Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools

A Guide to Using Restorative Practice

Richard Hendry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136850837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Implementing 'Restorative Practice' in schools can offer powerful and effective methods of promoting harmonious relationships and resolving conflict. Restorative Practice helps disruptive pupils to take responsibility for their actions, understand the consequences of their behaviour and apologise to others. Through a whole-school approach school teachers and managers can help all children build healthy and respectful relationships with peers and teachers.

Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools is a practical resource to help relieve the pressure on schools and education services by leading them to plan and implement restorative approaches in their day-to-day work. This innovative and informative book

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• provides a comprehensive overview of the current range of restorative approaches in schools

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• offers a clear framework and theoretical perspective for understanding the range of approaches

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• gives practical examples and case studies to illustrate practice

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• contains practical exercises and other useful resource materials

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• is relevant to individual staff as well as whole schools and education services.

Richard Hendry offers a vision for how our schools could be, if we are willing to embrace a 'way of being' that nurtures personal responsibility in a climate of mutual respect. As well as showing teachers how to reduce disruption and develop good relationships, this book is also about improving learning in schools and building skills for life. Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools is essential reading for all teachers, especially department and year heads, as well as headteachers, policy makers and researchers.

Chapter 1
An introduction to Restorative Practice

This chapter covers:

When I started teaching

Change is in the air

Supporting the development of Restorative Practice

Terminology

Ten frequently asked questions

After twenty-five years of sitting in staffrooms, I have learned that when a teacher begins an anecdote with ‘When I started teaching…’, this does not always guarantee that what follows is worth listening to. And so it is with some trepidation that I begin.

When I started teaching

When I started teaching… a dominant culture among teachers was that of professional individualism. You were alone with your class. The door closed firmly behind you. Whether you swam confidently, struggled to keep your head above water or sank like a stone depended, in the main, on two factors:

• the skills and attitudes that you brought from your previous experiences – in my case mainly from having been a pupil;

• your ability to adapt, and to learn from new experiences.

Of course, the preparation provided by formal teacher training was also a factor. However, this preparation proved woefully inadequate, for me at least, in terms of helping children to relate effectively to others and for dealing with challenging and disturbing behaviour when it arose.

Much has changed in the intervening twenty-five years. That culture of professional individualism has been challenged by a number of factors, including:

• the encouragement of reflective practice through staff development, self-evaluation and peer support programmes;

• increased opportunities for collaborative working between class teachers and support staff in classes;

• moves towards greater professional accountability.

These days, those who work in schools are, perhaps, more willing to share their experiences and skills with colleagues. Indeed, these experiences need to be shared if we are to have meaningful responses to the challenges that teaching throws up.

On the other hand, some things seem to have changed only superficially.

When I started teaching… I had the option of hitting with a leather belt those pupils who did something wrong or who did not behave the way I wanted them to. Proud as I am of my refusal to resort to this punishment, at the time my stance simply reduced by one the very limited number of available options for responding to unacceptable behaviour. When humour, persuasion or reasoned argument failed, all I could resort to were lesser forms of punishment (rows, having the culprit write out lines, or detention), or else I could pass on the ‘problem’ for someone more senior to deal with.

Since the mid-1990s, teachers have been encouraged, and sometimes directed, to adopt more positive approaches to ‘behaviour management’. The threat of sanctions has been ‘balanced’ by the increased use of praise and concrete rewards. While there is evidence that such behaviourist approaches can bring about changes in the conduct of some pupils, at least on a temporary basis, not everyone is at ease with this approach.

Praise and reward systems have been criticized for being, at best, difficult to administer consistently. At worst, they can be seen as tokenistic and may even be detrimental to a child’s developing sense of personal responsibility. Some children simply do not seem to respond to them in the ways intended. Some children learn to ‘work the system’. In other contexts, these children might be described as rapid learners, but when we are trying to manage their behaviour through behaviourist approaches, their ability to use the system to get what they want is often perceived as manipulative or under-hand. (See Chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)

Despite this apparent shift towards more positive approaches, the threat or actual use of sanctions (retribution) as a way of managing unacceptable behaviour remains a dominant culture in most of our schools. And yet, although sanctions may in some sense bring temporary relief, I cannot say that the need to resort to such retribution ever felt ‘right’ or ‘good’ to me when I was meting it out. The evidence of my own experience, as well as that from research, is that such sanctions do little to help children and young people understand their own behaviours or to take responsibility for the impact of those behaviours on others. Experience also tells us that sanctions are least effective for those pupils who are most frequently subjected to them.

These are the very children most in need of constructive support if we are to help them change their behaviours. And yet, this kind of retributive thinking remains a smoke that can cloud our judgement when making decisions about how best to respond to incidents of conflict and harm in schools.

Albert Einstein suggested that one definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’.

Change is in the air

Basic psychology tells us that if we are to have any hope of influencing the behaviours of children, we need to pay attention to their thinking and feeling processes as well as to their overt behaviours. Restorative Approaches do just that: they offer a theoretically coherent and practical basis for our interactions with others, and in doing so provide valid alternatives to our more typically retributive responses to rule breaking and wrongdoing.

We can identify three aspects of our work in schools that allow us to influence students’ learning and behaviour (Figure 1.1):

• the content of the curriculum that we teach;

• the behaviours that we as adults model when we relate to others;

• the interventions we choose to use when things go wrong between people, or when people do the wrong thing.

This book will show how Restorative Practice can be adopted in all three of these areas, with a particular focus on intervening in incidents of conflict and harm. This book reflects on international developments in the field and draws particularly on the experience of Scottish schools involved in implementing Restorative Approaches in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Figure 1.1 Three aspects that influence learning and behaviour

Restorative Justice principles and processes have existed in some cultures for hundreds of years. Some of the restorative processes that are now being used in UK schools have been tried and tested in a number of countries for up to twenty-five years. Schools in the United Kingdom are relative newcomers to Restorative Practice but since around 2000 there has been a burgeoning of development work in many areas.

In Scotland, the government is currently promoting the voluntary development of Restorative Practice in all its schools, building on successful pilots initiated in 2004. It has also made Restorative provision available within the justice system for young people, and in wider community settings. All this makes the Scottish experience particular. Scottish schools have been able to apply ideas and approaches that schools in other countries have previously developed. Scottish practitioners have gleaned information from the experience of others and have built on the learning of others to create models of implementation that work at individual school, cluster group and local authority levels. This book aims to share this recent learning by reflecting on the experience of individual staff members, headteachers, individual schools, local authority education services and Restorative Practice trainers.

When I started teaching… twenty-five years ago, Restorative Practice was not an option for schools. It is now. Evidence from pilot and lead schools in the United Kingdom, supported by evidence from other countries, indicates that schools that effectively adopt Restorative Practice can become significantly safer, calmer and happier places in which to learn and teach. Given the evident failings of our retributive systems and the evident potential of Restorative Practice, we cannot afford to ignore this way of working.

Supporting the development of Restorative Practice

This book will help you to consider how Restorative Practice can bring about lasting positive change in the ways we teach children to communicate constructively, to resolve conflict and to address harm. The book will support the development of Restorative Practice by:

• providing an opportunity for you to reflect on your values and your current responses to conflict and harm, and to compare these values and responses with those of Restorative Practice;

• exploring the existing range of Restorative Approaches and how these can be implemented at school and education service level;

• looking at some real experiences of change in schools, as reported by staff and students.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the kind of experiential staff development programm...