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Restorative practices is an emerging social science that studies how to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as social connections within communities. 

“Restorative practice is not a discipline program, but rather a framework for how to approach all relationships in a school building: leadership to staff, staff to staff, staff to students and student to student”... “The way we handle discipline flows naturally out of the way we approach relationships in general.  Responsive disciplinary practices are simply the natural result of that relational framework.”  

Purpose of Building Community

A classroom community helps students feel valued and connected with the teacher and other students in class.  Taking the time to create this type of environment can help students feel included, can help them learn important social skills, and can teach them about responsibility. 

Purpose of Building Relationships

Strong relationships increase student motivation and reduce behavior issues, and they improve student achievement and classroom climate.  Most teachers would love to spend more time building relationships with their students, but obstacles like time, the curriculum, and planning all get in the way.   

To build community and relationships, facilitators maybe incorporate proactive circles into the classroom routine. During circles, participants sit in a circle, with no physical barriers. They are often a sequential go-around in which each participant shares a thought, feeling, or experience related to the topic under discussion, sometimes passing a “talking piece” to indicate whose turn it is to speak. Circles provide opportunities for students to build trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors (Costello, Wachtel, & Wachtel, 2010). For the circles, facilitators may use topics drawn from problems or behaviors they’re seeing in the classrooms, or they may focus on issues the leadership team wants addressed schoolwide, such as social media bullying, name calling, fighting, harassment, or thoughtlessness. 

Restorative questions are a tool used to process an incident of wrongdoing or conflict. When a situation has occurred, the person(s) who has created the conflict takes some time and answers questions such as the following: What happened? What were you thinking about at the time of the incident? What are your thoughts now? Who was impacted by your actions, and how? How will you repair the harm? The questions focus on the incident, and allow the person to think about how his/her actions affected others. It encourages empathy, accountability, expression of feelings and thoughts, and problem solving. Restorative questions are also answered by those who were impacted by the incident, to help them process their feelings and determine what they need to make things right.