The "Why" of Restorative Practices in Spokane Public Schools Part3

Restorative practices definitely provides students with a different avenue in order to go about solving any of their issues and problems. When you do restorative practices right you increase accountability, you increase transparency and you increase the feeling of teamwork and support that you wouldn't typically get with conventional approaches to discipline. It doesn't mean we're not gonna hold kids accountable or say, "Listen I'm glad we've had this talk and now here's where we're going here", but they know that we've heard them and that we care about them regardless of what happened, and that actually is a way more powerful way to discipline, to restore to change behavior. Students who disrupt our community within the school we allow them some time to kind of deescalate and when they feel ready they'll process with a staff member, and what that looks like is they first acknowledge from the students perspective like what the incident was, what occurred https://casinoslots.sg/playamo.
From there they talk about what and how they were feeling at the time and what they needed, and then finally when they meet with the staff they'll go through as far as having agreements to what's a better alternative method to get your needs met that didn't have to involve the disruption of the community. We also do ongoing mediations so if there's a conflict between students we'll have a staff member mediate. Students will tell the perspective of the incident or the ongoing issue with the other student and the other student will listen. Then they'll kind of reverse roles. From there we'll ask the students what they need from each other and then we'll again establish some agreements that we can kind of move forward as a community. When agreements are broken among students it's frustrating, especially when you give 110% every day to students and you think you have a good plan moving forward and then only to come back the next day and that relationship has been damaged again.
Every teacher hopes that you only have to teach the lesson once and it sticks but you know it is definitely something that you're constantly building on. How long did it take you to learn to drive a car right? You didn't learn it in one session. Yes you have a great instruction and you do it really well and the next day you forget much of it, especially when you're dealing with the level of stress that struggling kids have, you're trying to identify with the student their actions and the consequences of their actions and then how we can go about kind of restoring some of the the community back in place due to a an incident that occurred and so you're just keep coming back to it, coming back to it.
Ruptures are essential for a healthy relationship, and the way they're essential is that the caregiver is big enough to realize something important has happened and their primary goal is to repair the relationship. And when the child learns that loop, there's a rupture then a repair, there's a rupture then a repair, if that happens again and again again that's when you get a secure child. And what I've learned over time you'll go through maybe four or five different agreements on four or five different occasions and eventually something clicks. So it's about that trust, that relationship and using that to fully understand the whole student. Our new policy 3240 incorporates the use of restorative philosophy but that doesn't mean that restorative practices are the only way that we respond to student behavior.