Restorative Practice Resources Tagged With: discipline

'Schools need to be transformed into communities where everyone belongs, where differences are accepted and membership is unconditional. Schools can and should be places that all students can love. Making this change will require educators to think differently about student behavior and reflect on how they respond to it.

Real discipline should be more than deciding what consequences to use with students; it should always be about learning. So when students break the rules or have trouble, educators need to ask, "How can we help them learn what they need to learn, and how can we meet their needs?" The answers to those questions should shape both our discipline practices and the type of school that we provide for our children.'

Jim Dillon backs accepting school environments for those with behavioral problems.

 

Dec. 12, 2019 — Researchers in the UTSA College of Public Policy, assistant professor of social work Jelena Todic and criminal justice lecturer and restorative justice coordinator Robert Rico are joining forces with Up Partnership and three local school districts in a collaborative applied researc...

 

'Making Restorative Practice Explicit in Classrooms A definition of Restorative Practice The social science of promoting and sustaining strong and healthy relationships across the school by implementing proactive and responsive programs rather than reactive strategies. This leads to increased social capital, improved individual self-discipline, selfregulation, emotional well being leading to improved academic outcomes and improved whole school climate.'

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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.'

Restorative justice is far from a panacea, but it's a start. Suspensions are used and it's not anti-discipline, a new RAND study shows.

'Punishment ignores reasons for the behaviour For centuries society has used the blunt stick of punishment as proxy for discipline. But in so doing we misunderstand the meaning of discipline, and we therefore experience mixed results (at best). Punishment means that we make someone pay a price for what they've done. We exact retribution. We believe that this will help them learn a lesson. Punishment is ultimately about hurting. Punishment has some fatal flaws.'

It is abysmal behaviour and the boys from St Kevin's may need to pay some kind of price, but if we think punishment alone can resolve this issue, we are mistaken.

'Restorative Practices is an approach to discipline and relationship management that can transform the climate of a school and strengthen relationships between students, and between teachers and students, laying the foundation for improved academic and personal outcomes in education. This RPforSchools site was established by a secondary school teacher, restorative practitioner and trainer from Brisbane, Australia. On the site you will find links to important websites, articles, books and videos on Restorative Practices in the School setting, as well some of my own papers, articles and Conference presentations.'

Contact Us at RP for Schools

'Keeping Them Connected: Restorative Justice in Schools in Australia and New Zealand – what progress? The traditional response of schools to school discipline is based on the retributive approach which has long characterised the criminal justice system. Research now indicates that this approach generally fails to satisfy the victim, the offender and the community. In the context of criminal offending, attention is increasingly being paid to the application of restorative practices. In New Zealand the restorative justice model has been operating since 1989 for youth offending and is now being implemented in the context of adult offending also. The Australian states and territories are following to varying degrees. Restorative practices move the focus from punishing the offender to requiring them to take responsibility for their actions. Because of this focus they are not seen as a ‘soft option’, and there are many indications of their success. Many schools are now applying this model to school discipline. A variety of different practices are being employed to keep young people in school and connected with the education process, while still not compromising school safety. This article explores the incorporation of restorative practices as alternative and proactive responses to behavioural problems within some Australian and New Zealand schools. The focus here is on particular restorative practices with the acknowledgement that there is a much wider picture which involves changes in school cultures to embrace, in a practical manner, principles of citizenship and democracy. This concept is the subject of significant research which is discussed by the author in a previous article.