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'Restorative practices include teachers and staff working more collaboratively with students and encouraging them to express their feelings in different ways and to understand and respect others. A focus is on healing the hurt associated with negative behaviors. Opponents characterize restorative approaches as anti-discipline and claim these approaches don’t hold students sufficiently accountable for their actions. That is not true: Restorative approaches, by definition, provide high levels of accountability. They are emerging as an alternative to zero-tolerance approaches that see students who’ve committed wrongful actions be suspended without hearing about the impacts of their actions — directly from their victims — and without explicitly focusing on repairing the harm done.'