A Practical Introduction to Restorative Practice in Schools

Theory, Skills and Guidance

Bill Hansberry

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784502324
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Gestion du comportement

Proven to reduce bad behaviour and exclusions, and encourage happier, safer school environments, restorative justice is an effective approach to conflict resolution.

Suitable for education settings from preschool to college, this guide explains what restorative justice is, how it can be used in schools, what it looks like in the classroom and how it can be implemented. Featuring case studies that illuminate the underlying restorative principles and practices, this book covers a wide range of topics from the basics of restorative justice, through to school-wide processes for embedding the approach in policy and practice.

Drawing on the expertise of educators and consultants, this is a must-have resource for any school or centre that is serious about reducing bad behaviour and developing safer learning communities.

PART 1

Thinking Restoratively

Challenging Paradigms about What to
Do when Things Go Wrong

Chapter 1

An Intractable Conflict

Case study: Tristan and Jason

To give you a strong sense of what restorative practice is, and how it works, I use real stories drawn from school life throughout the book. Below I start with the story of two boys, Tristan and Jason, and their intractable conflict. (Note: Jason and Tristan’s story is based on a real situation that I became involved with as an external consultant to the school. I facilitated the process. The names and places have been changed.)

The conflict

Things had become bad between Jason, a 13-year-old boy, and Tristan, a 12-year-old boy in the same class. At the beginning of the school year something had sparked a conflict. Nobody really knew what, but since then, the boys’ interactions had been characterised by regular episodes of teasing, and even awful comments about each other’s families. This had sometimes escalated into defacing one another’s schoolbooks, deliberately hiding belongings from one another and, on occasions, the boys had come to blows, although Jason, a much bigger boy, had a physical advantage.

There were times of ceasefire between the boys, when they managed to go about their day spending time in the same friendship group without confrontation. This was temporary, as both boys had developed a hair trigger when it came to one another’s words and actions, so something as small as a sideways glance or a difference of opinion would quickly descend into taunts, insults and challenges to fight at the school gates after school. Some of the other students in the class saw this as great entertainment and sometimes said and did things to set the scene for more conflict between Jason and Tristan.

Due to the escalating nature of the incidents and the rising distress of the boys’ parents and staff, the school principal, Mr Barker, felt that he had no choice but to separate the boys at break times. This arrangement saw Jason or Tristan spending break times in the school’s computer suite, on alternate days, while the other was free to move about the play areas. Mr Barker had invested hours of his time and energy trying to minimise the harm the boys could bring to one another. It seemed as though this was the only solution to an ongoing conflict where both boys believed that they were the victim.

The boys’ profiles

Jason

Jason was older, taller and physically stronger than Tristan. He presented as a quietly spoken and kind boy and had an air of self-assurance about him, which perhaps came from the fact that he was taller than most of the other boys. On occasion, Jason used his physical supremacy to gain status or to get his way. Like most boys his age, Jason’s mask of quiet confidence hid a scared little boy who spent a lot of time worrying about how he fitted in and what he was good at achieving.

Tristan

Tristan was Jason’s physical opposite: he was short for his age and all of the other boys stood taller. Tristan had an engaging personality and was more of an open book than Jason when it came to discussing life, friends and school. Tristan’s insecurities were easy to see and he was socially immature for his age. He was eager to ask questions about friendship and life and was yet to develop some of the finer skills for making and keeping friends. Tristan, however, had a quick mouth and an expansive vocabulary that made him a formidable opponent for anyone who engaged him in a battle of words. Tristan had learned to manipulate, divide and conquer to keep a hold on friendships. It was all he knew, and mild social anxiety drove many of his social decisions.

More about the conflict

What had been happening? How had people been affected?

Over several months, Mr Barker had investigated issue after issue between Jason and Tristan, ranging from reports of teasing to pushing, giving each other dead arms (a punch in the bicep), as well as a few public verbal exchanges, including taunts and threats at the school gates. Both boys had been suspended for their roles in these incidents. Each time, this only seemed to further galvanise each boy into seeing himself as the victim and further inflamed the boys’ parents, especially Tristan’s mother, Louise, who believed that these responses were unfair to Tristan while letting Jason get away with bullying.

Louise had made enquiries about legal action against the school for the harm that she believed had come to Tristan. A law student herself, Louise was deeply distressed by the stories that Tristan was telling and believed that the separation order that Mr Barker had put in place was impacting Tristan’s ability to maintain his friendships with other boys in his class and, therefore, damaging his mental health.

In a moment of extreme stress, Louise had, a few weeks earlier, entered the boys’ classroom unannounced, without signing in to the school, and publically threatened Jason that she was watching him and would involve the police if he didn’t leave Tristan alone. This incident embarrassed Tristan, made Jason fearful, distressed Mrs Jansen (the class teacher) and caused a stir within the community. Mr Barker was concerned with Louise’s disregard of the school’s child safety procedures and wrote her a formal letter, cleared by the school district’s legal team, indicating that she had breached child safety policies. The letter stated that, from then on, Louise was only to move within the school grounds accompanied by a member of the school’s leadership. Louise steeled herself for a legal challenge to this letter and was preparing her case against the school.

Galina, Jason’s mother, took a different view of the situation. The quarrelling between the boys concerned her, but she viewed the issue as something from which both boys could learn valuable lessons. In her opinion, what was happening between Jason and Tristan was part of growing up and could be overcome with sensible guidance from adults. Galina had encouraged Jason to make better choices when Tristan did something that insulted him. Galina did not know Louise well but had been made aware of how Louise had entered Jason’s classroom and confronted him. Galina felt angry with Louise for this but felt some empathy towards Louise, understanding that she must have been very distressed to have chosen this course of action.

Tristan and Jason’s class teacher, Mrs Jansen, was run off her feet from having to closely monitor the boys’ every interaction within the classroom and document her observations. There was a growing likelihood that these notes would become evidence in a courtroom some time in the future. As well as teaching a class of 30 students ranging from 11 to 13 years of age, Mrs Jansen had to constantly think about how any classroom activity might bring Tristan and Jason into contact with one another, and the potential consequences of this contact. Group work, class sports, excursions – even just eating time – all had become an exercise in risk management for Mrs Jansen. This was taking its toll.

Tristan and Jason shared a group of friends. These friends felt like the meat in the sandwich and were finding the constant bickering and one-upmanship between Jason and Tristan exhausting. Having to second-guess the potential consequences of spending time with either of the boys was taking up a lot of head space for the boys’ friends, particularly Adam and Aston. Understandably, Tristan and Jason would subtly encourage the boys to side with them, using their rostered play times to desperately re-establish their friendships, anxious that they had lost ground to the other during their previous stay in the computer suite. How else would boys of this age act under these circumstances?

Mr Barker phoned me to see whether I could work with the school to find a solution to the problems. He wondered whether a fresh set of eyes and a restorative approach could be the catalyst for positive change. This was a difficult step for Mr Barker, because involving an outside person in this situation was, perhaps, an admission that what the school had done to date had not been effective. Mr Barker was also adroit enough to know that Louise no longer trusted him to make decisions that she felt were in Tristan’s best interests. Communications with Louise were strained and this was, of course, impacting on how Mr Barker could work with Tristan. It had got to the stage that every interaction Mr Barker had with Tristan would result in another strongly worded, legalistic email from Louise, who had become so anguished that there was nothing Mr Barker could do that wasn’t immediately misinterpreted by her as a deliberate attempt to make Tristan’s existence at school miserable. Of course, Tristan was doing what most children in this position would do, that is, taking every possible opportunity to complain to Louise about Jason’s and Mr Barker’s unfairness and mistreatment of him. After all, this got his mother’s attention.

I’m sure elements of this story will be familiar to many readers. In the next chapter we look at restorative approaches as an effective alternative to addressing situations like this one, and we will return to Tristan and Jason’s story later in the book.

Chapter 2

Courage, Connectedness
and Restorative Work

Restorative practice is a constructivist, learning-based approach to conflict and wrongdoing that distinguishes between ‘managing behaviour’ and ‘managing relationships’. Those who’ve worked with restorative practice understand that when we change the way people see one another and feel about one another, people’s behaviour can change quickly. Underlying this is a truism that people’s behaviour is heavily influenced by the quality of their relationships.

Morrison (2007), in her analysis of research carried out by Baumeister and colleagues on the effects of social exclusion and rejection, sums things up by saying that the inference Baumeister is making is that who we are as individuals is ‘intimately caught up with who we are as a member of society’ and that our ‘social identities, understood as the psychological link between individuals and social groups, mould who we are and how we behave’ (p.29).

Based on the principles of restorative justice, restorative practice involves those who’ve become entangled in an incident of harm or conflict working together to find solutions and ways forward. A restorative mindset holds that the best way to deal with a problem or incident is to bring those involved, and affected, together (if possible) to discuss what has happened and how people have been affected. The next task is to help people to take responsibility for their misdeeds and bad decisions, and decide on a way that the harm might be repaired. This is a far more sophisticated approach than simply punishing those we judge to have wronged others. So restorative practice is essentially a face-to-face response to disruption and wrongdoing in schools. The ability to do this face-to-face restorative work is something that we can teach young people to do, beginning the moment they enter formal education settings. It is useful to think of restorative practice as a pedagogy rather than a bag of tricks that we pull out to use with some students in some situations.

The alternative to face-to-face work is the business of separating young people after a co...