Friday, February 23, 2018

Toward more effective interventions - Restorative Discipline

This series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.

1. Proactive PBIS tools to prevent student misbehavior
2. Reactive interventions and processes for misbehaviors to minimize loss of instruction time and keep students in school
3. Data and tools for continuous improvement

Restorative discipline in Behavior Manager

Restorative discipline is a consequence for misbehavior that emphasizes belonging in the school community instead of punishment and exclusion. The main idea is to get the offender and victims together and make things right. Ideally, after restorative discipline, the victims feel that their needs have been addressed and the offender rejoins the community. Restorative discipline is an effective substitute for suspension or expulsion, takes the victims into account and does not incur the academic damage that comes with suspensions.

There are several techniques for restorative discipline. Different situations require different approaches. Outlines of several restorative discipline techniques included in Behavior Manager are shown below.

Conference with students and parents

Conference with students, parents, teachers and administrators regarding misbehavior such as use of banned substances.

Attendees

·         Offenders

·         Parents

·         Teachers

·         Administrators

·         Others

To Offenders: what did you think or feel when you found out that parents, administrators and friends learned of the misbehavior?

To All: How have things been for you between then and now?

To Offenders: Who do you think has been affected by your actions and how?

To Parents, Teachers and Administrators: What were you thinking or feeling at the time you found out about the misbehavior?

To All: How have things been for you between then and now?

To Offenders: Are there additional things that need to happened to restore you to the community and rebuild the community's trust?

To Parents, Teachers and Administrators: Are there additional things you would like to add?

The Circle

The purpose of the circle is to discover what happened, the impact on victim(s) and offender and what would make it right.

Attendees

·         Offender(s)

·         Victim(s)

·         Others

The incident

·         What happened?

·         Who has been hurt?

·         What are their needs?

·         What are the causes?

·         Who had a "stake" in this?

What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to put things right?

Community service

As an alternative to punishment, a student can be assigned community service with the parent's permission. Community service may include hours worked at school or with a non-profit charity approved by the administration.

Community service should include:

·         Number of hours to be served,

·         A complete-by date and

·         Requirement for proof of service time.

Community service is most effective as a positive intervention which is viewed as making a positive contribution to the community rather than a "forced labor" or public humiliation punishment. The positive contribution can be seen as making things right following a negative behavior incident.

Offender/Victim conference for serious harms

Participants

·         Offenders

·         Victims

·         Parents

·         School staff (teachers, administrators, coaches, etc.)

What happened?

How did participants feel about it?

What needs to be done to make things right?

How might the situation be prevented in the future?

One-on-one restorative process

For incidents such as bullying

Initial private meeting with the person harmed.

·         Create a safety plan

·         What does he/she need to put things right?

·         Create an agreement if necessary

Private meeting with the wrongdoer

·         Get his/her perspective

·         What did you do?

·         What did you want to happen when you did that?

·         How do you think [the person harmed] feels about what happened?

·         Remember a time when someone hurt you. What happened? How did you feel?

·         Do you want to be someone who fixes mistakes? How can you make things better?

·         How will you do that? When will you do it?

·         Encourage self-reflection, responsibility-taking and better actions in the future

·         Create a plan to put things right

·         Use an agreement if necessary

Follow-up with both parties to assure agreements have been met

Are there environmental conditions that may have contributed to the incident?

Victim/offender mediation

The purpose of mediation is to find how to make it right for both victim and offender. The mediator's role is not to arbitrate and decide the proper action. Rather, the mediator in Restorative Discipline only facilitates the discussion leading to an agreement on how to make it right.

A speaker's token is recommended to help all be heard.

Attendees

·         Offender(s)

·         Victim(s)

·         Victim and offender participation should be voluntary

·         Mediator

The incident

·         What happened?

·         Who has been hurt?

·         What are their needs?

Making it right

·         How can the situation be made right?

·         Have the actions been taken to make it right?

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Keywords: Responsible-Motivated-Engaged, Behavior Manager