Implementing Restorative Practice in Schools

A Practical Guide to Transforming School Communities

Margaret Thorsborne, Peta Blood

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857007377
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Consejería educativa

Restorative practice is a proven approach to discipline in schools that favours relationships over retribution, and has been shown to improve behaviour and enhance teaching and learning outcomes. However, in order for it to work, restorative practice needs a relational school culture.

Implementing Restorative Practice in Schools explains what has to happen in a school in order for it to become truly restorative. Section 1 explains the potential of restorative practice in schools, describing the positive outcomes for students and teachers. It also outlines the measures that need to be in place in order to embed restorative practice. Section 2 examines the process of understanding and managing change, providing realistic and pragmatic guidance on the practical and emotional barriers that may be encountered. Finally, Section 3 provides in eight practical steps, strategic guidance for achieving a restorative culture that sticks.

Featuring useful pro formas and templates, this book will be an indispensable guide for educators, administrators and school leaders in mainstream and specialist settings.

SECTION 1

A Whole School Approach

Chapter 1

Restorative Practice Explained

Successful implementation of restorative practice in schools requires a firm understanding of the philosophy and the nature of this practice. This includes an understanding of what can be achieved, what can get in the way, and how to bring people on board in a strategic rather than a haphazard way. Starting with the end in mind, we consider what it is to be a restorative school and how to build the case for change.

In Section 1 we answer two critical questions:

• Why would a school adopt restorative practice?
• What is the relationship between restorative practice and quality teaching and learning?

In answering these fundamental questions, we address:

• what we mean by restorative practice
• how restorative practice is integral to the core business of teaching and learning
• how restorative practice enhances social and emotional literacy, and
• the difference this can make to a school community in terms of staff relationships with one another, with parents and with students.

We begin by exploring the notion of restorative justice, how it relates to the dominant retributive justice paradigm still present in criminal justice, in many schools, families, organisations and the wider community, and the challenges this poses if we want to change how we do things in schools. We need to understand the limitations of punishment in the achievement of compliance, or more importantly, in achieving the climate that supports learning in classrooms and the development of social and emotional competence in our young people.

Restorative practice (RP), or as it is known elsewhere, restorative measures (RM) or restorative approaches (RA), in schools has been in developmental mode since the mid-nineties, and remains so, as practitioners find more ways to apply the principles in different settings and situations. In Section 1 we look at the range of restorative practices as we explore the continuum of practice, and we will also explain a whole school model that explores not just these restorative responses, but what a school could be doing in terms of developing a healthy school environment that is conducive to learning. We will make links between RP and how it will enhance the core business of the school – that is, pedagogy (teaching and learning in classrooms). We will explore how RP can help with the deliberate development of the values, attitudes and skills for students, staff, management and families, so that working together in this way will become the glue that holds everything together.

We conclude Section 1 with what a restorative school might look like, feel like and sound like, so you can get a sense of the end point you might be working towards.

In a nutshell, restorative practice (RP/RM/RA) is the practice of restorative justice (RJ), a philosophical approach to crime and wrongdoing that puts harm done, accountability for that harm by the wrongdoer, and repair of that harm at the centre of the problem-solving, involving the stakeholders in the matter. Initiated in the 1970s in Ontario, Canada, and later in Indiana, USA, in Mennonite communities (Zehr 2002), modern RJ was a way of assisting offenders to take responsibility for their actions by helping them to understand and to repair the harm done to victims and their families. Starting with victim–offender mediation, practice has been prolific and varied, dependent on the culture, practice and ways of working already in place or developed as a result.

Restorative justice is a different paradigm, or mindset, from retributive justice. The two paradigms are illustrated in Table 1.1 adapted from Zehr (2002) where different sets of questions are asked in the wake of wrongdoing, whether in a criminal justice setting, a school, a workplace, a church, a family or a community.

Table 1.1 Two paradigms (adapted from Zehr 2002)

Retributive justice	Restorative justice
Crime and wrongdoing are violations against the laws/rules: what laws/rules have been broken?	Crime and wrongdoing is a violation of people and relationships: who has been harmed? In what way?
Blame must be apportioned: who did it?	Obligations must be recognised: Whose are these?
Punishment must be imposed: what do they deserve?	How can the harm be repaired?

In practice, retributive justice tends to isolate offenders/wrongdoers from any connection or problem-solving with those they have harmed, with the state or institution taking responsibility for decision-making about what punishment is to be imposed. With a restorative approach to problem-solving, those responsible and those harmed are together involved in dialogue that explores the event, the harm done, and together (within the legislative framework that might confine their decisions) work out a way forward. On the one hand, we have an approach that keeps people apart, indeed, pushes people apart; on the other hand, we have an approach that brings people together.

1.1 A Changing Paradigm in Schools

Over the years, we have each had the opportunity to work in many schools in different countries and education systems. Discipline, everywhere it seems, has had a history of being built on a solid foundation of retributive justice. It has been the norm, in the community, in families, in the justice system and before recent times hardly questioned except for the stories told by adults still bitter from their own experiences at school. If you did the wrong thing, you were punished. Even if you didn’t do it, and people in authority thought you did, you still got what you ‘deserved’. The ‘story behind the story’ was of no importance and often children were labelled as being naughty, bad, brats, etc. If you broke the rules, you were disobedient and you suffered the consequences.

Howard Zehr (2002) eloquently articulates the shift involved from this traditional punitive way of dealing with transgressions to a restorative approach. In a school setting these two approaches look quite different.

Retributive approach

In a traditional approach to school discipline, the enquiry is one of blame and punishment. We describe this as a quick fix, although there is ample research to demonstrate that it rarely leads to the required behaviour change, unless it involves the death penalty, an option thankfully denied to schools! In fact, it tends to give us more of what we are trying to eliminate. In a traditional, retributive approach, the enquiry is:

1. What school/classroom/playground rule was broken?
2. Who is to blame?
3. What punishment or sanction is deserved?

The usual forms of punitive consequences still being used in schools include sanctions such as:

1. removal from class to be sent to the disciplinarian’s office
2. isolation in or outside of class
3. detention and detention plus (compound interest earned for not turning up the first time)
4. writing of lines
5. removal of privileges (e.g. you can no longer use the student common room)
6. not being allowed to go on a field trip or excursion
7. group punishment (e.g. the whole class on detention)
8. humiliation, belittling, name calling, use of sarcasm
9. suspension/stand-down/fixed-term exclusions
10. exclusion and or expulsion
11. yelling, shouting, growling, scolding
12. sending a young person to someone else to be ‘fixed’
13. caning (still present in some countries where it has not yet been outlawed in legislation).

These strategies have two broad hoped-for outcomes: to inflict pain in order to act as a deterrent to the wrongdoer and others (and sometimes to serve the purpose of revenge if we are to be honest); and to reduce re-offending. They are only rarely successful at achieving these and are reliant on the young person’s responsibility to self-correct and regulate their own behaviour, as the act itself does not bring about learning. In most instances it simply reinforces the internal story that there is something wrong with me, or I hate this person for doing this to me.

It is an approach that is arbitrary, about finding the right person to blame, and about a set of predetermined sanctions. There is minimal learning by the wrongdoer (or anyone else) and certainly no place for repairing the damage done. Wrongdoers are often labelled and, once they repeat their crime, find it difficult to shed the label. Teachers and other students see this young person as the problem child. Unfortunately, the relationships of people involved are often damaged as a result of the action-taking by the school, since no attention is paid to the harm done to relationships in the first instance.

Restorative approach

A restorative approach, on the other hand, is a different enquiry, one that is much more focused on relationships and repairing of harm. In our adaptation of Zehr’s (2002) work, this translates to:

1. What happened?
2. Who has been harmed? How?
3. What needs to happen to repair the harm?

A restorative approach is relational and anything but a ‘one size fits all’, prescriptive approach to problem-solving. With this approach, there is an understanding that when wrong is done, we need to work with those involved to help them take responsibility for their behaviour, to learn from the incident and to take what action is required to repair the harm. It is necessary to pay attention to the stories of those harmed, in order to repair the harm, and to help the person responsible understand how their actions have affected others.

Howard Zehr (2002) advises that the three pillars of restorative justice – harm, obligations, and engagement and participation – must be evident for a successful restorative approach. We summarise Zehr’s (2002) explanation of each:

• Harm. Justice begins with a focus on victims and their needs; it seeks to repair the harm in ways that are substantive as well as symbolic. This view of harm also extends to harm suffered by wrongdoers and the wider community.
• Obligations. Recognition of obligations places an emphasis on wrongdoer accountability and responsibility. This means the wrongdoer must be helped to understand the consequences for others of their behaviour, and they have a responsibility to make things right as far as it is possible, both substantively and symbolically. The community also bears responsibilities and accountabilities.
• Engagement and participation. Inclusion of the key people involved in what happened is important. Participants are involved in the process of telling the story of what happened, exploring the harm, and making decisions about how to resolve the issues. In its purest form, this is a level playing field, with all parties having equal space to tell their stories, to be understood, to have their wrongs righted.

If any of these three pillars are missing, then we have to question whether our approach has been restorative. Simply sending a student out of the classroom to be ‘disciplined’ by another staff member who has a slightly restorative dialogue may result in some awareness and understanding by the student about their responsibility but it rarely attends to the needs of those impacted by the behaviour and certainly fails on the engagement level. In this way, it is little more than a punitive approach to discipline that has a mild restorative flavour to it.

1.2 The Problem with Punishment

There is a plethora of convincing studies emerging that demonstrate that punishment is counterproductive to creating a climate of healthy connectedness in a school community. Blum, McNeeley and Rinehart (2002) in their longitudinal study of connectedness among US school students found that harsh discipline contributes to a sense of disconnect in the school environment. The impact of this disconnect is that students who feel disconnected from their peers and their school are more likely to hurt themselves, hurt others and/or participate in risky and dangerous behaviours (Blum et al. 2002). Alfie Kohn (2006, p.28) suggests that the use of punishment actually impedes the process of ethical development with a focus of what will happen to the child (‘this is what will happen to you if you persist in following this pathway’), rather than what the consequences will be for others. Other notable authors (Coloroso 2003; Grille 2005; Morrison 2007) agree that punishment used as a standard tool for the achievement of compliance no longer delivers the kind of hopeful outcomes that we dreamed possible, and that these methods are indeed counterproductive.

Howard Zehr (2007) points out a number of reasons why there are problems with punishment:

• There are risks that wrongdoers will simply become angry with those who punish them. Kohn (2000) makes the same point, stating that punishment (often guised as sanctions, negative incentives or consequences) ‘creates a climate of fear, and fear generates anger and resentment’ (p.97).
• The threat of punishment leads to denial of responsibility (pleading not guilty, outright lying), making excuses, and minimising the harm (they can afford it, it didn’t hurt anyone).
• The capacity to empathise with the victim is not encouraged if there is no process of coming together.
• Punishment doesn’t get at the root causes, a point echoed by Kohn (2006).

Zehr (2002) also refers to noted violence expert James Gilligan (1997), who, in his book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, suggests that all violence by a perpetrator, for example, is an effort to gain respect when s/he has felt disrespected. Zehr (2007) also noted in a plenary address with educators in Auckland, New Zealand, that a study of some 20,000 studies of punishment across justice, corrections, schools, families and communities showed that it did not produce the kinds of behaviour changes that were intended. Damning evidence to our thinking!

Ruby Payne (2009) in her ground-breaking work on understanding the values and behaviours of students and families who live in poverty, states:

In poverty, discipline is about penance and forgiveness, not necessarily change. Because love is unconditional and because the timeframe is the present, the notion that discipline should be instructive and change behaviour is not part of the culture in generational poverty. (p.77)

In other words, if we want change, for these students who live in a different world from most middle class school values, we have to be prepared to teach them how to behave while they are at school, even if it is different from how they behave in their world.

By the time you are reading this, more discoveries in neuroscience (Brooks 2012; Doidge 2008; Lane and Garfield 2012; Lewis, Amini and Lannon 2001) will probably reinforce our recent understanding about why restorative processes are far more effective in delivering required behaviour change than traditional punitive sanctions. Le Messurier (2010) writes elegantly about the impact of poor ‘executive functioning’ in the prefrontal regions of the brain, which is vitally important to the kinds of concentration, tasks and behaviours we expect and need for the complex learning of today’s classrooms. The Harvard University (2012) Center on the Developing Child refers to the impact of toxic stress on a child’s development and wellbeing. Toxic stress ‘occurs when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity – such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship – without adequate adult support’ (Harvard University 2012, para. 6). Prolonged stress responses such ...