The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools

Teaching Responsibility; Creating Caring Climates

Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz

• Publisher: Good Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781680990430
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Alternative Dispute Resolution
• Index: Law

Can community-building begin in a classroom? The authors of this book believe that by applying restorative justice at school, we can build a healthier and more just society. With practical applications and models.Can an overworked teacher possibly turn an unruly incident with students into an "opportunity for learning, growth, and community-building"? If restorative justice has been able to salvage lives within the world of criminal behavior, why shouldn't its principles be applied in school classrooms and cafeterias? And if our children learn restorative practices early and daily, won't we be building a healthier, more just society?Two educators answer yes, yes, and yes in this new addition to The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series. Amstutz and Mullet offer applications and models. "Discipline that restores is a process to make things as right as possible." This Little Book shows how to get there.

1.

Introduction

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Situations requiring discipline in our schools can, in fact, be opportunities for learning, growth, and community-building. This idea is based on the assumption put forth by Nel Noddings, author of Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, that “the aim of education is to reveal an attainable image of self that is lovelier than that manifested in his or her present acts.”1

For this to happen, we will need to move beyond viewing discipline as punishment, or even as problem-solving, to a more holistic perspective that sees all aspects of behavior as related. A number of developments in education and related fields are already pointing in this direction. We will especially draw upon two of these.

First, the “peaceable school” concept acknowledges that education is for and by the community. This concept has been widely recognized and written about within education and has significant implications for our subject. Second, the principles and values of restorative justice have much to say about the way we live in community with one another, including in our schools. Although in our Western culture, restorative justice emerged initially within the criminal justice field, this approach is increasingly gaining recognition and application in the educational arena.

This book draws upon these and other concepts and provides some suggestions about how a restorative approach might be applied to discipline and problem-solving in schools. However, we don’t propose a cookie-cutter approach to restorative discipline; to imply such would oversimplify complex and diverse community situations. Rather, a restorative approach is a philosophy or framework that can guide us as we design programs and make decisions within our particular settings.

Restorative discipline is a philosophy or framework.

We urge you to think about the values and principles of restorative justice and to adapt them to fit your situation. We believe that doing so honors the strength and competencies within your own setting.

We offer this Little Book as a resource for teachers and administrators. We hope it can be a helpful addition to the knowledge and expertise already available to you within your school.

We begin by telling two stories that for some may sound too good to be true, too pie-in-the-sky. We tell these stories, however, to show the potential we believe a restorative approach has for our schools, recognizing that much of what we talk about is like planting seeds.

We have no illusions that implementing restorative approaches is the “cure” for all behavior issues. We also have stories of frustration, of working with students in situations where it seemed uncertain whether the seeds would take root. But the following two stories demonstrate that encouraging empathy can foster compassion and motivate right choices. When we ask our children to put themselves in others’ shoes, possibilities can become reality.

Someone once noted that there are at least 500 choices in every conflict situation. Options not yet considered exist daily in our classrooms. To discover these options requires creative thinking and a sense of possibility. We believe this vision of untried possibilities is the new but often neglected frontier in community education. We hope these stories will help foster this vision in your educational setting.

The turkey prank2

What do you get when you put five graduating seniors, five or six turkeys, and a need to be remembered, together in an empty high school late at night? Answer: A disaster.

The original plan was to take the turkeys from a local turkey farm, put them in the high school to run around all night, and make a mess. However, once inside the school, the young men reported that everyone’s adrenaline kicked in and a crowd mentality took over.

Turkeys were stuffed into lockers so they would fly out at unsuspecting students the next morning. One turkey was butchered and bled up and down the halls before dying. Another turkey was so disoriented it ran into a floor-to-ceiling window and broke its neck. The mayhem was indescribable when the janitor arrived for school the next day. The job before him seemed horrific.

The case went through the legal system, but the judge realized the small community had gaping wounds that the legal system could not address. So the case was referred to the local restorative justice program for a conference.

When the case was received by the program, a decision needed to be made about whom to invite to the conference in addition to the five young men and their parents, who had already agreed to attend. Individuals, including a member of the faith community, were chosen to represent the community at large. The superintendent, principal, three school-board members, three teachers, and the janitor were asked to participate. A member of the media was asked to join the conference, with the understanding that he was there as a community member. The total number of attendees was 35, which included one lead facilitator and five trained community volunteer facilitators.

The process of pre-conferencing with participants began with a meeting of the five seniors and their parents. A second meeting was held with representatives of the school community, and it included the visibly angry janitor. The janitor wanted to participate but insisted he would not be part of a conference in which they would get him to “sing Kum Ba Yah.”

The tension during the final conference was high as it began. School representatives spoke first about their feelings of anger and betrayal, while at the same time acknowledging the students’ positive qualities.

The students were also given an opportunity to speak and talked of how the prank escalated out of control. They expressed shame and embarrassment because of their behavior and apologized to those present, including their parents. The final young man to speak was flushed and shaking. He commented about how difficult it was for him to walk down Main Street and make eye contact with anyone because he was so ashamed of what he had done.

Near the end of the conference, the facilitator asked if there were final comments. The janitor raised his hand and the room fell silent. He addressed all of the young men, saying he accepted their apologies. He then turned to the last young man who had spoken and said to him, “The next time you see me on the street, you can look me in the eye because I will remember you for who you were tonight and not for what you did.”

An environment of care3

I visited an elementary peaceable school on the same day that school learned it had won a statewide award for excellence in education. The principal led me and my group of prospective teachers on a jubilant tour of the school. The school’s educators had designed the building. They insisted on changes that made the architects groan, but which they believed would foster the kind of community they envisioned. Parents of first-graders chose their individual student’s classroom, and, thus, which method of reading instruction they wanted for their child. Parents only were hired as assistants in the classroom, and community volunteers were visible throughout the building.

In the middle of the school was a cultural center honoring community traditions. In the media center, all materials were accessible to both teachers and students. The school enjoyed long lists of teachers who wanted to work there.

The principal was quick to note that the school received no more monies than any other school in the district. When I asked him what discipline system they had developed, he paused for a moment, then mused, “I guess we don’t have one. We just don’t have discipline problems.” I had visited scores of schools in four states during my tenure as a school psychologist and college professor, but never one with an ethos of peace and community engagement like this one.

Then I visited another school on this same tour. Down the road a mile or so was a high school that the children in the school I just described would eventually attend. As I entered I noticed huge holes in the tiles on the floor. I learned that the lockers were recently moved to a place where adults could view them all of the time because students had set fires in them in their old location. When the bell rang at the start of each period, the teachers would lock the classroom doors to keep out mischievous students. Three rooms were reserved for in-school suspension. Teacher turnover was high, and an air of suspicion and fear permeated the school. What happened on the road between the two schools? How was caring unlearned?

2.

Why Restorative Discipline?

The role of discipline

One of the greatest concerns of parents and educators is how to assist our children, through teaching and guidance, to become responsible and caring adults. Providing adequate and appropriate discipline is an important part of this process.

The term discipline comes from an old English word and means “to teach or train.” Discipline is teaching children rules to live by and helping them become socialized into their culture. That socialization is a lifelong process and includes helping children to control their impulses and to develop social skills that allow them to fully participate in lifelong interactions with others around them.

Discipline usually has several goals. Short-term, discipline intends to stop a child’s inappropriate behavior while explaining what is appropriate. Long-term, discipline aims to help them take responsibility for their own behavior. When children’s lives and behavior are too regulated by others, they feel no need to control themselves since others do it for them. So an important long-term goal is to teach self-discipline.

Restorative discipline adds to the current discipline models, which attempt to prevent or stop misbehavior, and teaches more life-giving responses. In today’s schools, care for the person(s) harmed through misbehavior is rarely addressed in intentional ways. Restorative discipline helps misbehaving students deal with the harm they have caused to individuals and to the school community. The goals of restorative discipline apply not only to those involved in or affected by misbehavior, but to the larger educational community as well.

Key goals of restorative discipline

• To understand the harm and develop empathy for both the harmed and the harmer.

• To listen and respond to the needs of the person harmed and the person who harmed.

• To encourage accountability and responsibility through personal reflection within a collaborative planning process.

• To reintegrate the harmer (and, if necessary, the harmed) into the community as valuable, contributing members.

• To create caring climates to support healthy communities.

• To change the system when it contributes to the harm.

Discipline, then, becomes a long-term process that hopefully leads our children to become responsible for their own behavior. Teaching self-discipline requires time, patience, and respect for our children. We need to invest the required time it takes in order to prepare our children for life.

How do we do that in the context of school life? We know that children misbehave and that they do so for a variety of reasons. They may still be learning the difference between right and wrong. They may be upset, discouraged, or feeling rejected. They may be feeling powerless in a particular situation. Or they simply may be acting their age; misbehavior is often associated with particular developmental stages of life.

But even though children may follow similar overall patterns of development from one stage to another, they do not all reach and leave each stage at the same time. Each child has his or her own internal developmental timetable, so each progresses uniquely. This becomes a source of unpredictability for parents and teachers and gives rise to a feeling that we can never figure them out.

Discipline is a long-term process that leads children to become responsible.

We do know that differentiated instruction is successful when teachers plan for different learning rates and styles and when they structure tasks to meet individual needs. We believe that discipline should be equally individualized to meet the needs of students; we will discuss that more fully in a later chapter.

The role of punishment

Nelsen, Lott, and Glenn, in their book Positive Discipline in the Classroom, ask, “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that to make people do better we first have to make them feel worse?”4 In general, punishment serves to restrain a child temporarily but does little to teach self-discipline directly. Punishment may make children obey the rules when the enforcer is present or nearby, and it may teach them to comply in the short run. But does it teach the skills needed to understand the meaning behind the rules?

The negative effects of punishment are well documented.5 These include feelings of anger by the one being punished which change the focus from the harm done to resenting the giver of the painful punishment. The punished student then...