Restorative Justice in Education: Building Relationships and Repairing Harm
In traditional school settings, discipline often follows a punitive model: break a rule and face consequences like detention or suspension. While this approach aims to deter misconduct, it frequently interrupts students’ education and may inadvertently lead to repeated behavioral issues without addressing the underlying causes. These conventional methods often fail to equip students with necessary conflict-resolution skills. As a result, a growing number of educational institutions are shifting toward a more holistic approach known as restorative justice.
Restorative justice (RJ) is a way of thinking about behavior correction in a way that emphasizes healing the harm done-whether to a person, group, or object-rather than punishment for the sake of punishment itself. Restorative justice in schools represents a transformative approach to discipline that focuses on repairing harm and rebuilding relationships rather than punishing students for misbehavior. By shifting from a punitive model to one that seeks to understand and resolve the root causes of behavior, schools implementing restorative justice report significant reductions in suspensions, improved student behavior, and better overall school climate.
Core Principles of Restorative Justice
Restorative justice seeks the root cause behind individual and group behaviors instead of treating the behavior as an isolated symptom or judging students as good or bad based on isolated incidents. It follows three main principles: holding the wrongdoer accountable, involving the victim/survivor, and engaging the community.
The goal of restorative justice is to “build community and repair relationships while supporting reflection, communication, and problem-solving skills for staff and students,” which can lead to more effective learning and teaching. “At its core, restorative justice is about how the humans in the building relate to each other-what to do when there is a breach or a break, and how to repair,” says Beth Napleton, founder of a middle and high school on the far South Side of Chicago. “In many cases, this can be a massive paradigm shift that changes the foundation of the school. … There’s a lot of work that goes into this-this is a true change management initiative, and it takes time.
Key Practices in Restorative Justice
Restorative justice is centered on a set of practices that aim to mend the harm caused by an incident and rebuild relationships among those involved.
Read also: Transforming Schools with Restorative Practices
Facilitated dialogues: These are structured conversations, often referred to as “circles,” where all affected parties gather to discuss the incident.
Mediation sessions: Mediation is used to address conflicts before they escalate.
Restorative conferences: These are formal meetings that include not just the victim and the offender but also family members, school staff, or community representatives, depending on the context.
Support and reintegration: Following an incident, there’s a focus on supporting both the victim and the offender.
The effectiveness of these practices depends on the commitment of all participants to the principles of honesty, respect, and mutual concern.
Read also: Curriculum Overview
Implementing Restorative Justice in Schools: A Tiered Approach
Restorative justice can impact school culture in powerful ways, such as reduction in exclusionary discipline. Schools often see dramatic drops in suspensions and expulsions, especially when restorative justice is implemented schoolwide. It can improve school climate by encouraging empathy, accountability, and stronger relationships among students and staff.
A tiered approach can be used to implement restorative justice in schools:
Tier I: The first tier is all about community building as a preventive measure. Teachers or peer facilitators can lead students in circles of sharing, where kids open up about their fears and goals. Students play an integral part in creating the climate of Tier I. The teacher and students start the year by creating a classroom-respect agreement. Everyone agrees to be held accountable.
Tier II: Tier II comes into play when students break rules and someone has caused harm to someone else. In traditional justice, this is when punishments are meted out. Restorative justice instead turns to mediation. The offending student is given the chance to come forward and make things right. The mediator asks nonjudgmental, restorative questions like What happened? How did it happen? and/or What can we do to make it right?
Tier III: Tier III aims to help kids who’ve been out of school due to suspension, expulsion, incarceration, or truancy. Returning to school life can be a real challenge in those cases. Many students in traditional environments quickly re-offend or drop out again. Restorative justice practices seek to reduce this recidivism by providing a supportive environment during re-entry from the start.
Examples of Restorative Practices
Restorative practices in schools are strategies that use the underlying principles of restorative justice instead of traditional punishment measures. Popular examples of restorative processes include affective statements, community-building circles, small impromptu conferencing, and setting classroom agreements or norms.
Restorative circles: Use restorative circles to build community and address conflicts, and implement conferences for more serious incidents. These involve structured meetings where the affected parties discuss the harm caused and work together to find ways to repair the damage and restore relationships.
Peer mediation programs: Establish peer mediation programs where trained students help mediate conflicts between their peers.
Policy integration: Integrate restorative practices into the school’s discipline policies. This means shifting from a punitive approach to one that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships.
Ongoing support and evaluation: Provide ongoing support for staff through regular training sessions, coaching, and access to resources.
Community involvement: Engage the broader school community, including parents and local organizations, in restorative justice initiatives.
Restorative Practices vs. Restorative Justice vs. Restorative Systems
It is important to acknowledge and embrace the differences between restorative practices, restorative justice, and restorative systems. By doing so, we can better understand their unique characteristics and work towards implementing them more comprehensively in educational settings. To fully realize their potential in education, it is crucial to take a holistic approach to implementing them and to understand their unique histories, shared principles, and distinct roles.
Restorative Practices: Restorative Practices is an emerging social science that aims to strengthen individual relationships and form stronger communal bonds to prevent conflict from happening. While the roots can be traced back to indigenous communities worldwide, the formal adoption and use of restorative practices in non-criminal contexts, particularly in schools, gained significant traction in the 1990s. This was after positive results were observed in restorative justice programs implemented in juvenile detention centers. While restorative practices do include aspects of restorative justice and systems in their scope, the primary focus here is on fostering positive relationships and connections within a community.
Restorative Justice: The modern era of Restorative Justice, greatly influenced by Dr. Howard Zehr, emerged in the 1970s, starting in Ontario, Canada, with the "Elmira Case." In the Elmira Case, two minors were encouraged to meet their victims directly, resulting in a positive outcome that sparked interest in alternative dispute resolution methods and has grown in popularity ever since. It aims to correct the weaknesses of our current legal system by focusing on the needs of the victims rather than just holding offenders accountable. It emphasizes repairing the harm caused by crime and involving individuals and community members.
Restorative Systems: A Restorative System is a community-created set of agreements that provides the structured application of restorative practice and justice principles within organizations and communities, including schools, aiming for a comprehensive approach to conflict and overall well-being. The Maori traditions strongly influenced these principles, leading to significant reforms to the juvenile justice system in New Zealand during the 1980s. Having a concrete restorative system in place can make implementing restorative practices and justice in the classroom easier because it provides teachers with guidance on when and how to use them in their everyday teaching environment.
Benefits of Restorative Justice
Research shows that restorative justice “can be successful in schools because it creates interactional patterns that produce positive social-emotional outcomes like group solidarity and individual emotional energy.
Improved behavior and reduced recidivism: Restorative justice practices focus on accountability and making amends, which helps students understand the impact of their actions. There is no evidence to suggest that punitive measures increase a child’s understanding of what is “right” and “wrong.” In fact, punitive measures do not decrease rates of future misbehavior, while the use of restorative justice practices after initial misbehavior frequently results in reduced rates of future misbehavior. This result is partially due to the fact that restorative justice harm reparation is often the natural, direct consequence of a misbehavior (e.g. scrubbing graffiti off the wall you spray-painted), while punitive measures are generally inflexible and unrelated, or counterintuitive, to the offense.
Enhanced relationships: By promoting dialogue and mutual understanding, restorative justice fosters stronger relationships between students and teachers.
Positive school climate: Implementing restorative practices helps create a more inclusive and respectful school culture.
Academic improvement: Schools that adopt restorative justice practices often see improvements in academic performance.
Conflict-resolution skills: Restorative practices teach students valuable conflict-resolution and communication skills.
Challenges and Considerations
For restorative justice to work, engagement from all involved parties is required. If the offender isn’t willing to take responsibility and make meaningful restitution, the program can’t help. More than this, restorative justice in schools requires a pledge of time and money from the district and its administration. There are multiple examples of schools that set aside funds to implement the program but leave the money unspent. Other districts encourage teachers to use restorative discipline but provide little or no training or support. On top of that, “leaders often significantly underestimate how much baggage every adult-teachers, staff, parents, etc.-brings to a conversation about consequences,” Napleton shares. “There are strong feelings about ‘how it should work’ and ‘back in my day,’ and when a school makes a shift towards a more repair-based approach, accusations of being ‘too soft’ are hurled.
One crucial step? “Monitor outcomes by race, gender, and disability status to ensure restorative justice is reducing and not reinforcing inequities,” says Davidon. Research has established that Black and Hispanic students face more punitive punishments. In Payne and Welch’s research, they found that schools with a greater proportion of white students tended to use restorative practices more: talking circles, community service, and restitution. Schools with larger minority populations did the opposite: They relied more heavily on detention, suspension, and expulsion.
Successful Implementation Strategies
Schools that dedicate themselves fully to the system, like Oakland USD and Chicago Public Schools, see real change and benefits.
Start Small: “To mitigate this, don’t be afraid to start small-with pilot programs or opt-in trainings for staff who are interested or lower-stakes elements of the discipline system,” says Napleton. “Identify what the hottest-button issues might be (like suspensions) and save those for year two or three of the work-don’t feel the need to take those on right away.
Comprehensive Training: Provide comprehensive training for teachers, administrators, and staff on restorative justice principles and practices. Go Beyond Buzzwords. The rapid adoption of educational trends like restorative practices and restorative justice often outpaces the necessary training for effective implementation, leading to many teachers rolling their eyes even at the mention of it. For these initiatives to succeed, school leaders must prioritize comprehensive professional development.
Policy Integration: Integrate restorative practices into the school’s discipline policies. This means shifting from a punitive approach to one that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships.
Ongoing Support and Evaluation: Provide ongoing support for staff through regular training sessions, coaching, and access to resources.
Community Involvement: Engage the broader school community, including parents and local organizations, in restorative justice initiatives.
Take it Slow: “Schools should be very intentional and not try to change the discipline system quickly,” says Davidon. “Beginning by embedding restorative conversations into everyday practices can help. Shift the culture through consistent practice, not big gestures of change. It’s so important to start by building trust among students and staff.
Stay Connected to the Vision: “Stay really connected to why you are doing this: Have a clear and vivid vision of what you want to be true and how that vision connects to the critically important work you do of preparing students to be good citizens and neighbors,” offers Napleton. “You should also be able to narrate this vision-and its connections to the outside world, the school-to-prison pipeline, etc.-and engage your stakeholders in it so they understand the bigger why.
Restorative Justice in Action: Case Studies
In California, Oakland Unified School District began using the program at a failing middle school in 2006. Within three years, the pilot school saw an 87% decrease in suspensions, with a corresponding decrease in violence. “Implementing restorative justice led to a major culture shift in our schools-most powerfully, all faculty and students really began to connect and relate to each other as humans, rather than through the hierarchy of age and experience,” says Napleton.
The Center for Court Innovation runs restorative justice programs in five underserved Brooklyn schools. They’re trying to address the subject through a racial justice lens. “Restorative justice is about accountability and repairing harm,” they note.
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