Audiocast: Centering Adaptive and Relational Elements of Restorative Practices as Tools for Implementation Success
Lauren Trout: Welcome to “Centering Adaptive and Relational Elements of Restorative Practices as Tools for Implementation Success,” a companion audiocast to “The Toolkit Before the Toolkit.” My name is Lauren Trout. This audiocast comes from WestEd and the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, and it supports an interactive restorative practices implementation guide that emphasizes the mindsets, values, and paradigm of restorative practices as foundational to implementation success. Joining me in this conversation today is Dr. Angela Ward from Transforming Education. Dr. Ward is a student-centered anti-racist educator with 25 years of experience supporting students in urban schools. Dr. Ward supports state and school leaders to build a robust set of systems and practices that nurtures student agency and self-efficacy. Hello, Dr. Ward.
Dr. Angela Ward: Hi, Lauren. How are you?
Lauren Trout: I’m good. So happy you’re here. Thank you for being with us today.
Dr. Angela Ward: Yes, excited to engage with you. So I’m going to introduce Lauren Trout. Lauren is a restorative justice practitioner who has worked with schools and school systems, justice systems, and communities on local and national levels for the last 10 years. Trout uses restorative theory to shift trauma-informed practice, social-emotional well-being, and relationship-centered learning from being siloed programs into being paradigms, collective values, and guiding principles that inform and are embedded in structures and organizational culture. Lauren specializes in using a restorative justice paradigm to transform systems of power, helping create climates that are inclusive, center equity, and [are] places of transformation. So, Lauren, let’s tell the people, what’s the purpose of this audiocast?
Lauren Trout: This audiocast is coming in as a supplement to the guide that was created, authored by me, by the SEL Center at WestEd. In my work in schools—and also really in justice systems, and in some community spaces, but largely schools—I became kind of fascinated with this question of, we know that this works, why isn’t this working? And why is it not working on such a spectrum? And so the guide is really a little bit of a labor of love for me, of thinking about how we apply restorative practices as these technical applications of things, when, really, behind this technical application or these technical elements are these really deep adaptive and relational elements, and we’ll talk about what that is later on in this audiocast. But the toolkit is for educators and administrators to understand restorative practices beyond a technical application. Instead, understanding them as adaptive and relational, meaning that there are practices that have values and mindsets and guiding principles behind them. They require social capital and trust and agency, and it’s really not so much about more to do, as much as a different way to be. They’re a way of being. And you’ve talked about that a lot, Dr. Ward, in our conversations. But I want to back up for a little bit. I’m curious to hear from you. How do you define restorative practices? And I know, in schools, and kind of societally, we’ve conflated restorative practices and restorative justice to be interchangeable. I’m curious, your thoughts on that.
Dr. Angela Ward: Yeah. So, for me, restorative practices aren’t something that needs to be defined. They are grounded in indigenous roots, they are practices that are thousands of years old, and they come from all over the world. People indigenous to the land on which they inhabit have practices that help them maintain harmony, help maintain community, and it was studied by Western culture, to potentially think about how to shift the ways in which justice was being meted out in Western cultures. And what was studied was how indigenous communities maintained harmony and found ways to be in community with each other even when conflict was occurring. And what Western researchers have taken from those indigenous communities from around the world is that harm, victim/offender, piece, and that’s what became popularized in Western culture. And so, for me, I honor the indigenous roots of restorative practices and don’t pretend to understand them deeply because I have not been in that type of community, really engaged in it, and really sitting within the confines of all that means to indigenous communities. What I have done is to understand what it could look like in a school system. And restorative justice is not separate from restorative practice. When we think about schools, we think about it in a tiered system. And so the practices happen at tiers one, two, and three of a successful intervention focus in a school system. And restorative justice exists within that successful multi-tiered system, often at tier three. And the practice that I’ve been adamant about, including it all along the way, tiers one, two, and three, we’re finding ways to connect to the community, connect to the loved ones of the children, to make sure that we understand who they are, what they value, what their beliefs are. And that’s part of those principles of restorative practices, really getting to understand the human-ness in each of us, so that we are implementing this in a way that humanizes how we work with each other at school systems. So restorative justice is not separate from restorative practices; yet it’s been popularized as the practice and seen as a way, in schools, of shifting—in schools, restorative justice is seen as an alternative to discipline. And it is not an alternative to discipline. It is a way of being, it is a way of engaging, and it is a way to humanize the lived experiences of the students, the staff, the families.
Lauren Trout: Yeah, I really appreciate you grounding us, right off the bat, in the indigenous history of this work. I think there’s such a misconception that restorative justice, and restorative practices, came out of the justice system in the ’70s and ’80s. But really honoring the roots and values and guiding principles of restorative practices.
Dr. Angela Ward: Yes. That’s been something that we’ve had to undo a lot in conversations with people in schools, because there have been books published that say that restorative justice began in the criminal justice system, which is so far from the truth.
Lauren Trout: When we’re talking about restorative justice, and we’re talking about restorative practices, what you’re saying is, this is not about just trying something new or applying this thing onto our existing practices, or even our existing belief systems of the world; it’s this full shift of our paradigm of what justice is, of what safety is, of how power is held, of what community is, and its purpose. This is about proactive relationship building, and not just on this kind of technical surface level, but really the way we are deeply in community with each other.
Dr. Angela Ward: What we’re finding is, those who come in with the packaged way of looking at restorative practices, they’re selling a product. And it’s pretty disingenuous to sell a product on the backs of people who’ve been developing it for thousands of years, and not giving them credit for that work, and not even attempting to understand the human-ness and the complexity of being in community and being in harmony. It’s easy to package something and sell it to a school district. It’s harder to develop the types of relationships with the school district and the people within the school district to have intentional dialogue and intentional conversation about how the school was set up to receive students every day. How the school was set up to receive adults every day. Are the teachers and the principals and the curriculum specialists who may come from another area of the school district—are they set up for success? Are the systems and structures in place for adults to feel safe, welcome, and included, so they can then, in turn, share that with the students, in the ways in which they work with students? A program that is packaged doesn’t allow you to even think in that way, because you’re looking at page one, you’re looking at the facilitators’ guide, you’re looking at the teacher notes, and there’s no human connection to that. And so, for me, what restorative practices requires is that human connection, and it’s more of a coaching relationship than it is “here’s this packaged curriculum and its packaged way of doing it.” Trying to honor, as much as possible, the original intent—again, knowing that I’m not steeped in indigenous culture, but I do know that my African American culture draws from so many indigenous cultures, and so I feel the connection to building community, finding structures of support, finding ways to keep people in the community, even when they’ve messed up or caused conflict. But knowing, too, that there’s this piece that people have been banned from communities. But that is never our intent in school, but we’re doing it anyway. Especially when we say we’re doing restorative, we’re still expelling children.
Lauren Trout: You’re perfectly setting me up to talk a little bit about these elements here that are talked about in the guide. And so we’ve identified these technical elements of restorative practices. These are the practices, the programs, the “interventions.” And these are the things that we would typically find if we went to a two-day training or a four-day training or opened an online toolkit. These are circles, maybe your affective statements, restorative questions, scripts . . . these things have their place; they’re very important. But, really, what we are finding is that implementing just at the surface, technical level is not getting us to deepen in restorative work and not getting to the outcomes that we’re wanting as schools. And so, connected to these technical elements are adaptive elements of restorative practices. These are mindsets, these are values, these are guiding principles, these are paradigms, that we were speaking about before. An example I like to give here is an experience of, one time, talking to a student, going into a school that was implementing restorative practices. They were even doing the “proactive circle-keeping work” of proactive relationship building and checking in with a student who was struggling with being in circle, and talking to him, and he just gave me an answer that I’ll never forget, which was him saying, “Yeah, the circles are fine. I don’t mind being in them. But I know my teacher doesn’t actually believe in this. You know, she gives us space in the circle, and the second the circle is over, she is yelling at us. She doesn’t care what we have to say. I know she doesn’t actually believe in this process. It’s one more thing she has to do, to say she’s doing the thing.” And that just kind of blew my mind wide open about—what it means is like, “Yep, I can apply a technical circle perfectly. But if I don’t have the actual mindsets that drive that circle, about how I’m holding power, about how I’m creating space for authentic connection, I’m missing something.” And, man, leave it to our students to really get us that truth. Another thing that comes to mind with adaptive elements of restorative practice is exactly what you were speaking to, of all of the times we do the responsive circles, the community conferences, the restorative justice elements of this work, as alternatives to punitive discipline. And we do them punitively. How many times schools are running circles in a punitive manner because they have not had that paradigm shift about what justice is, about what safety is. Those adaptive elements are missing. And the other element that’s just as important is the relational element: the deep relationships, the social capital. And so I like to highlight here that, with restorative practices, it feels like the end is also the means, like the outcome that we want is also the path, how we are in relationship to each other sets up how we implement, and it is also a tool for implementation success, and it is also the goal. And I think that that is so scanned over sometimes! It’s like, trying to apply restorative practices without a deep commitment and structures to support authentic deep relationship is a misstep, right? All three of these things, it’s like a stool, and when we have one of those legs missing, it’s like we don’t actually have a stool, we don’t have the thing.
Dr. Angela Ward: Yeah, what came up for me as I heard you talk about the student and being in circle, one thing, I bring my lessons working with children to my work with adults, and, as I developed community in my classroom, before I knew anything about the word “restorative,” I created opportunities for my students to just be, and to understand who they were. That’s a restorative practice: to welcome them into the classroom every day, to have systems and structures set up so that they feel safe, and knowing that when they come into the classroom, they understand what happens in the relationships in the classroom. And it’s because you and they have taken the time to build those structures and those ways of being together in the classroom, and work through conflict, and work through misunderstanding. And they’ve been okay, even through those things, because you’ve modeled it as an adult. Those are restorative practices. And I think of restorative practices on a continuum. So you have affective statements and questions. So, it’s the way you talk, how you talk, and the way you frame statements and questions to students and to adults. They see you also modeling those with other adults, having intentional conversations with students, one on one. You should create opportunities to have one-on-one conversations with students as you’re building relationships, because you have to build that trust with them. They don’t just give it to you. It’s necessary for you, as the adult, to do the work to find out if the student really wants to be in relationship with you. And one relationship they have to have is the transactional one. You know, student to teacher. But they don’t have to open themselves up to you as intently as you may think they need to be successful in class. And so what does that mean? How do you even know you’ve gotten there with a student, if you’ve never even taken the time to have a one-on-one conversation with them, or a small-group conversation, where you can focus more on a few students at a time? And then those formal conferences that you will have with them, and maybe their parents, or members of the community who have a vested interest in their success, members of the larger school community who have a vested interest in their success. And so, elements of restorative practices are really rooted and grounded in, how are we creating those systems, those structures, those protocols, in this very individualistic space of a school, so that students feel like their well-being is taken into account by the adults responsible for their care?
Lauren Trout: I really appreciate that a lot. I’m thinking about this practitioner that I know who told me this story about going into a school and being in a meeting with the principal, trying to talk about restorative practices, and over the walkie-talkie of the principal comes this, like, “We need help, we need help.” And the principal says to this practitioner, “Great, show me how this stuff works,” and went into this classroom. And there was, I believe it was a second- or third-grader, who was just really activated, just really dysregulated. Something had happened, I don’t know what, and he was throwing chairs. The teacher had the rest of the classroom on the other side of the room, trying to kind of physically protect them. And nobody knew what to do. And the principal said to this practitioner, “Get in there, go do this.” And so she was like, “Well, I’m a restorative practitioner, and I have these tools, I can ask these questions.” And tried to ask this kid, and it just made things worse. [Dr. Ward: It bombed.] It totally bombed. Exactly. And what happened, luckily, was that there was such commotion that this teacher that the student had had the year before, that he had a really strong relationship with, came in, helped the student get regulated, and asked the exact same set of restorative questions that the practitioner had just totally bombed with, and, within, really, a couple minutes, was able to get that student regulated, connected, understood. They had a plan for repairing the harm together. The student, the rest of the class, felt good to move forward. And they didn’t have to remove the student out of the room. I just think it is such an important story to me, of highlighting what happens when we try to apply this work without deep relationships.
Dr. Angela Ward: It’s when we see it as a program and not a way of being. It’s something, I went to a training, and I learned. And I guess that’s why I focus on professional learning, and the professional is the person that is in this learning session, and for me, the opportunity to learn is more personal. And there’s personal connections that I strive to help adults make, so they don’t see anything that I’m sharing with them as packaged curriculum or a packaged program. And adopting—I require two and a half to three hours at the least, but a multi-day process where we are engaging in deeper and deeper conversation every time we meet, because educators have been given kind of an opt out of actually doing deep work, when we provide training that doesn’t go deep. It’s not requiring them to think about how they show up, how they enter the space, every day at work, and what potential conflicts that could bring up with students, when we don’t even consciously think about those things. And so I want to dig a little bit more into the guide. So, as you were creating it, what are some of the reasons you thought about restorative practices varying so widely in research, and in implementation outcomes? And where have you seen restorative implementation go well, and where have you seen it go wrong?
Lauren Trout: Yeah, that’s such a good question. So I think that schools and districts are implementing this with varying levels of fidelity, of understanding of what it even is, of clarity. And, really authentic—“buy-in” is maybe the word we use a lot, but really what I mean is agency to opt into it. And so the guide was created because of witnessing so many schools trying restorative practices with good intentions, but either failing and/or inadvertently co-opting what this work is about, and I think, as a system eager to use really speedy rollouts, and packaged programs, exactly as you’re saying, and maybe even these limited concepts of data, we regularly overlook these critical steps of personal and collective unlearning and reimagining of what safe and equitable schools and systems of education are and what they can be. And I think the misstep of centering technical work over adaptive and relational plays a really key role in causing our implementation of new strategies in general, but specifically with restorative practices, to fail. We really devalue and ignore the most essential parts of change work, which are working on ourselves and being in deep relationship with one another. And then we are surprised when our efforts to do something new don’t work. And exactly as you’re saying, in this case, we implement restorative practices as this singular program. We just tack it on to existing structures, rather than really engaging with it as a paradigm that is able to transform those those structures themselves. I think that centering mindsets and social capital, these adaptive and relational pieces as a whole, in the field of work—because, exactly like you’re saying, it’s slow, it can be hard to measure. So we just kind of tend to leave them out. Restorative practices really sits on a belief system, and all of the practices are informed by this idea that learning doesn’t exist without community. Community is the foundation for all learning to occur and strong relationships. And so, yeah, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on all of this, as well as what you would say to schools that are like, “Yeah, we value relationships,” but, really on a deep level, what does that mean to center relationships as a crux for learning?
Dr. Angela Ward: Yeah, so, the way I think about relationships and relationship building in schools is, my ultimate goal is to make sure that I’m supporting students in a way that they feel like they can come into the school and be their authentic self as much as they can, so they can learn, so they can grow, and so they can share the parts of their identity they want to share in community. And so I do my best to learn as much as I can about my students, from them as well as their parents and anyone in their lives, whoever their caregivers are. And I work to really understand, how are they interacting in the school? Is the school environment, is the classroom environment, set up in a way that this individual student can be successful? And so, I use that individual learning, connect it with my collectivist values, and find ways to bridge the school community to that student’s needs. And a key thing is, you can’t restore something that did not already exist. And so, one question that I often ask schools, when they say they want to do restorative work, is, “What does your tier one community building look like? Talk me through that. How do you make sure that students feel like this school is a place that values them? Do your staff feel like this is a place that values them?” Because if your staff are not whole, they’re not going to be able to nurture your students. You’re talking about a story I thought about one also, where we talk about social-emotional learning, that’s a strong tier one for multi-tiered systems of support that also support a strong restorative practices focus. If your social-emotional learning, engaging strategies, your community-building efforts or relationship-building efforts, are weak, schoolwide, it’s going to show. How do you ensure that you have a strong community-building opportunity in each classroom? How do we know that the adults and the students are creating opportunities to learn, interests, needs, likes, dislikes? One of those structures may tell me a curriculum. That doesn’t tell me what your community building is. It tells me you’ve adopted a curriculum. And so, what are the ways in which you humanize your work? Step one to a successful multi-tiered system of support is to create the structures, in classrooms and school spaces, to nurture and build trusting relationships with students and families. As an elementary school teacher, I studied, “What is it that I’m supposed to do as a teacher this year? Where are my children entering?” And I met them where they were, and meeting elementary school students where they are sometimes means you’re not teaching the actual academic curriculum in the ways in which someone who wrote it thinks you should be writing it. But if you’re still meeting those objectives, and your children are growing, then you’re still teaching the academic curriculum. And it takes being in community with other teachers to understand how they address working with students, taking a little bit of your knowledge, and marrying those things together so that you feel like you can be secure knowing that, “yes, I’m meeting the requirements of my job role, but, more importantly, I’m meeting the needs of the children in my care, who are the future,” —I want to make sure that they’re prepared. So, making sure that the adults are using humanizing pedagogy. The pedagogy is the “how.” How are you delivering your academic content? Do you think about that? Do you think about how it’s received? Do you think about potential gaps that your students may have, curricularly? And how are you using your pedagogy in a way to pull those things out and understand them and reflect on your teaching? And especially, being in community with other adults. Mental health and well-being are crucial to successful restorative practices, and giving yourself permission, as an adult, to engage in repair at tier two, and restoration at tier three, knowing that you can’t repair or restore something that never existed. And so step one is to create those structures in classrooms and school spaces, to nurture and build trusting relationships with students and families, and be secure, in your decisions as an adult, that you are setting up the structure. So, each October, I felt like I had gotten to a space where I’d gotten that classroom community to a place where the students could trust me enough to begin to let down some walls and begin to increase their opportunity to grow more, because they were willing to give more to me, more to their classmates, more to the larger school community.
Lauren Trout: It’s making me think so much about the way that we have really siloed restorative practices, so, emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, culturally responsive teaching, all of these things as these separate, isolated programs. And in some ways they differ, but in so many ways they dovetail back to this idea that this is about how we show up. And so it makes me have this question for you: What role does equity play in restorative practices? And what does restorative practices play—what role does restorative practices have in equity? Why is a race-centered equity lens necessary to implement restorative practices?
Dr. Angela Ward: Well, the one thing that I’ll say is that restorative practices are an equity-centered practice, when implemented in a way that centers the indigenous roots of the practice, centers building relationships that can sustain a student in schools, and they’re equity-centered practices when the adults who are responsible for the care and concern of the students in the school every day are creating the systems of support to make sure a child is not kicked out or left behind. And so the way I frame restorative practices is culturally responsive restorative practices. And when I worked in a large urban school district, that’s how we framed it. My staff were responsible for working on individual campuses, to help teachers, principals, counselors, every staff member, cafeteria workers, the security guards. Everyone had a role in helping the school to be a culturally responsive restorative space. And so it started with creating opportunities for teachers and adults to be in circle together. And restorative practices are not just about circles, again. But that circle is a grounding. And it’s a way to begin to build trust and a way to begin to build camaraderie. And, often, we found that the circle process created an opportunity for adults to feel like they were receiving so much at work. And it began to break down barriers and break down walls. And adults who were completely opposed, like, “I’m not doing that touchy-feely stuff,” eventually, as they began to see the shift in how relationships were being formed with other adults, relationships were being formed with parents who they may not have gotten along with prior, now they’re seeing those parents coming into the schools with smiles on their faces and interacting in ways very differently than they had prior to the intentional ways in which we’re building opportunities for community building. And then, just thinking differently about how we work and how we talk, equity-centered practices recognize that schools are set up in a way—like we said earlier—they work perfectly, because, often, in schools when we were talking about restorative practices, so, the staff and I, we were given the opportunity to do this work because we had schools that had high discipline rates for Black boys. And our role was to shift the discipline system, but we turned it on its head, and we worked towards shifting the way the entire system was working, starting with the principal, starting with the principal’s supervisor, and really having opportunities to have these intentional dialogues about, “How is your school structured? When I walk onto the campus, what is the feeling? What am I encountering, from the first moment to the last moment that I’m on this campus?” Attending to those types of things attends to the equity in the ways in which children experience school, their families experience school.
Lauren Trout: So, Dr. Ward, what can schools and districts do to begin to course correct, or to continue their journeys implementing restorative practices so that it’s equitable, there is a maintaining a fidelity to a model, and that it’s sustainable? Especially, I’m thinking about, in this critical moment in time, with weakening social contracts, or just a forgetting that we belong to each other, I think, in a lot of spaces, and ongoing racial injustice, and what feels kind of like an increasingly unstable future, what advice might you give to schools in this moment in time?
Dr. Angela Ward: So, when we think about what schools and school districts can do to begin to do work with implementing restorative practices in an equitable manner, it starts with the adults. And it starts with adults taking a long, hard look at how adults are faring in the educational system right now—or just, period. But, as we record this audiocast, we are in the midst of coming down from two years of schools operating in very different ways to respond to the global pandemic and the global racial reckoning. And so, adults have been pretty much forced to rethink how they’re supporting other adults, because adults are leaving education in droves. And we first have to stop the hemorrhaging of adults. And we have to figure out how to humanize our work. We have to figure out how to create environments where adults are seen, where they are heard, where they are valued as the professionals that they trained to be. Adults come to schools and classrooms with knowledge. And we need to look at whose knowledge we’re valuing, and why are we valuing certain knowledge over others, when all knowledge is going to be critical to bring all of those different perspectives into the work that we do every day, to create an equitable, engaging restorative practices. And so, simple things we can do, what I encourage schools and school districts to do that are simple, “check in, check up, check out,” and that can take so many different ways. A check-in can be one word. “Tell me how you’re doing.” It can be, “Hey, here’s one of my favorite songs, what’s one of yours?” and you have to dance that, rock that. Adults can do that, too. Checking out with students, checking out with adults, noticing when adults are hurting, noticing when students are hurting. Those are equitable restorative practices, and how do you talk about those things? I talked a lot with the administration, as other campus administration, we had lots of conversations about how we were supporting our adults and how they were faring, because we knew that if they were not whole, they would not be able to support our children. And we couldn’t go out and teach all the classes; we really needed them to teach all those classes. And so how do we feed them and fuel them and find out what feeds them and fuels them so that they can continue to do the tough work of supporting other people’s children? And I would say, too, when we think about restorative practices, we have to get folks to understand and know whose land they reside on. I’m coming to you from the land of the Tonkawa, the Karankawa, the Comanche, and the Coahuiltecan, in central Texas. And whose practices are you trying to implement in your schools? Because these are indigenous practices. And so my staff and I really got to understand that we were operating on land where—major watering holes, sacred watering holes, of indigenous communities that were here before us and still reside here on this land. There’s a misnomer that they no longer reside on the land. They’re still here. These are sacred watering holes that are all tourist sites now. And what does that mean to the communities? And these are those practices that we’re trying to implement in our schools without that knowledge. And so, again, whose knowledge has value, and how are you bringing that into the space? Because, as educators, we have to understand knowledge, and we have to understand the extant knowledge that came before us and bring that to the surface.
Lauren Trout: Yeah, I think that that’s such an amazing question: Whose knowledge is getting centered? And how are we defining knowledge, too, right? Yeah, absolutely. I’m appreciating, too, you spoke to the importance of modeling, and having space for adults to do this work, too, and I just want to lift that up, because I think—not sure where we have gotten in our heads that school culture, school climate, is “just for young people and just for students,” but, you know, it’s for everybody that makes up that school community. I’d love to just highlight a couple things I’m thinking about, too, that are talked about in the guide. If we’re talking about, what can schools do to start this off on the right track, or start off their ideas of restorative practices on the right track, or course correct, or wherever you are in this . . . Again, I hope this audiocast has really driven home this centering of adaptive and relational pieces and not just this surface-level technical stuff. I think another thing that comes to mind is the importance of putting structures of support in place. And I think there are structures, but that we often forget are structures. And so what comes to mind for me is, firstly, a rethinking of success, of what it is, and the concept that it’s linear, and that there are linear ideas of implementation to this. I think, really often, schools have this misconception that “we’ll do the work for a semester or a year, and then we’re going to get these outcomes.” But this is really slow change work if what we’re doing is centering paradigm shifts, social capital, and getting to the true roots of this work. And so I think, remembering that all change work is often nonlinear, it’s complex, and it’s a praxis of action and reflection. And again, I also want to just highlight what you said about what it means to model this work, and to live this work, and to be in this work, and then body, mind, and spirit, and right relationship with those things, as opposed to grabbing a binder with a script and doing it to children, doing it to young people, as opposed to, how are we in this with ourselves and with each other, whoever that may be, including adults? And coming into the technical piece, which is important—what does it mean to hold staff meetings in circle? What does it mean to have space for a spirit of vulnerability and public learning, to build trust and agency in a space? All of these things are elements of how we can engage with this with ourselves and with our colleagues, before we do it with young people. Yeah, those are the things that are coming to mind for me.
Dr. Angela Ward: Yeah, as I think about praxis, adults, as we think about what this work looks like, sounds like, and feels like in schools, our praxis is a combination of our beliefs about education. What do you believe about education? What is education to you? And how does that play out in what you do every day? So if you say, “I believe all children can learn,” and that is something that you hold true to yourself as an educator, are your actions showing that? Are you making the types of decisions that show you believe that to be true? Because actions speak louder than words. And when we’re thinking about how to implement, successfully, restorative practices in schools, you have to go to the people who are closest to the problem. Those are students. If you’re trying to do this to students, you’re not going to be successful. But if you’re creating opportunities for students to do this work with you, and to learn how to slowly remove yourself from the situation and watch them work . . . You know, I’ve seen students do amazing work, shifting their own school culture, because the adults got out of the way. So how are you creating that gradual release? And sometimes it doesn’t even have to be gradual, because, often, students just want someone to ask them. Trust me: they have answers. So are you creating the opportunity to just ask them?
Lauren Trout: Yes. So much wisdom. I love it. So, Dr. Ward, as we close out, I’m wondering if you have any closing thoughts or takeaways, things that you really want folks to hear as we close out.
Dr. Angela Ward: I really want folks to hear that restorative practices are thousands of years old. I want them to hear that the practices have been co-opted and often watered down. And it’s our responsibility, as people who say our job is to educate the future, to educate our students about the true origin of the practices. It’s important, too, that, as we are educating our students about the origins of the practice, we’re not pretending as if those practices do not still exist in communities that are around us. So I challenge you to understand whose land you live on, whose land you’re educating on, so that you can at least get a peek into what’s important for those who hold these practices to be true and a part of their community well-being and sustainability. And it’s important that you don’t think about restorative practices, social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practice, outside of a strong, supportive, centered, student-centered, equity-centered, multi-tiered system of support. If that system is not strong, and if academic, social, and emotional Learning is not at the core of your tier one, restorative practices don’t have a chance to succeed in your schools.
Lauren Trout: Yes. Thank you so much. Absolutely. I think I’m leaving, too, with just really this groundedness and really wanting to remind folks about restorative practices as a paradigm, and not as a program. And we see the ways that it operates as a program, but when we’re really looking at it and understanding it as a paradigm with belief systems and values and guiding principles and practices, it really does have the potential for real transformation of space. Yeah, Dr. Ward, I’m so grateful for you being here today. I’ve learned so much from you. I feel like we could talk for hours and hours more. Yeah. Thank you so much for everything that you bring.
Dr. Angela Ward: Thank you. Thanks for the invite.
Lauren Trout: Thank you for listening. For more information about the toolkit, go to the resource section at SEL Center at WestEd.org. And thank you to the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd for their support.