Looking at School Discipline from a Community Lens: More on Restorative Practices

The International Institute for Restorative Practices defines Restorative Practices as "an emerging social science that studies how to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as social connections within communities." This focus on communities shifts how we look at behavior and discipline at school, zooming out to see the impact of actions and words on the community as a whole. 

Looking specifically at discipline, Restorative Practices remains focused on the community. The goals of Restorative Discipline, articulated by Lorrainne Stuzman Amstuz and Judy Mullet, are marked shift from focusing on the individual alone. They have been adapted here:

1. To understand the harm and develop empathy for both those who have been harmed and those who have engaged in harmful behavior. This is a shift from a punitive stance where the focus is on the student and his/her behavior. Restorative discipline also takes into account the harm to people and relationships and seeks to understand why the student engages in hurtful behavior.
2. To listen and respond to the needs of both those who have been harmed and those who have engaged in harmful behavior. Restorative discipline recognizes that behavior is a means of communication and seeks to identify the need being expressed. It also looks at the needs of those harmed and the impact on the community.
3. To encourage responsibility and accountability through personal reflection within a collaborative planning process. Those harmed and those engaging in harmful behavior are involved in the resolution process.
4. To reintegrate those who have harmed others (and sometimes those who have been harmed) into the community as valuable, contributing members. Traditional methods included a consequence such as suspension, without taking into account what would happen to the community when the student returned to school.
5. To create caring climates to support healthy communities. Especially in an incident where someone has engaged in behavior that hurts another, the community remains the focus. Caring climates and healthy communities separate the deed from the doer, focusing instead on building and maintaining the strong relationships at the heart of those communities.
6. To change the system when it contributes to the harm. This is perhaps the biggest shift from traditional discipline. Restorative practices are also reflective, encouraging schools to examine how policies and practices may worsen the negative impact. In the United States, students of color are suspended and expelled at a much higher rates than white students. States that have acknowledged this disproportionality are using restorative practices and alternatives to suspension as a way to make changes in the system. 

With this community focus, misbehavior is not the violation of school rules, it is the harming of people and relationships.  Instead of cultivating shame and guilt, restorative discipline breeds accountability and responsibility. Traditionally, justice focused on the one engaging in misbehavior and ignored the people and relationships harmed. Restorative discipline includes those who harm, those who are harmed and the entire community in the justice process.

The Social Capital Window of Restorative Practices

The goal of Restorative Practices is to build and strengthen strong school communities. Eighty percent of the efforts is for building the relationships that provide the backbone of strong school communities; 20% of the efforts aims to restore and heal those relationships that are harmed.

At the basis of Restorative Practices is the Social Capital Window, a broad categorization of school or classroom environments. The University of Michigan's Professor Wayne Baker defines social capital as the resources available within networks. including information, ideas, cooperation, support, and power. The Social Capital Window, also called the Social Discipline Window, categorizes social norms and behavioral expectations into four types of environment, based on degrees of support and control and reflecting the impact of different types of leadership. The Social Capital Window is an adaptation of Diane Baumrind's Parenting Styles from the 1960s. 

The degree of Support is indicated by the horizontal x-axis. Support connotes encouragement, growth, nurturing, warmth, and acceptance and goes from low to high.

The degree of Control is found on the vertical y-axis. Control indicates a range of limit-setting, discipline, expectations, boundaries, intentionality, and structure from low to high.

In the illustration above, the green panes are categories at the extremes with a high degree of control or support and a low degree of the other. At the top left is the Authoritarian environment with high control and low support. In this school or classroom, academic and/or behavioral expectations are high, but emotional support is low. Strict rule adherence is expected, and emotional needs are not considered. This environment is "doing to" students and staff; at its worst, it is a breeding ground for unhealthy behaviors such as stigmatizing, blaming, and being punitive. The Permissive environment is "doing for" students, with a high degree of support and a low degree of control. While warm and responsive, this environment is lenient and indulgent. It can affect impulse control, prevent adequate social awareness, and promote egocentricity. in students and staff.

The orange pane represents an environment with low support and low control. It is labeled as Neglectful, "doing nothing" for students and staff. With uninvolved and indifferent leaders, staff and students are in survival mode with no warmth and no consistent rules and expectations. The impact of the neglectful environment are behavioral issues with inconsistent consequences and little to no accountability.

Restorative Practices lives in the Restorative pane, "doing with" staff and students. In this environment, high degrees of both control and support from leaders create cultures defined by collaboration, cooperation, shared responsibility and accountability. High expectations are set for staff and students within an accepting and responsive environment. Boundaries are set and enforced through shared decision making.

As schools see the power of Restorative Practices as a way to build the school communities where everyone thrives, it is important to understand the foundation of these practices. The Social Capital Window is an important first step to implementing RP with fidelity. It is especially important for all trusted adults in a child's life to understand, from parents and law enforcement officers to educators and social workers.

Integrating Restorative Practices and Bullying Prevention

We have reached an understanding that effective schools have one common and critical characteristic: a safe and supportive school community. We also know that a safe and supportive school community is the heart of restorative practices and that bullying cannot flourish in these environments. Despite this common understanding, we remain unsure how to integrate restorative practices and bullying prevention within a comprehensive school-wide initiative.

Restorative practitioners, bullying prevention experts, mental health practioners, and policymakers came together to provide this direction. The result of their two-year effort is the white paper entitled Integrating Bullying Prevention and Restorative Practices in Schools: Considerations for Practitioners and Policymakers. With the goal of connecting research- and evidence-based bullying prevention programs with restorative practices, the workgroup first described the problem of bullying, shared best practices in bullying prevention, and laid the foundation for restorative practices. The remainder of this white paper provides opportunities and cautions in integrating bullying prevention and restorative practices.

Some Examples of Appropriate Integration

• School staff work with trained professionals to identify specific research- and evidence-based bullying prevention and restorative practices initiatives.
• The implementation process includes wide-spread training of school personnel and a systematic plan, among other considerations, to ensure fidelity of the process.
• The bullying prevention and restorative practices integrated efforts are preventative efforts, leading to changes in the overall school culture.
• Parents are engaged in solutions to bullying incidents.
• Data is collected and analyzed throughout the process to monitor and adjust implementation for greatest impact.

Some Examples of Inappropriate Integration

• Schools do not choose high quality and proven bullying prevention programs.
• The implementation process does not provide adequate training for staff and does not tend to the fidelity of the implementation process.
• Restorative practices are used in bullying situations, rather than in day-to-day activities.
• Inadequate time and resources for staff prevent the success of the integration.
• Adults do not play a prominent facilitator role in mediating bullying situations and instead use coercion and other unhealthy strategies to engage students.
• No systematic evaluation of the integration prevents reflection and improvement.

Integrating restorative practices and bullying prevention should be part of a systemic and comprehensive plan to build and strengthen the school community. This white paper provides clear guidance on how to proceed. However, the impact of this integration remains unknown, and research in this area is still needed.

Restorative Practices as a Promising Approach to Bullying Prevention

In October 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released Preventing Bullying through Science, Policy, and Practice, the results of a study commissioned by the NAS to determine what we know and what more we need to know about bullying behavior and its impact. Restorative practices is mentioned in the chapter focusing on the research on preventative interventions. In short, despite the growing interest in implementing restorative practices as a way to prevent bullying, little research supports its effectiveness. The panel calls for research in this area in order to support this claim.

That call is being answered. RAND, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, is currently engaged in the first randomized control study of the effectiveness of restorative practices on improving school culture and in addressing behavioral issues. The study will also examine changes in suspension rates, staff and student attendance, student achievement, and more. The study goes beyond the existing and smaller scale studies on restorative practices and looks more broadly at effectiveness at the system level, the peer group level and the individual student level.

The results of this study hold great promise in informing the bullying prevention community for several reasons:

1. The International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) is providing the training for the control schools at first, and then once comparison data has been collected, will also train the comparison schools. IIRP has trained over 75,000 people from over 80 countries in their research-based approach to restorative practices. The IIRP Graduate School is the first "world's first graduate school wholly devoted to restorative practices." Highly trained facilitators are inside the schools, training staff and students.
2. This study is also evaluating the fidelity of implementation of restorative practices at each of the control schools. The implementation of research- and evidence-based bullying prevention programs is very difficult to track, probably contributing to the varying degrees of effectiveness shown in fully implemented bullying prevention programs. 
3. By tracking high-risk behaviors, including bullying, this study aims to show that problem behaviors will be reduced as restorative practices becomes a part of the school. Prior research has suggested effective bullying prevention efforts are comprehensive and school-wide initiatives. 
4. IIRP has previously shown how restorative practices and bullying prevention programs such as Olweus Bullying Prevention and Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) work together.
5. Most importantly, this study is focused on middle schools, where bullying behavior peaks. 

Some preliminary results of this study will be presented later in October at the 2018 IIRP World Conference, held this year in Detroit, Michigan. 

"The fundamental premise of restorative practices is that people are happier, more cooperative, more productive and more likely to make positive changes when those in authority do things with them, rather than to them or for them.” 

~Ted Wachtel, International Institute for Restorative Practices