Tips For Successful Restorative Practices Implementation
Contributed by Christine Kleiman and Carol Bahrke, RP Trainers and Coaches
We have had the privilege for the last two years, to serve Wisconsin Schools as coaches, trainers, and developers of Restorative Practices Connections. Through our work with thousands of educators and over 80 schools and districts plus our research on best practices, implementation science, and assisted implementation of Restorative Practices we have come to some conclusions about what works best when implementing Restorative Practices. This article summarizes lessons learned to continue the growth in our learning communities of how to create a strong and resilient learning community through the implementation of Restorative Practices.
What are Restorative Practices?
Restorative practices are 5 practices on a continuum of informal and formal tools, practices, and processes that build, maintain, and repair relationships and promise school transformation.
However, because of the widespread popularity of their restorative justice component, many educators mistakenly assume that restorative practices are mainly focused on repairing harm to relationships as an alternative to traditional disciplinary approaches that focus on punitive responses to rule infractions. On the contrary, restorative practices are characterized by proactive relationships, connection, and community transformation. As the International Institute for Restorative Practices says, these practices focus on “how to build social capital and achieve social discipline through participatory learning and decision making.” A paradigm shift of mindsets, values, social capital, and structural supports that bind and hold together Restorative Practices will happen when implemented correctly.
We use the 4 stages of Implementation Science as our framework for our tips
1. Exploration of Implementation:
- Develop a leadership team at the district level who can work with school leaders, to explore implementation, create buy-in, and secure funding to implement restorative practices. This could be done with a volunteer pilot school(s) or by talking to other districts or schools that have implemented.
- Create goals around Restorative Practices to be used in the district strategic plan.
2. Initial Implementation:
- Each school has an RP Building Experts Team who were trained before their peers. This team could be an already existing team that works on Equity, Tiered Systems of Support, SEL. Their purpose is to coach, extend and develop ongoing PD and give demonstrations on the practices.
- All staff need to be trained and to find a place for these practices in their work. Building Experts need to consider the needs of all staff and their role in the Restorative Practices. For example, support staff need to know the basic practices of Affective Statements and Affective Questions and how they can utilize them in their daily work, while classroom teachers may need more emphasis on circle use and creation.
- A District Leadership Team needs to develop a three-year implementation plan that is communicated to all buildings outlining training, support, coaching, goals and expectations around Restorative Practices.
3. Implementation:
- Building RP Expert Teams need to create their building implementation plans and share them with their staff.
- Staff meetings have ongoing professional development and modeling of restorative practices (sit in a circle, ask open-ended questions, and model practices that teachers can use the next day).
- Practices are used and modeled by Building Experts in their interactions with staff, students, and parents.
- PLC time has an agenda item on Restorative Practices. Teams decide what RP work happens together. For example: create a team goal and share progress, create content circles together, and share or study RP data collection outcomes.
- Building Expert Team looks at school systems with a restorative lens to see where and how the practices fit with what they are already doing and what needs to be tweaked. For example, student discipline procedures, morning meeting time, PLC time, teaching content, reaching SEL goals, tiered systems of response, student consultation teams, IEPs, and discipline data collection.
4. Full Implementation:
- District and Building Level Expert Teams need to think about what further training needs to happen such as Training of Trainers and Formal Conferencing.
- Building Level Expert Teams need to decide what RP data to collect and where to house that data to show changes in behavior due to practices and accountability that practices are actually being used.
- District and Building Level Expert Teams determine how to onboard new staff.
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