Restorative practice

I am taking short courses on Futurelearn.com which are very informative, inspirational, worthwile!

This is an extract from the course Behaviour management

The most important strategy if something happens that needs to be dealt with.

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Kevin:  Now I’m interested in the term, ‘Restorative,’ itself. Is that all about restoring something? What it
is actually trying to restore?

Paul Dix: I think it’s about restoring the trust between the adult and the young person. It’s about redrawing and
restoring the boundaries that are applied to every child. It’s about restoring sort of the crime sheet and cleaning it off so
that we start the next lesson the next day with a clean sheet.

Alongside the idea of punishing children into behaving better we’ve got this whole obsession with detentions where even experienced teachers are standing up and saying, “Well we’re gonna solve the world by putting children in detention.” Again, there’s no evidence for that either.

If detention worked to change behaviour I would not have a job, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, the police would be sitting and eating donuts and nobody would be talking about behaviour because it would be simple. Somebody does something wrong, you give them a detention, slap them in isolation and everything’s all right again.

Restorative practices

For maximum effectiveness, the following six questions should be used in all restorative meetings. They can be made highly visible, for example on teacher lanyards, in student planners and on posters around the school:

1. What has happened?

2. What were you thinking at the time? (teacher and student)

3. Who has been affected by the actions?

4. How have they been affected?

5. What needs to be done now to make things right?

6. How can we do things differently in the future?

* Using the framework of those six questions is at the heart of great restorative practice.

* So at the end of the meeting it’s expected that the child will apologise and I always say to teachers, “Don’t expect an apology.”

* Don’t predicate the meeting with the child on an apology because then the whole thing is false and the child just learns to give stock answers, apologise and nothing actually is furthered

* So for me, the apology may come at the end of the meeting. That’s lovely. Sometimes it might be the teacher, the adult who needs to apologise because these questions aren’t just for the children. Importantly, they’re for both sides.

* the school is going to modify behaviour, not simply just manage it.

* Get together all the people involved in the incident, take them all through the restorative questions (there would be lots of other teachers doing exactly the same thing). And in that way you suddenly feel like you’re supported, you don’t have to do it behind a closed door, you can call over an experienced teacher to sit alongside you if you need to.

* Sometimes they just want to have their voice heard, even though they’re not necessarily saying the right things or necessarily have the right opinion, the one that you’d agree with. That ability to have themselves heard is critical to the outcomes, even if the outcome is negative for the child at least they know they’ve been heard, they know the teacher is reasonable and they walk away from those meetings with a different opinion of the teacher and very often an improved opinion of the teacher.