Restorative Justice
Restorative justice is a powerful approach to discipline that focuses on repairing harm through inclusive processes that engage all stakeholders. Implemented well, RJ shifts the focus of discipline from punishment to learning and from the individual to the community.
Informative Articles
8 Tips for Schools Interested in Restorative Justice | Edutopia
Restorative justice promotes a positive, orderly school environment. Students and all members of the school community can learn and practice self-discipline, empathy, and accountability.
School-Wide Restorative Practices: Step by Step
This guide is written for educators, families, and community members who understand that traditional, punitive discipline policies and practices are ineffective, do not support students, and have a disproportionate impact on students of color. This guide hopes to build the capacity of educators and community members to implement a positive approach to discipline in the form of restorative practices.
Implementing Restorative Practices In The Classroom
What is restorative justice? And what does it look like when it's put in the classroom? This article addresses these two questions. Restorative practices and language in the classroom allow students to understand their emotions and how their expressions affect those around them, thus decreasing the likelihood that a behavioral problem will occur again. This approach is also being used to help reduce suspension rates by moving away from a punitive discipline system.
Teaching Restorative Practices with Classroom Circles
This is an example of a curriculum that educators can use to guide them through restorative classroom practices. It features many variations of the classic circle that is used in restorative justice practices, offering teachers many options that they can choose from to best fit their students' needs.
Strategies for Restorative Student Discipline
Listen to this podcast outlining strategies that have been used in U.S. schools. Academic rigor, codes of conduct, and biases in expectations are discussed, among several other issues that schools face, while also addressing how restorative justice combats these issues.
Another overview of what restorative justice in the classroom looks like. This article emphasizes, however, the importance of the fact that restorative practices foster the development of students' social and emotional skills, which can benefit them in all aspects of life.
Nurtured Heart Approach
The Nurtured Heart Approach is a proven methodology for creating healthy relationships and igniting greatness within all children, including those with ADHD, Autism and other behavioral diagnoses. The approach has been used successfully in schools, foster-care systems, and communities worldwide to help all children flourish.
Collaborative Problem Solving
For more than a decade, the CPS model has demonstrated effectiveness with children and adolescents with a wide range of social, emotional, and behavioral challenges across a variety of different settings.
As applied to challenging kids, the model sets forth two major tenets: first, that these challenges are best understood as the byproduct of lagging thinking skills (rather than, for example, as attention-seeking, manipulative, limit-testing, or a sign of poor motivation); and second, that these challenges are best addressed by teaching children the skills they lack (rather than through reward and punishment programs and intensive imposition of adult will).
