.

Implementation of PBIS has been formally evaluated in a number of descriptive, evaluation, and experimental studies. Findings indicate that PBIS is experimentally associated with reduction in office discipline referrals (Bradshaw et al. 2010, 2012; Horner et al. 2009; Safran and Oswald 2003), reduction in out of school suspensions and expulsions (Bradshaw et al. 2010), improved social emotional competence (Bradshaw et al. 2012), improved organizational efficiency (Bradshaw et al. 2008, 2009), improved academic outcomes (Horner et al. 2009), improved perception of safety (Horner et al. 2009; Ross et al. 2012), and reduction in bullying (Ross and Horner 2009; Waasdorp et al. 2012).

Lessons Learned

A worthy question is why PBIS has been so widely adopted over the past 20 years when so many other examples of behavior analysis have offered impressive research outcomes with limited societal adoption. We offer the following as "lessons learned" that may guide future research and dissemination efforts.

1. Emphasize Core Features and Evidence-based Strategies. Behavioral theory focuses on the behavioral mechanism(s) by which core features of an environment alter behavior. Core features are the "kernels" or "smallest functional units" needed to produce valued outcomes (Embry and Biglan 2008). Within PBIS, consistent attention has been given to operational descriptions of the core features needed to achieve academic and social gains for students. The focus on core features allows the separation of the strategy being employed (e.g., second step Frey et al. 2005) and the feature being established (e.g., increased instruction of pro-social behavior). Students behave differently when core features are in place, and core features are more likely to be in place when research validated programs are implemented. Too often, however, programs and core features are combined, and users emphasize adoption of the program or package without confirming implementation of functional core features. Emphasizing core features, rather than the practices that are used to achieve the core features, allows school personnel to tailor new strategies and packages to the local cultural and context. For example, while schools using PBIS are expected to define and teach school-wide behavioral expectations, the specific expectations and the method for teaching the expectations are left to match the culture, resources and organizational demands of the local school.

The focus on core features also has direct relevance for the implementation process. Because adoption of a package or intervention strategy is not adoption of PBIS, school teams need a formal way to assess if core features are in place. This is done through formal fidelity assessment. Implementation of PBIS is not determined by participation in a training workshop, employment of a "certified trainer," or purchasing an instructional product. Implementation of PBIS is assessed by measuring if the core features of Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III support are in place in a school (c.f. Algozzine et al. 2010).

2. Implement "Systems" that Support and Sustain Effective Practices. The likelihood that a school will implement and sustain PBIS with high fidelity depends largely on attention not just to the PBIS core features, but the "systems" that support implementation (e.g., policies, team structures, data systems, funding, and regulations) (McIntosh et al. 2010). Figure 2 provides a summary of the integration of outcomes, intervention practices that change student behavior, the systems that support and sustain adult behavior, and the data needed for adaptation and continued improvement.

Behavioral theory teaches us that organizations do not behave, people behave. And people behave differently within social contexts with clearly defined contingencies (Dickinson 2000). Organizational behavioral theory extends what we have learned about developing adaptive individual behavior patterns, to development of similar behavior patterns across coordinated groups of individuals (Abernathy and Lattal 2014). In schools, this means (a) establishing engaged leadership teams, (b) delivering training and support to teams of individuals, (c) providing the resources and time to allow teams to receive training, apply skills/practices learned in training, and (d) adapting procedures in response to data, local cultural, and organizational variables. Schools implementing these practices are more likely to implement PBIS with high fidelity and sustain PBIS with valued student outcomes (Coffey & Horner 2012; McIntosh et al. 2010).

3. Collect and Use Data for Decision-making. Among the great contributions of behavior analysis has been a consistent emphasis on operational measurement (Cooper et al. 2007). Within PBIS, behavioral measurement is central at two levels. The first level focuses on the extent to which adopted procedures have been successful in establishing the core features of PBIS (e.g., measurement of fidelity or intervention integrity; Fryling et al. 2012). Investing in valid, reliable, and efficient measures of implementation fidelity led to over 11,524 schools in 2014 systematically measuring PBIS fidelity with 81 % meeting Tier I fidelity criteria during the year. The second, and more traditional, emphasis is on continuous measurement of student behavior. Within PBIS, school teams monitor student discipline patterns to assess not just the frequency of problems, but the type of problem behavior, locations where problems are most and least likely, time of day, students engaging in problem behavior, and the perceived maintaining behavioral function of problem behavior. By asking every staff member in a school to record not just who and what a student did that was problematic, but the perceived function of the problem behavior, PBIS builds a system that extends function-based behavior support from Tier III, high-intensity, individual support plans to the Tier II and Tier I levels of school-wide prevention. The key is that data are used not just for policy levels reports to state and district administrators, but for local decision-making at the school and classroom level. Effective use of data by school teams has been demonstrated to improve educational outcomes (Newton et al. 2012), and the repeated use of data at the school level has been associated with improved sustainability of PBIS implementation (McItosh et al. 2014).

4. A fourth lesson drawn from behavior analysis is an emphasis on the implementation process. Implementation science (Fixsen et al. 2005, 2013) separates intervention practices (what is done to change student behavior) from the practices used to change an organizational system (adoption of the intervention practices). It is as important to define how effective practices are adopted as it is to provide the research demonstrating that these practices both produce desired change in the organization, and desired outcomes for the target population.

Figure 3 integrates the lessons learned from implementation of PBIS. First, implementation of PBIS in schools requires a district or regional implementation team. Students are the unit of impact, schools are the unit of intervention, but districts are the unit of implementation. Teams are the mechanism for comprehensive and sustained implementation. The district leadership team is more than advisory or informative they actively manage and guide the implementation process. Second, there is a tendency for implementation efforts to both start and end with initial demonstrations. This is ineffective. Effective implementation processes build district and school capacity while establishing initial demonstrations. As initial schools in a district adopt PBIS the leadership team needs to be improving district capacity to (a) conduct PBIS training without reliance on external trainers, (b) provide active coaching of trained skills to ensure that they are applied under natural conditions, at high fidelity, and with the adaptation to local culture needed to achieve the core features, (c) establish the behavioral expertise in behavior analysis needed for moving from the foundational knowledge needed for Tier I practices to the more sophisticated knowledge needed for implementation of Tier II and Tier III supports, and (d) development of the evaluation capacity to assess both school-level and district-level outcomes. Failure to invest in the implementation elements needed to move from "demonstration" to "full implementation" too often results in major fiscal and organizational loss (Horner et al. 2014).

Summary

The promise of applied behavior analysis is that our understanding of human behavior will have direct impact on improving social systems. The challenges faced in schools, families, work places, and communities require better application of behavioral theory. School-wide PBIS is one example of successful implementation of behavioral theory to address a major social concern. It is an example that is still evolving, but with over 21,000 schools in the USA actively engaged in implementing PBIS, and a growing body of scholarship supporting the impact of PBIS on student behavior it is worthwhile to consider lessons learned. A full summary of these lessons is beyond the scope of the present paper, but four key messages have relevance for anyone extending behavioral theory to large social systems.

First, use current science to isolate the smallest number of core features needed in a context to produce valued outcomes. Identify multiple strategies and practices for establishing these core features allows different implementers to select the strategy or practice that best fits their social and cultural context.

Second, implement the "systems" needed for sustained high fidelity use of effective practices. Systems include the policies, teaming structures, decision-making protocols, funding, and organizational practices that allow effective interventions to be adopted with efficiency and effectiveness. Third, a central part of this process is development of data systems that allow all individuals in the system to engage in effective decision-making. Finally, attention to the implementation process is as critical as attention to the research-validated practices. Implementation includes attention to the selection of core practices, the teams needed to achieve functional effects, the stages of adoption, and the development of the drivers and data systems that allow effective practices to flourish.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Office of Special Education Programs US Department of Education (H326S980003). Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the US Department of Education, and such endorsements should not be inferred.

References

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Articles from Behavior Analysis in Practice are provided here courtesy of Association for Behavior Analysis International

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School-wide PBIS: An Example of Applied Behavior Analysis Implemented at a Scale of Social Importance

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School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an example of applied behavior analysis implemented at a scale of social importance. In this paper, PBIS is defined and the contributions of behavior analysis in shaping both the content ...

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Morning Meetings: Building Community in the Classroom

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Raising Kings: A year of love and struggle at ron brown college prep

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When this new boys-only, public school in Washington, D.C., opened its doors in August 2016 to a class of roughly 100 freshmen of color, NPR and Education Week were there. All. Year.

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Affective Language: How to use Affective Statements | Teacher Training Webinar | Part 1

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Website about Affective language and RP with data and details

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Website about Affective language and RP with data and details

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Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teacher in a typical school year. That's enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a student's lifetime love of learning-and it's enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails.

Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students.

"People sometimes mistake a kind of casual familiarity and friendliness for the promotion of really deep relationships that are about a child's potential, their interests, their strengths, and weaknesses," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies the effects of emotions and mindsets on learning.

"A lot of teachers ... have really strong abilities to engage socially with the students, but then it's not enough," she said. "You have to go much deeper than that and actually start to engage with students around their curiosity, their interests, their habits of mind through understanding and approaching material to really be an effective teacher."

In a forthcoming longitudinal study with Bank Street College of Education, Immordino-Yang is tracking how the highly effective teachers of low-income students set classroom norms and feelings of trust and safety for students-but also leverage that foundation to promote students' deeper thinking and engagement.

Why are teacher-student relationships important?

"The relational part of teaching may very well be its most underrated aspect. ... When teachers are good at building relationships with students, the skill is seen more as cover for a lack of content knowledge or wherewithal to instruct with rigor," James Ford, the 2015 North Carolina State Teacher of the Year and the program director for the Public School Forum of North Carolina, told Education Week. To the contrary, he added, "Our first job as teachers is to make sure that we learn our students, that we connect with them on a real level, showing respect for their culture and affirming their worthiness to receive the best education possible."

A Review of Educational Research analysis of 46 studies found that strong teacher-student relationships were associated in both the short- and long-term with improvements on practically every measure schools care about: higher student academic engagement, attendance, grades, fewer disruptive behaviors and suspensions, and lower school dropout rates. Those effects were strong even after controlling for differences in students' individual, family, and school backgrounds.

Teachers benefit, too. A study in the European Journal of Psychology of Education found that a teacher's relationship with students was the best predictor of how much the teacher experienced joy versus anxiety in class.

How does a teacher's approach affect that relationship?

In a 2018 study, Arizona State University researcher Victoria Theisen-Homer found different teacher-training programs prioritized different kinds of relationships with students:

An instrumental focus involved a limited, one-way relationship in which teachers cull bits of information about students specifically to motivate them to behave well and focus on teacher-directed tasks. The relationships "were structured as a controlled means to a particular end: student compliance," she found. "Students learned that their value was tied to the degree to which they worked hard and behaved in line with what mostly white authority figures demanded."

A reciprocal focus required teachers to gather complex information and develop a holistic understanding of their students, inviting the students to grapple with content and problems together. "These students not only learned to think for themselves, but also had adults who affirmed and responded to their thoughts and experiences. Such interactions prepared them to engage with authority figures, and to someday hold positions of authority themselves," Theisen-Homer said.

The study also found in an analysis of two of these programs that teachers trained in the instrumental focus were more likely to go on to teach in low-income, high-minority schools, while those trained in reciprocal relationships ended up in schools with more high-income and white students. It was not clear why teachers ended up sorting in this way, but it raised concerns about differences in the kinds of relationships high- and low-income students might experience with teachers.

"Sometimes teachers don't understand the importance that their relationship with each student has on that student's identity and sense of belonging," said Vicki Nishioka, a senior researcher with Education Northwest who studies teacher-student relationships. "What gets in the way of that is a more authoritarian kind of discipline and interaction approach with students, which really doesn't work."

For example, a 2016 study randomly assigned teachers to increase their positive interactions with students. Students of teachers who boosted their ratio to five positive comments and interactions for every negative one had significantly less disruptive behavior and more time on task academically than the students of a control group of teachers.

How can teachers improve their relationships with students?

In a word: Empathy. Across several recent studies, researchers have found that teachers who cultivate empathy for and with their students are able to manage students' behavior and academic engagement better.

Nishioka finds that trying to suppress biases or stereotypes about students can sometimes make them worse, but practicing perspective-taking-actively imagining how a student might perceive or be affected by a situation-can reduce bias and deepen teacher-student relationships. She recommended teachers:

Talk to students to understand differences in their perceptions and expectations in class.

Research cultural differences between teachers and students to head off cultural misunderstandings, particularly around norms, styles, and language.

Teach and model perspective-taking for students in class.

How can teachers maintain healthy boundaries with students?

Experts caution that for teachers and students, "relationship" does not equal "friend," particularly on social media. Many districts have rules against teachers following or friending current students on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, in part because it might open teachers to liability if they see inappropriate behavior from students online.

Teachers also should be upfront with students who confide in them that they are required by law to report evidence of abuse and can't keep secrets that could put students in danger.

Teacher and education author Starr Sackstein, whose blog is hosted on the edweek.org website, also recommends that while teachers can and should share personal stories if they are "purposeful and appropriate" to the discussion, they should use these to model for students what level of detail is appropriate for sharing in social conversations.

How can relationships with students support teacher quality?

While student feedback is often incorporated into teacher evaluations in higher education, it is rarely a direct part of K-12 teacher evaluations. But that doesn't mean districts can't use student feedback to improve teaching practice, and in particular, such feedback can be used to help teachers build deeper relationships with students.

For example, the High Tech High Media Arts charter school in San Diego trains students using a six-week course to act as observers. The students met regularly with the teacher to give feedback about their communication skills and engagement in the classroom, and to brainstorm better ways to reach out to students. Teachers and administrators found that going through the training gave students better understanding of the teachers' roles. School staff members said that teachers also "developed deeper relationships with students, interacted with students in a more positive way during class, communicated information about projects and assignments to students more clearly, generated better questions to stimulate student dialogue during Socratic seminars, and created more collaborative learning environments for students."

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New studies are painting a clearer picture of why teacher-student relationships matter and how teachers should cultivate them.

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Tools for planing your circle to addressing problems 

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Tools for planing your circle to addressing problems 

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Practical advice for schools to create safe, positive and restorative schools. Ideas on student discipline, PBIS, Restorative Practices, and school safety.

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Supports for Affective language, circles, parent ed

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Supports for Affective language, circles, parent ed

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We've gathered resources for helping you implement a program of compassionate, creative and inclusive alternatives for responding to school discipline issues.

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Using Affective Statements in the Classroom || Free Download

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Middle school is a time when youths experience many changes physically and socially and can be exposed to drugs, sex, bullying and other risks that can influence health, development and, ultimately, the quality of their lives. During this high-risk time, it can be especially important for youths to have strong relationships with adults and peers and feel connected to their schools. When youths feel connected to their schools and the adults in it, they are less likely to use alcohol or other drugs, engage in violence, or initiate sex at an early age.

Two RAND Corp. studies recently evaluated the use of restorative practices to strengthen relationships between students and teachers to build that connection to school. These include teachers and other adult staff soliciting thoughts and ideas from students when making decisions, such as developing classroom norms; expressing their feelings in response to students' behavior; encouraging students to express and respect their and others' feelings; addressing not just bad behavior but also the underlying causes; and focusing on healing the hurt associated with negative behavior. Many of these practices occur while students and teachers sit together in a circle, so everyone is face to face.

Collectively, the two research teams looked at the impact of using these practices on school climate, suspension rates, classroom climate, peer relationships, connection to school and academics. In both studies, schools that received the intervention were chosen randomly, which is the gold standard for research. These two studies are the first to use random assignment of schools to assess the impacts of restorative practices. The first study identified no differences between the schools that were implementing restorative practices and those that were not. The second study identified stronger school climates and lower suspension rates but worsened classroom climates and academic outcomes.

Overall, the negative impact on academic outcomes was not large. The average student in the study district scored at the 37th percentile of the state distribution; restorative practices would reduce this to the 35th percentile. However, the negative impact was almost completely experienced by students in schools with predominantly African-American students, increasing the district's racial achievement gap from 15 to 18 percentile points. Of note, the negative impact on achievement was worse in schools that did not reduce suspensions, suggesting that it had more to do with the difficulty teachers had in meeting all the demands on their time than with disruption by students who otherwise would have been suspended.

There are several reasons these two studies might draw different conclusions. Schools in the first study were scattered throughout the state; in the second study, the schools were all within one district and received support from district leaders. Thus, schools in the second study arguably had better support for implementation, given the roles played by district leaders, which could have resulted in better implementation in these schools and thereby better outcomes. The first study centered on a rural state where suspension rates were low; the second study focused on an urban district with higher suspension rates.

But the studies' findings were similar in some ways. In the first, across all schools, restorative experiences were associated with positive youth development for middle school students. Those students who reported experiencing more restorative practices also reported experiencing greater empathy, stronger social skills, less bullying (both cyber and physical), greater peer attachment, a stronger connection to their schools and a more positive school climate (characterized by teacher support, clarity and consistency of rules, and student input into classroom decisions). It is particularly notable that these results were found for cyberbullying victimization, which is especially difficult to address because it occurs outside of formal and controlled settings, such as school. The second study also found that middle school students who reported greater restorative experiences found more peer support, a better classroom climate and less bullying. Also, teachers at schools assigned to the intervention reported more positive perceptions of teaching and learning, and stronger relationships with students.

Both research teams also found that implementation quality varied and that teachers and staff wanted more support for implementation than the interventions provided. The ability to use restorative practices is honed over time through practice and regular feedback from experts, expensive supports that schools might not be able to afford or prioritize. Teachers and staff in the studies also wanted clearer expectations for what they should be doing and how often they should be doing it, which can be a challenge when an intervention is intended to change behaviors to improve relationships, and for which there is not a simple checklist. Leadership training for administrators and staff to learn how to collaboratively implement the intervention across their school was optional, which led some schools to opt in and some to opt out. Given the barriers that schools experience when implementing schoolwide interventions (staff turnover, school schedules, competing demands), districts could consider making this type of training mandatory, since involvement of school leadership is critical to overcome these structural barriers.

But without clear expectations and strong support, teachers and staff might not feel equipped to use the practices to build stronger relationships. This could be a missed opportunity to help middle school students avoid risky behaviors during this critical time in their lives - and to have a healthier and more productive future. There are many nuances to the implementation and impact of restorative practices, which suggests that continued experimentation could allow districts to realize the benefits of instituting these practices and reduce the cost of doing so.
Joie Acosta is a senior behavioral scientist, Catherine Augustine is a senior policy researcher, Matthew Chinman is a senior behavioral scientist and John Engberg is a senior economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
Submit a Letter to the Editor

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Joie Acosta, Catherine Augustine, Matthew Chinman and John Engberg 

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Analysis: What Two New Studies Reveal About Restorative Justice in Middle School - and How It Can Be Done Better

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Middle school is a time when youths experience many changes physically and socially and can be exposed to drugs, sex, bullying and other risks that can influence health, development and, ultimately, the quality of their lives. During this high-risk time, it can be especially important for youths to have strong relationships with adults and peers [...]

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Restorative circles are strategies you can use in your classrooms to develop relationships, build communities, and respond to conflicts and problems that arise. With restorative circles, you give everyone an equal opportunity to speak, and be listened to.

When you're building your restorative circles, the basic structure is easy to learn. Gather everyone around in a circle, and follow the guidelines of whatever circle type you're using!

You always keep two things the same across restorative circle types.

One, only let your participants speak one at a time. Don't allow interruptions while others are talking. By doing this, you encourage everyone to listen while giving each of them an equal chance to respond.

Two, don't pass judgement, but seek to understand problems. Your circle's goal isn't to pass judgement and define punishment. Instead, challenge those involved to understand why the conflict happened, and how it affected others.

Here are three types of restorative circles you can use in your classroom

Sequential Restorative Circles

Real Justice Conference

Fishbowl Restorative Conference

1. Sequential Restorative Circles:

Sequential Restorative Circles

In sequential restorative circles, one person speaks at a time. The chance to speak moves around your circle in one direction.

Structure your sequential restorative circles around topics or questions raised by your circle facilitator. This format gives quite or reserved voices, who often get pressured by loud or assertive voices, a chance to speak freely. By using topics and questions, you also help guide your circle, and give your participants a more structured way of voicing their concerns.

When using a restorative circle, you'll often rely on the help of a circle facilitator. Your job as a circle facilitator is to help guide your circle, but not lead it. You don't determine who is right or wrong. Instead, you keep everyone on track, making sure they all have an equal chance to speak.

You don't need a leader to run a successful restorative circle though. Often you can simply trust your participants to go around, as many times as you need, keeping order yourselves.

2. Real Justice Circles:

Real Justice Circle

Another type of restorative circles you can use is known as a Real Justice Circles. When using real justice conferences, your order of speaking is different and more structured.

Your participants still sit in a circle, and discussion is still lead by a circle facilitator. However, your order of speaking is not sequential. Instead, follow a specific speaking order that's defined by your conference script. The general format most people use goes: offender, victim, victim's supporter, and offender's supporter. As a circle facilitator, ask each person a set of restorative questions and listen to their response.

Once everyone has responded to the restorative questions, transition into a more open model of discussion. During this time, you can discuss what the victim needs and how those needs can be met. Once you're at this point, the previous order is broken down. Everyone is allowed to talk in a non-ordered discussion, while still following the original guidelines.

3. Fishbowl Restorative Circles:

Fishbowl Restorative Circle

An additional restorative circle format you can use is the fishbowl. Fishbowl circles are drastically different than other restorative circles.
First, create an inner circle of active participants using either a sequential approach or a non-sequential activity. Outside the inner circle place your observers, each arranged in as many concentric circles as are needed to accommodate the group.

You can use fishbowl circles when you might have a large number of active participants but it would be impractical to have them all involved. Observers watch the circle activity and occasionally comment on it, but aren't active members of the circle.

To create a slight variation on this, place an empty chair in the middle of the room. Have your outside observers sit in the chair, one at a time, say something, and then return to the outer circle. This helps you maintain a limited amount of participation by observers.

Restorative Circles are valuable tools for developing relationships and building classroom communities because they give each participant an equal opportunity to speak and be heard. Unlike traditional discipline models, they also allow individuals to understand how their actions impacted others. By not responding with just punishment, and instead listening to the stories, experiences, feelings, and thoughts of others, you get a deeper understanding of why something might have happened.

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3 Types of Restorative Circles * Region 13's Blog

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Restorative circles are strategies you can use in your classrooms to develop relationships, build communities, and respond to conflicts and problems that arise. With restorative circles, you give everyone an equal opportunity to speak, and be listened to. When you're building your restorative circles, the basic structure is easy to learn.

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How PBIS and Restorative process are really what you are doing/ is best practice 

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How PBIS and Restorative process are really what you are doing/ is best practice 

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Relational Schools Conference - 2021 Integrating PBIS and RP

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Classroom Circle_ First Day of School (1)

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Restorative Circles in Schools - How to facilitate a circle?

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RP guide to- mediation, circle or conference

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Guide for Restorative: Circle, mediation, conference

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Guide for Restorative: Circle, mediation, conference

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RP guide toResorative- mediation, circle or conference

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Circle Expectations for staff and students 

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Circle Expectations for staff and students 

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Reflection worksheet with drawing/ visuals 

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Reflection worksheet with drawing/ visuals 

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Reflection worksheet with all text and writing 

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Reflection worksheet with all text and writing 

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An Overview of RP for teachers-short but packed 

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An Overview of RP for teachers-short but packed 

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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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Restorative Conference support card ( two sided)

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Restorative Conference support card ( two sided)

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Your school or campus might already use conferences to deal with behavior issues, but restorative conferences are a bit different. In restorative conferences, victims, offenders, and their friends and family take an active role in resolving any conflicts.

A restorative conference is an example of restorative discipline. You should use restorative practices when you wish to repair harm done and reestablish relationships within your school as opposed to strictly punishing students. During a conference, your students get a chance to deal with the consequences of their wrongdoing and decide how to best repair and harms caused together.

You shouldn't think of these conferences as counseling sessions or meditation processes either. Instead, restorative conferences should take a victim-sensitive, problem-solving approach to conflicts. Your students learn to address problems and conflicts and create solutions that suit their unique needs.

What happens during a Restorative Conference?

During your restorative conferences, your students will get a chance to share their feelings, ask questions, and have a say in any outcomes. Victims, get the opportunity to confront their offenders and explain how the offender's actions have affected them. Offenders also get the chance to listen to the victim, participate in the conference, and repair any harm done. Typically offenders will apologize, make amends, and agree to a personal or community-service centered solution to the problem. As a facilitator, you are not the deciding voice for your students. Instead, students come up with their own solutions to conflicts.

As a result, offenders are held accountable for their actions without being unfairly punished. Offenders can also lose their "offender" label, repair and reestablish relationships, and join your community again.

How do you start a restorative conference?

First, before starting a restorative conference, you should determine if a conference is even appropriate. There are a range of restorative discipline options to choose, from informal to formal. Restorative conferences will not always be the best fit for solving disagreements. Second, make sure that your victims and offenders have agreed to attend. After that, invite others affected by the incident (this can be family members, friends of the victim or offender, etc).

Each restorative conference will have a facilitator, that's the role you're likely taking on. As a facilitator you'll stick to a simple written script and keep the conference focused without being an active participant. You'll provide an opportunity for each participant to speak, staring with the offender by a set of open-ended questions. Next, the victim and their friends and family will explain the incident from their perspectives. Victims will share how the incident made them feel or how it affected them. The offender's friends and family are then asked to do the same.

As you move through the conference and approach the end, you'll ask the victim what they'd like the outcome of the conference to be. Whatever the response is, the victim, offender, and everyone else at your conference will discuss it. When you reach a decision, you write and sign a simple contract. Both parties then leave with a new understanding of each other's feelings, and with a concrete course to correct the wrong-doing that they decided upon together.

Restorative conferences switch up our responses to wrongdoing in schools. They encourage your students to be active and willing participants in their own discipline and don't seek to establish unilateral punishment techniques to all students for all offenses. By involving the victim and offender into the process when appropriate, you help reestablish connections, build relationships, and foster a sense of growth and community within your students.

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What is a Restorative Conference? * Region 13's Blog

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Your school or campus might already use conferences to deal with behavior issues, but restorative conferences are a bit different. In restorative conferences, victims, offenders, and their friends and family take an active role in resolving any conflicts. A restorative conference is an example of restorative discipline.

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Restorative Approach Example - Primary School

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Restorative Approaches in Schools (with subtitles)

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An Antidote to Teacher Stress || Relational Schools Conference Keynote

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Positive Behavior Supports in Chicago's Schools

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In school, some names invoke teasing. To start our year off right and to stop teasing before it begins, I have students create identity posters about themselves.

We begin by sharing what we know about our names. Who named you? Were you named after someone? Next, I send home a sheet for students to interview their parents or guardians. Why did you give me this name? What does my name mean? What is its origin? Who chose my name?

When students return to class with their answers, we take time to share. Some of the students with the same name discover their parents named them for different reasons. Some find that though they share the same name, their research of origins turned up different meanings.

Students bring in photos of themselves and their families and use magazines to cut out pictures of favorite things. These images, along with written explanations, will be used to create their identity posters. These posters tell who they are and what makes each of them unique.

This provides a springboard discussion for our study of world history. During the year, we will learn about all the world's religions, and students learn that many of their names have religious origins even if it's not the religion their families practice.

We all enjoy walking around the room and looking at the posters. The students' discussions often reveal the importance of this activity. Students ask each other if they like their names, or if they would choose a different name. Once, I overheard a Chinese student tell his classmate, "I'm glad my parents gave me an English-sounding name, but I wish people could pronounce my real name." That year, we all learned how to say his Chinese name correctly. It really wasn't difficult at all.

We hang the posters along the back wall of our classroom all year long. Each week, I take down one to place in a prominent position in the room where everyone can focus on it.

As an extension activity during the year, students create identity posters of famous people we are studying in history.

Students learn that although their names may carry certain information, it is not all of who they are, what they like, do or think. We are multifaceted. This activity curbs students from making fun of each other's names.
Ellen Mulholland
Wood Middle School
Alameda, CA
Teaching Tolerance Recommends

For more information on the importance of the arts in education, read Eric Jensen's Arts with the Brain in Mind ($22.95; ISBN 0-87120-514-9.)

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In school, some names invoke teasing. To start our year off right and to stop teasing before it begins, I have students create identity posters about themselves. We begin by sharing what we know about our names. Who named you? Were you named after someone?

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Public Versus Private Relationship

Community organizers try to help people understand the difference between public and private relationships (I was an organizer for 19 years prior to becoming a teacher). Often, those in power will try to blur that division when it suits their purposes (for example, politicians kissing babies).

Here is another example: I have spent time over the years working with many organizations, including religious congregations, organizing for community improvements. The political decision makers with whom we would have to negotiate for those neighborhood changes were sometimes members of those congregations, and they would often try to privately influence pastors or congregation leaders to take a different public position. The religious leaders, in turn, would point out that when it came time to participating in public life, it was a public relationship and public dialogue -- and when it came time to a personal issue, it was a private relationship and a private dialogue. In public life, the relationship was conditional, based on negotiation and reciprocity. In private life, the relationship was often based on love and friendship. This distinction was particularly important to demonstrate in public settings.

And we carried this distinction over to how members needed to act in the context of the organization -- at our meetings, with the media, and whenever they were in the public eye.

I apply this concept in the classroom by helping students understand the difference between public behavior and private behavior. When students are in the classroom, it is a public space with certain expectations. One small example is a student shouting out "I'm bored" or some other inappropriate comment.

One possible response to that kind of remark is a sharp admonishment from the teacher. Instead, though, what I generally do, either right then or at the next available opportunity, is to go over the student, put my arm around his or her shoulders, and have this kind of quick dialogue, with a smile:

Me: "Johnny, is it okay for you to think what you said?"
Johnny: "Yes."
Me: "Johnny, is it okay for you to tell your friends after class what you just said?"
Johnny: "Yes."
Me: "Johnny, is it okay for you to say what you just said out loud in the classroom?"
Johnny: "No."

And with both of us smiling, it's over.

I sometimes will have done it enough times with a student that when I go over, he or she will recite all of the lines. Notice that the dialogue leads with what students can do, instead of what they can't.

These kinds of inappropriate comments seem to decrease as the school year goes on, because at least some students gain a greater understanding of the differences between public and private, an understanding that should serve them well for years to come.

"What Would Be the Long-Term Effect of Doing That?"

Educator and positive classroom management consultant Marvin Marshall recommends a simple strategy of asking a disruptive student a simple question, either in the moment or afterward: "What would be the long-term effect of doing that?" As he suggests, asking can be far more effective than telling.

Alternatives to Collective Punishment

I suspect many teachers have had an experience like this:

A paper airplane, ball of paper, or pencil flies through the air, or somebody makes an obnoxious noise. The object is probably aimed at another student, and it may or may not hit the intended target. The noise is just meant to be funny.

You can tell the general area it came from, but you don't really know who the culprit is. It's frustrating because that kind of behavior does not contribute to a learning community.

What do you do?

It's not uncommon for teachers to first yell something like, "Who threw it?" No one admits to it, and then the teacher will punish the entire group.

Here's a definition of collective punishment:

Collective punishment is the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behavior of one or more other individuals or groups. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions.

I'm not convinced that this behavior is one we want to model for our students.

If collective punishment is out, then what are the alternatives?

This kind of misbehavior does not happen that often in my classes, thankfully, but it certainly does occur. What I usually do is go over to the area where I suspect the noise or projectile originated and quietly explain that I don't feel respected when this kind of thing happens. And, since I feel like I show that I respect students at all times, I would hope they would want me to feel respected. I then explain that I don't know who actually did it, but that I would like each of them to commit that they will not throw something (or make a noise, etc.), and we shake on it. I tell them that I'm sure they are people of their word, and the matter is closed.

Nine times out of ten, that is the end of things, and there is no repetition.

However, if it does happen again, I go to the next step. For example, somebody in my class was occasionally making an obnoxious noise. I knew it was one of two students. I did the first step with them, and that went fine. Then, two days later, one of them made the noise again.

I asked them both to come outside with me, and I explained that I was disappointed that one of them was not keeping their word. I knew that one was trustworthy, but I didn't know which one. So I said that I couldn't trust the word of either of them and didn't like feeling that way. I suggested that the person who was making the noise might want to think about how his or her actions were now affecting the other student. Then, I gave them a few minutes to talk about it privately (I left the door open and asked them to stay in front of it so I could observe their actions, but not overhear what they said).

We didn't hear that obnoxious noise again.

So in other words, the second step, when necessary, is to ask students to consider the impact their actions have on others, and ask them to try to work out problems among themselves. In my teaching career, this has almost always resulted in stopping the inappropriate behavior and, I hope, students gaining some added maturity.

Of course, one of the most common situations where the specter of collective punishment is raised is after a difficult time with a substitute teacher. One preventative strategy is the use of something like the Attitude and Behavior With A Substitute Teacher grading rubric. Early in the year, the teacher shows the simple rubric to students and explains that a substitute will use it with them. Five minutes prior to the end of class with the sub, he or she will distribute the rubrics, and students will write down their names and grade themselves. The sub will then go around, give what grade he or she believes the student has earned, and collect the sheets (this process means the sub does not have to worry about remembering individual names and can base the evaluation on student faces).

This can be a very effective strategy to reduce teacher temptation to inflict collective punishment on a class, enhance the likelihood of a class with a sub being somewhat productive, and dramatically reduce stress for the sub.

After a class has shown that it understands and respects the expected behavior, a teacher can experiment with not using the grading rubric and explaining to students that he or she trusts that they will act appropriately.

In Part Two of this excerpt, I'll offer additional positive classroom management strategies. In the meantime, please share your own in the comments section below.

This article was adapted and excerpted with permission from Larry Ferlazzo's Self-Driven Learning: Teaching Strategies for Student Motivation, © 2013 Eye On Education, Inc. Larchmont, NY. All rights reserved. www.eyeoneducation.com. More information about this title is available here.

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Positive, Not Punitive, Classroom Management Tips

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Community organizers try to help people understand the difference between public and private relationships (I was an organizer for 19 years prior to becoming a teacher). Often, those in power will try to blur that division when it suits their purposes (for example, politicians kissing babies).

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According to this definition, events that serve to decrease an individual's behaviors are considered to be punishers. Teachers should understand the pros and cons about using punishment in the classroom, as schools frequently build punishing, or aversive, consequences into plans designed to help manage student behaviors.

An important point about possible punishers is that they affect different people in different ways. Imagine a scenario, for example, in which a teacher uses time-out as a behavioral intervention for two students who frequently call out in the classroom. One student stops calling out almost immediately. For this student, time-out is clearly a punisher. The second student persists in calling out, despite being placed repeatedly in time-out. For that student, time-out has no effect and is not a punisher at all.

Punishment can take various forms in classroom discipline programs. Sometimes an event is presented whenever the student shows an undesired behavior. A teacher may reprimand a student, for example, each time that the student leaves her seat without permission. In another form of punishment, the student may temporarily be removed to a less-reinforcing setting (e.g., by being sent to a time-out room for a 10 minute period of seclusion) whenever she displays a negative behavior. In a type of punishment known as response-cost, a student has rewards, tokens, privileges, or other positive reinforcers taken away whenever he or she engages in a problem behavior. An example of response cost is a student who earns stickers for good classroom conduct having one sticker removed from her sticker chart for each episode of misbehavior.

Teachers sometimes find punishment to be effective as a classroom behavior management tool, especially in the short term. Because punishment tends to rapidly stop problem behaviors, the teacher in turn is positively reinforced for using it (Martens & Meller, 1990). On the surface, then, punishment may appear to be a powerful and attractive behavior management strategy. But this power can come at a significant cost.

Research indicates that punishment is sometimes accompanied by significant negative side effects. Students who are regularly the object of punishment may over time show a drop in positive attitudes toward school (resulting in poor attendance and work performance), have a more negative perception of teachers, and adopt a more punitive manner in interacting with peers and adults (Martens & Meller, 1990).

What to Consider Before Using Punishment Techniques.

Simply put, punishment techniques of any kind are strong behavioral medicine-and should be used with care and compassion. Before using any punishment techniques, the teacher should consider whether:

the student's behavioral problems are caused by a skill-deficit. From an ethical standpoint, students should never be punished for behaviors that they cannot help. For example, a student who is chronically disorganized and always arrives late to class with no writing materials may well need to be taught organization skills--rather than be punished for his lack of preparedness.

positive techniques alone will adequately improve problem behaviors. Instructors have a range of positive behavior intervention strategies to draw on when shaping student behaviors. These positive approaches might include the structuring of the student's classroom experience to avoid 'behavioral triggers' that lead to problems or the use of praise and other reinforcers to reward the student for engaging in appropriate, 'learner-friendly' behaviors. Punishment techniques, particularly 'strong' forms of punishments such as isolation/seclusion time-our from reinforcement, generally should be considered only when the range of positive strategies have not been successful in improving the student's conduct.

What to Think About When Setting Up a Behavior Program That Includes Punishment Techniques.

Teachers who include punishment as one element of a behavior plan are most likely to experience success if their plan follows these guidelines:

Punishment is paired with positive reinforcement. The power of punishment techniques is that they can rapidly decrease a student's rate of problem behaviors. But merely suppressing unacceptable behaviors is not enough: The student should also be encouraged to adopt positive classroom behaviors to replace them. When planning a behavioral program, then, it is always a good idea to complement negative consequences for inappropriate behaviors with a positive-reinforcement system that rewards a child's positive behaviors. In fact, for some children (e.g., those with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), the positive reinforcement program (e.g., sticker chart) should be put into place first. Only when that positive program begins to show results should a mild punishment component (e.g., response-cost) be added.

The plan uses the mildest punishment technique that is likely to be effective. When selecting a punishment technique, start off with less intensive interventions. Consider moving to a more intensive or restrictive form of punishment only if the milder alternative proves ineffective. A teacher may first decide, for example, to try in-class time-out (with the student remaining in the classroom during time-out and watching but not otherwise participating in academic activities) before moving to a more intensive form of isolation time-out in which the student is sent to a special time-out room for misbehavior.

The student is not deprived of key opportunities to build social and academic skills. When selecting negative consequences to impose for student misbehavior, the teacher should carefully consider possible harmful effects of that consequence before implementing it. For instance, reducing recess time as a consequence for misbehavior may not be the best approach if the student already has few friends and limited social skills. Missing unstructured free time with her peers may in fact only worsen the student's social isolation. Similarly, teachers may want to rethink placing students with academic deficits into seclusion time-out or in-school detention, as such a consequence would deprive those children of opportunities for academic instruction that they badly need.

The student provides input as the behavior plan is being developed. One potential unintended effect of punishment techniques is that the target child may feel powerless--a situation that could erode the child's investment in learning. Whenever possible, the teacher should give the student a voice in the design of the behavior management plan. For example, a teacher designing a response-cost program might ask the student to come up with a 'secret' sign that the instructor might use to signal a warning to the student that he is on the verge of having a point deducted from his 'Great Study Behaviors' chart.

The behavior plan is congruent with state regulations and school district policies and has parent support. The use of punishment procedures to manage student behaviors is an issue of growing debate in school discipline. Instructors should take care that all elements of a behavior plan, including punishment procedures, fall within disciplinary guidelines both of the state education department and their school district. Parents, too, should be informed of any behavior plan being put into place for their child and asked to sign off on it prior to that plan being implemented. (It is particularly important that parents approve behavior plans if those plans contain punishment procedures such as use of time-out.)

The teacher monitors the effects of the behavior plan. Because punishment procedures can in some cases lead to unintended negative effects on student performance and attitudes toward school, behavior plans that include a punishment component should be closely monitored. Monitoring should include collection of information both about whether the student's problem behaviors are improving under the plan and whether the child is showing any negative reaction to the behavior plan itself.

Troubleshooting Behavior Programs That Include Punishment Techniques.

Here are some ideas to think about if problems arise when using punishment techniques as part of a larger behavior plan:

The student reacts negatively to the behavior program. Whenever a new behavior plan is put into place for a student, teachers can expect that the student may initially 'test the limits' of the program. Such testing behavior may include loud complaining, or the student's refusing to follow teacher requests. Often, such behaviors subside when the program has been in place and consistently enforced for a short time.

If the student reacts to the program, though, with more serious behavioral outbursts that suggest a safety risk to self or others, the teacher should consider substantially revising or discontinuing the plan immediately. Also, if the student begins to show other negative reactions sometimes associated with use of punishment (e.g., reduced investment in learning, increased hostility toward teaching staff, etc.), the teacher should heed these potential warning signs and revise the behavior plan as necessary.

The student accepts the program but shows little behavioral improvement. If a student fails to show significant behavioral improvements within a reasonable amount of time, a plan that contains a punishment component should be revised or discontinued. (Teachers should be particularly careful not to regard a behavior plan as 'effective' merely because it makes the student easier to manage. While an instructor, for example, may like a time-out intervention because it offers her an occasional break from a problem student, that intervention should be regarded as useless or even harmful to the student if it fails to bring about a speedy improvement in that child's behaviors in the classroom.)

Punishment techniques gradually lose their effectiveness. It is not uncommon for punishment to lose its effectiveness over time as the recipient of that punishment becomes acclimated to it. In such cases, the problem is usually that the teacher has become overdependent on using punishment techniques alone to manage the student's behaviors.

An instructor may find after her intervention has been in place for a month, for instance, that she has to reprimand a student more often and more insistently to get that student to comply with a request. (Remember that reprimands serve as a kind of punishment.) Upon reflection, the teacher realizes that she has been overusing reprimands. Furthermore, she finds that her loud reprimands distract other students from their classwork.

So the instructor revises the behavior plan. She starts the student on a sticker chart for positive behaviors, giving the child a sticker each half-hour if the student completes and turns in all class assignments (positive reinforcement). The teacher also tells the student that she can have five extra minutes of free time at the end of each day to spend in the book corner, a place that the student likes to visit. However, whenever the student fails to comply with a teacher request within 5 seconds during the day, the teacher deducts a single minute from the student's extra free time (response-cost). The final behavior plan, then, combines both positive reinforcement for appropriate behaviors (sticker chart) and punishment for inappropriate behaviors (loss of free time for failure to comply with teacher requests). The teacher finds that this revised plan is actually easier to administer, since she no longer feels that she has to 'nag' the student. Furthermore, the teacher discovers that the new plan retains its effectiveness over time.

References

Kazdin, A.E. (1989). Behavior modification in applied settings (4th ed.) Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing.

Martens, B.K., & Meller, P.J. (1990). The application of behavioral principles to educational settings. In T.B. Gutkin & C.R.Reynolds (Eds.), The handbook of school psychology (2nd ed.) (pp. 612-634). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Mayer, G.R. (1995). Preventing antisocial behavior in the schools. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 28, 467-492.

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What Every Teacher Should Know About...Punishment Techniques and Student Behavior Plans

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According to this definition, events that serve to decrease an individual's behaviors are considered to be punishers. Teachers should understand the pros and cons about using punishment in the classroom, as schools frequently build punishing, or aversive, consequences into plans designed to help manage student behaviors.

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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 - Affective Language Handout

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Restorative Practices - Restorative Questions Handout

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DCFPI supports the Student Fair Access to School Act of 2017, which offers reasonable parameters to ensure student access to education. This legislation would steer all DC schools away from an ineffective, counterproductive, and costly overreliance on punitive discipline-one that negatively impacts all students, school communities, families and the city at large. We recommend that the sensible protections in this legislation are also paired with corresponding investments in school resources, including Restorative Justice, and a Positive School Culture Fund.

When schools rely on suspension or expulsion as discipline methods, they create more problems than they solve. Students miss lessons, fall behind when they return, and are more likely to drop out, struggle to find jobs, or become involved with the Juvenile Justice System. This costs everyone in the District, both ethically and financially. Prevention is far less expensive.

Special education students and homeless students are both about two and half times more likely to be suspended than students without disabilities or their peers living in stable housing. Students identified as "at-risk" of academic failure because of poverty or performance are 2.71 times more likely to be suspended. There is no evidence that students of color misbehave to a greater degree than white students. Yet in DC, 10 percent of Black students were suspended and sent out of the classroom compared to only 0.5 percent of white students. This bill would limit suspensions for the kinds of subjective infractions that disproportionately hurt special education students, low-income students, and students of color.

When schools have the funds to fully staff Restorative Justice Models, they can better address the root causes of disruptive behavior. Students acquire the skills to manage their emotions and actions, learn to take responsibility for their mistakes, develop a greater sense of empathy, strengthen relationships, and repair harm. Teachers are better supported in managing the classroom without interrupting the learning of individual students. A more positive school climate allows for greater attention to academics, which benefits everyone and boosts student performance.

Mayor Bowser and the DC Council should increase funding for Restorative Justice Models. We also support the inclusion of a Positive School Culture Fund in this legislation, which would empower schools to pursue promising practices that reduce school push-out. For example, school leaders might offer new teacher trainings or trauma-responsive services. We should also ensure the student populations most affected by punitive school discipline receive the resources the city has already promised them through the 2014 special education reforms, and through the targeted use of "at-risk" funding.

Watch our testimony today, or read it in full here.

Sensible policies in the Student Fair Access to School Act include:

Requiring every school to establish a consistent school discipline policy that promotes the safety and well-being of the school community and emphasizes positive approaches, limited use of school exclusion, preventative and restorative responses to misbehavior, graduated and age appropriate discipline for misbehavior, and clear communication of due process with students and families.

Creating a plan for continuity of education for any student subject to a suspension.

Ensuring that a student's return to school is not contingent on a parent or guardian accompanying them to school, who may not be able.

Protecting students from the harmful effects of an out-of-school suspension or expulsion in kindergarten through eighth grade, except when causing significant bodily harm or emotional distress to another. Ensuring high school students are not subject to an out-of-school suspension for being late or absent, violating the dress code, defiance, or behavior off of school grounds.

Limiting suspensions for students to no more than five days consecutively in elementary and middle school and ten days in high school, or 20 days total in a school year.

Special attention to whether the student is being excluded for a manifestation of their disability, and if so, the creation of a positive intervention plan.

The provision of supportive resources to train teachers on trauma, chronic stress, positive interventions, implicit bias and restorative practices.

Requiring each school to maintain comprehensive data on student demographics and discipline.

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Punitive School Discipline Doesn't Work. Let's Help Schools Do What Does.

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DCFPI supports the Student Fair Access to School Act of 2017, which offers reasonable parameters to ensure student access to education. This legislation would steer all DC schools away from an ineffective, counterproductive, and costly overreliance on punitive discipline-one that negatively impacts all students, school communities, families and the city at large.

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Parent Today, Capital Region BOCES Communications Service, Albany, NY

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Ask most children what will happen if they break the rules, and you're likely to get an answer along the lines of, "I'll get in trouble." But for educators like Pete Mody, the question is, "Will that really help?"

Mody, who is the principal at South Glens Falls High School, is one of many educators throughout the region who has been involved in bringing restorative justice programs to local schools.

Restorative justice is a process by which participants are asked to consider their actions and take steps to resolve issues.

"The idea is, if you make a mess, you clean it up," Mody explained.

Rather than just punishing the offender, restorative justice focuses on righting wrongs - which can take a lot of different forms.

At South Glens Falls, Mody says, two students who get into a scuffle in the hallway might be encouraged to talk it over, resulting in an apology. For more serious transgressions, the process might involve family members, coaches, teachers or others who were affected by the student's actions.

At its core, the process aims to repair relationships and get to the core of why a problem happened in the first place.

"Often what I've said is, if punishment really worked for every kid, we wouldn't see the same kids doing the same thing over and over again," pointed out Timothy Dawkins, assistant superintendent for curriculum & instruction at South Glens Falls.

Both Dawkins and Mody can attest to the power of restorative justice in the classroom.

"It gives an opportunity for a student to see the whole scope of their actions, and repair all that damage," Mody said. "Almost always, when it's done, that student has stronger relationships with almost everyone who was involved."

But the tactics of restorative justice can be just as powerful outside of school. Here are a few strategies parents can use to introduce some of the concepts of restorative justice at home:

Hold regular family meetings

In schools, restorative justice can't begin until teachers and administrators get to know their students and begin to earn their trust. At home, Dawkins suggests having regular family "meetings" so that parents and children can check in with each other and be proactive about identifying problems or issues before they get out of control.

"If you do that work ahead of time to understand each other, it's easier to tackle these things when they come along," Dawkins pointed out.

Tell a different story

Particularly at a young age, children often struggle to understand their own actions. A child who knows he shouldn't have hit his sister may conclude that he is a bad person - or, he may rationalize his actions by concluding that his sister deserved to be hit.

Restorative justice, Mody said, gives children (and parents) a third option: recognizing that one single choice or behavior doesn't have to define who a child truly is.

"Sometimes you're just devastated that a child would make that choice, and you're focused on the negative," Mody said. "Restorative justice gives that child a mechanism to do something positive with it - to fix it and look back and say to themselves, 'I was willing to put in the time to make that right, and that's who I really am.'"

Hit the pause button

Restorative justice is a thoughtful process, not a snap judgment or a decision made in the heat of the moment - and to make that possible, Dawkins said, both parents and children may need a cooling-off period.

"Parents might need to say, 'I'm going to send you to your room and then we're going to talk this over,'" Dawkins explained. "You can take stock and be more measured in your response, instead of just reacting emotionally to your child's behavior."

Ask the right questions

When both parent and child are ready to talk, each person should have the chance to say their piece. Mody suggests the following five questions as a good starting point for the restorative process:

What happened?

What were you thinking/feeling at the time?

What have you thought about since it happened?

Who has been affected?

What do you think needs to be done to make it right?

It might not be necessary to ask all of these questions every time. "The essence of it is finding out what it was like for each person, and finding out what they need," Mody said.

If there's a conflict between two children, for example, one child might want an apology or a hug; another might want to make an agreement about what they will do going forward.

"You're creating a social contract," Mody said. "The complexity of the language might change, depending on the child's age, but the core idea is going to be the same."

For Dawkins, Mody and others who have embraced restorative justice, the benefits are palpable and long-lasting - not just for the individual students who participate, but, Dawkins hopes, for society as a whole.

"We want to think about creating socially aware, socially responsible human beings," Dawkins said. "And a big part of that is how we deal with conflict."

The lessons of restorative justice, Mody argues, can help young people take responsibility for their own actions.

"If I suspend a student, that student can shrug it off and say, 'The school's being a jerk,'" Mody said. "He doesn't have to confront what he's done. Conversation, discussion and repair are a more permanent, lasting and effective solution to whatever problem that young person may be having."

To learn more about restorative justice, visit restorativejustice.org.
Emily Popek is a public information specialist for Capital Region BOCES. She lives in Otsego County with her husband and their daughter.
Tags: behavior, change, child development, parenting, restorative justice

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Bringing the lessons of restorative justice home

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Ask most children what will happen if they break the rules, and you're likely to get an answer along the lines of, "I'll get in trouble." But for educators like Pete Mody, the question is, "Will that really help?"

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Restorative Justice: Resources for Schools

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Explore resources and case studies that demonstrate how to bring restorative justice to your school or classroom.

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A 5 min overview with students and staff- primary to high school

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A 5 min overview with students and staff- primary to high school

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We learn from reflecting on experiences, good and bad. A Reflection Sheet is a very effective tool to use when a student is displaying unacceptable or acceptable behaviors and can be used in conjunction with the Class Rules.

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Restorative Processes Framework for Discipline- A Deeper Look Workshop

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Community circle, or community meeting, is the time of day when the teacher and students greet e… | Primary Elementary Classroom (1st Grade, 2nd Grade) | Classroom community, Circle time activities, Responsive classroom

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Community circle, or community meeting, is the time of day when the teacher and students greet each other, take time to build inclusion and community, and practice social skills. These questions are used a quick-reference to use daily to allow each student to share something about themselves in a non-intimidating way. Use them to help create your own!

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Download [PDF] The Restorative Practices Handbook

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Download The Restorative Practices Handbook eBook for free in PDF or ePUB format Mobi without registration Instant access Library

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We've gathered resources for helping you implement a program of compassionate, creative and inclusive alternatives for responding to school discipline issues.

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A full range of how to videos from Laura Mooiman

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A full range of how to videos from Laura Mooiman

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"restorative practices" "restorative justice" pbis "positive behavior interventions & supports" "laura mooiman" "professional development" teachers "classroo...

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Hi, I am Laura Mooiman helping you create safe, positive, and restorative schools. I believe a healthy school climate will support teachers and set students to engage in learning. On this Youtube channel I will post training and topic videos about Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS), Restorative Justice (RJ)/ Restorative Practices, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in schools.

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An inspirational story on gratitude | A black dot story | Short moral story

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Compassion

Altruism is the most effective means of self-realization and self-perfection. Doing good for others is the best way to develop one's own character and find greater happiness for oneself.

An attitude of compassion does not mean looking down on someone, pitying them in their misery. Compassion is based on respect. We discuss life as equals, learn from each other and strive together to improve our lives.

Compassion is the very soul of Buddhism. To pray for others, making their problems and anguish our own; to embrace those who are suffering, becoming their greatest ally; to continue giving them our support and encouragement until they become truly happy―it is in such humanistic actions that Buddhism lives and breathes.

Courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin. Compassion without courage is not genuine. You may have a compassionate thought or impulse, but if you don't do or say anything, it's not real compassion.

Encouragement means to plant the seed of courage in the lives of others. It is an act of regeneration.

Even when someone finds themselves in a vulnerable position, if they are surrounded by people who are prepared to share that challenge with them, it becomes possible to find a way forward. The way in which we experience even such conditions as poverty or illness can be profoundly transformed simply by the knowledge that we have the support of others. This is a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy.

However difficult our situation or profound our anguish, we always retain the capacity to light the flame of encouragement. This light dispels not only the darkness of others' suffering, but also that which envelops our own heart.

Humanity's collective mission in the cosmos lies in the practice of compassion.

In order to relieve another person of suffering one must identify with that person and share their suffering. This very identification is the means of practicing compassion, and the act of relieving others of suffering and giving them happiness is the path of self-perfection.

It is often enough for a person in anguish simply to know that there is someone thinking of them, sharing in their pain and plight, even though that person may be unable to actually help.

It is our refusal to dismiss any form of suffering as unrelated to us that brings our humanity to its true luster.

Our true selves shine and the inherent strength of our lives wells forth when we exert ourselves for others. This is human nature. And this is the way of life Buddhism teaches.

Sincerity knows no barriers of age or nationality. Words spoken out of genuine concern for others strike a powerful chord in people's hearts.

Supporting, encouraging and reinvigorating each suffering individual we encounter is the first sure step to realizing a society that respects the dignity of life; it is the starting point for building peace.

The fact is, when we support others, we ourselves are actually being supported; when we help others, we ourselves are actually being helped. This is the worldview of "dependent origination" taught in Buddhism.

There are countless people in the world whose hearts have been wounded in some way. We need to extend a healing hand to such individuals. Through such efforts, we in fact heal ourselves.

To "love people" or "love humanity" in the abstract is easy, whereas to feel compassion toward actual individuals is difficult.

To have compassion means to feel the sufferings of others as one's own. Because the Buddha has a deep desire to save others, he agonizes over what to do to achieve this. Such compassion gives rise to wisdom.

We are often highly sensitive to our own sufferings but oblivious to the pain of others. Buddhism teaches the importance of empathy, feeling the suffering of others as your own. A century based on respect for life will not be realized as long as this spirit is disregarded.

What our society today needs more than anything is the spirit of empathy-the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are facing hardship and suffering, to understand and share what they are going through. When the spirit of compassion becomes the bedrock of society, and is embodied by society's leaders, the future will be bright with hope.

When we care for others our own strength to live increases. When we help people expand their state of life, our lives also expand. Actions to benefit others are not separate from actions to benefit oneself. Our lives and the lives of others are ultimately inseparable.

When we light a lantern for others, our own way forward is lit. The source of illumination needed to dispel the chaos and darkness of the age is to be found in actions that bring forth our own inner light through committed action on behalf of others.

Words of encouragement motivated by the wish for someone's happiness can function as a source of revitalizing light, rousing courage and strength.

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Quotations On the Theme of Compassion | Daisaku Ikeda Website

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Compassion Altruism is the most effective means of self-realization and self-perfection. Doing good for others is the best way to develop one's own character and find greater happiness for oneself. An attitude of compassion does not mean looking down on someone, pitying them in their misery. Compassion is based on respect.

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These are some of our common mistakes ...simply because humans are really selfish by nature and we just tend to believe on what we see or hear ..and other times we judge people easily ...without thinking that everyone fights their own battle..and the sequel of it all... We simply break the strings or bond that we have with them thinking that we were betrayed or deceived by them and just regret at the end for loosing and misunderstanding them because of our own follies!

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judging others quotes these are some of our common mistakes ...simply because humans

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quotes: judging others quotes these are some of our common mistakes ...simply because humans

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Judging Others Quotes These are some of our common mistakes ...simply because humans

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These are some of our common mistakes ...simply because humans are really selfish by nature and we just tend to believe on what we see or hear ..and other times we judge people easily ...without thinking that everyone fights their own battle..and the sequel of it all...

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Daily Morning Affirmations | Positive Affirmations To Start Your Day | Morning Meditation | Manifest