Restorative Schools: How to Make the Implicit Explicit

Source: (2006) Papers presented at the Fourth Conference of the European Forum for Restorative Justice, “Restorative justice: An agenda for Europe”, Barcelona, Spain, 15-17 June 2006.

This presentation will look at the use of restorative practices in the school community to build relationships, deal with conflict and repair harm. This approach engages the whole school community including all staff, students, parents and others associated with the school. Much of what happens in schools when it is done well could be considered to be restorative and most of us will be able to identify the restorative teachers within a school. However, much of what makes this approach restorative is implicit and therefore sometimes difficult to replicate and model. This presentation will look at how those implicit restorative practices can be made explicit and how this explicit framework can help to build a restorative school community. An explicit framework allows staff, students, parents and all those involved with the school to identify what is restorative, challenge behaviour when it is not restorative and engage in restorative practice on purpose more of the time. (author’s abstract)