Transcript

Restorative Practitioners Panel: Insights from The Toolkit Before the Toolkit

Lauren Trout: Thank you for listening to this panel of restorative practitioners talk about their work, their noticings about restorative practices in the field of education, and their insights on the Toolkit before the Toolkit; an interactive restorative practices implementation guide that emphasizes the mindsets, values, and paradigm of restorative practices as foundational to implementation success. This Toolkit and accompanying panel come from WestEd and the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety.

My name is Lauren Trout. I am a restorative justice practitioner, author of the Toolkit, and today I will be moderating this panel discussion. Our panelists of restorative practitioners today come from across the country and were participants in cohorts of school-, district-, COE-, and state-level practitioners engaging with the Toolkit as a way to deepen their practice, build community with other practitioners, and examine the current state of restorative practices and education.

Toby Espley is the restorative practices coordinator at the Orange County Department of Education and Learning Support Services. She holds a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in child development. The focus of her work consists of restorative practices, social–emotional learning, early childhood education, and positive behavioral interventions and supports within the California Multi-Tiered System of Support. With over 20 years of experience in education, Toby continues to bring current research and best practices to support professional development for the preK through 12 continuum.

Next is Dr. Rose Prejean-Harris. She is a Louisiana native and received her bachelor’s in science education from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, her master’s of education in school counseling from the University of West Georgia, and her PhD in curriculum and instruction from Mercer University. She began her teaching career as a middle and high school science teacher in New Orleans, Dallas, and Atlanta before transitioning to a high school counselor, and then assistant principal in DeKalb County Schools.

Most recently, she was the principal of Gainesville Middle School in Gainesville, Georgia, before becoming Director of Social–Emotional Learning for Atlanta Public Schools. Dr. Prejean-Harris believes that in order for students to gain access to a challenging curriculum, their social and emotional needs must also be addressed by caring adults who are also self-aware and skilled in meeting the needs of all children. For her, the depth of SEL reaches beyond the classroom and changes the lives and communities in which we live.

Next, we have Jill Gurtner, who is the principal of Clark Street Community School in the Middleton Cross Plains Area School District in Wisconsin. Clark Street Community School is a small public charter high school designed as an innovation zone within the school district. In order to support their mission to democratically cultivate a community of engaged learners, Clark Street has worked to foster a restorative school community since opening in 2012. Jill is driven by a passion to design and implement an educational system rooted in talent development for all learners, which repays the educational debt owed to our historically marginalized learners.

And last but not least, we have Beverly Maxwell. Beverly is a program specialist with Metro West Georgia Learning Resource Systems. Bev provides free training to coaches and provides technical assistance related to special education and restorative practices to seven of the public school systems in Metro Atlanta. Prior to this role, she enjoyed being a special education teacher where Beverly received the Atlanta Power 30 Under 30 Award, the Leadership Character Award by Turk Net Leadership Group, and the Channel 11 Class Act Teacher Award. She’s passionate about restoring hope, maintaining dignity, intentional neighboring, and cheese dip. If you ever find yourself in Atlanta, reach out and she’ll be sure to direct your belly to the best food around.

Hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here. I am so appreciative of your wisdom and your knowledge and I’m really excited to chat with you all about restorative practices and your work. I’d love to offer talking about the Toolkit itself as a starting place. This question is for the whole group, but Toby, if you wouldn’t mind kicking us off: What has been your experience with the Toolkit before the Toolkit and how has it changed your perspective and/or your practice in the role you’re in?

Toby Espley: Absolutely. So, in our county of Orange County, California, and within the state of California, we’re seeing the need and the request for restorative practices training, but we often live in this technical and structural piece, so we have, “here’s the practices, here’s the people we’re sending.” But what’s happening is—what everyone’s finding is—“Well, we’re doing that, but then it’s not working,” and like anything else that’s the  feedback I’m getting. “Well, we went; we sent everybody; we have people in place. We’re doing the practices, but we’re not making the connections.”

So, the Toolkit has been instrumental and has been such a game changer in this last year, having it in my hands now, and integrating it into each of my RP trainings across the state of California to bring in those relational and adaptive elements. Because we really want this not to be just one more thing that we’re doing because we’re often on initiative overload, but this is just a different way to be and really beginning to move and shift that paradigm shift. So having integrated that in, now I see the difference in the feedback and what is now happening in schools, after the RP training in addition to learning about the elements of the Toolkit.

Lauren Trout: Yeah. I think the real aim of the Toolkit was to highlight that restorative practices isn’t just kind of a set of steps that we can implement in schools. It is a paradigm and a way in which we show up to each other, and that is really never going to be implemented through step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as much as learning how to coexist and be in relationship. So, I’m curious to hear from others, what was your experience with the Toolkit, and what takeaways and thoughts do you have? I’ll open this up to anyone.

Jill Gurtner: My experience has been the same as Toby’s, that often people jump in with the technical, structural sides of things. And what that has led to is really core implementation that often while restorative practices is so committed to philosophically creating community and doing things with, that idea of doing things with, within our systems within our school systems is really counter-cultural. It isn’t the way we tend to do things, and so, if people don’t spend enough time really looking and thinking about those adaptive elements, they often miss implementation even if they’re very committed to starting with relationships because even in the relationship field that can still be a “to” and very adult structured as opposed to really a flattened community commitment.

So, for me, the clarity with which the Toolkit really tackles those adaptive elements and grounds all of the work in the adaptive elements, that’s been really helpful to me to have conversations with people who have really good intentions about implementation but perhaps haven’t spent enough time in that really reflective work of the adaptive elements to help, hopefully, ensure better implementation in the long run.

Rose Prejean-Harris: And I’ll concur, Jill, since I live in the adaptive world in terms of SEL, we have used the Toolkit to kind of introduce why we use SEL as a primer to the restorative practices work. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with helping the adults to understand where they are in terms of their own critical self-awareness and how they enter the room and how they enter the work. So really homing in on those SEL skills and really honing in on that adaptive piece from the resource has been helpful. It gives them an opportunity to kind of “play with the clay” is what I call it. So, they’re “playing with the clay,” molding, looking at how they can change their practices within the school and not be so technical at first and really, really work on the mindsets in the school system.

Lauren Trout: Thank you. I’m going to go rogue here for a second. When we’re talking about the adaptive, we’re talking about the values and the mindsets that are really imbued in restorative practices and how often we try to implement restorative practices as these technical things without those mindsets and values and paradigm shifts. How often we implement restorative circles without actually a deep understanding of what it means to be restorative. And this is where we see so often, like, restorative circle keeping to repair harm, be punitive, and sometimes cause more harm.

So, I think this is a question for Rose and not to put you on the spot, but also for everybody and thinking about what it means to de-center the technical pieces, “here’s exactly the script to do a circle,” and “here’s exactly how you do this thing,” and instead centering what does it mean to have restorative mindsets and values? I’m curious to hear what is it in your spaces, how are you trying that on in terms of engaging with educators in that? What is it like to be trying to do adaptive work with educators?

Rose Prejean-Harris: I think the most important piece is that within our district, we’ve been doing the SEL work for about five, six years now and so that has really helped us to set the stage for entering into the conversation around restorative practice and around the adaptive piece and how important it is to really understand that this work is more than just about behavior. It’s really a lifestyle, how we move, how think, and how we really take our beliefs and values and infuse them into our system so that it is the culture that we want it to be. So in 2020, our board actually implemented a restorative practices policy, and then last year, we had a “non-negotiable” around restorative practices. And then the question was, “Well, who’s trained in restorative practices?” [laughter]

So, we had lots of people that we have already trained, but the training was something that was not mandatory, but voluntary. These were people who were interested in the work, in wanting to do the work, and really wanting to move the work forward and deeper in the district and so, we see pockets of champions within our district around the restorative practices work and we’ve actually had people to move on into other roles outside of our district and actually change professions based on restorative practices training. That’s just how powerful it is. I say that to say that we know that this helps to shift culture, it helps to shift mindsets, and really honing in on that work and honing into the adaptive piece of it really sets up the technical pieces for success.

So, in schools that have really taken on the work of restorative practices, they’ve hired what we called a restorative practices coach. And they are really working on using this as part of the value of their system: this is something that we really value, this is something that we really want in our culture, and this is what we want our culture to be. For saying that this work, you won’t see it happen overnight. That is something that has to truly be infused, that people have to have a strong belief in the work itself and understand what the work is. And each time that you actually participate in a restorative circle, you’re continuously doing those proactive pieces of restorative practices that is 80%. We hone in on those proactive pieces.

And then instead of calling the other 20% reactive, we really call it responsive because it’s the intentionality of what you do when you respond to when harm happens. That is powerful. So, we hone in on “if you use this as a practice, kind of like yoga, I don’t care if you are a beginning yogi or an expert yogi, you are always continuously practicing and continuously improving.” You have to do the same thing with restorative practices, you’re never getting to an end. You’re always just getting better and deeper and having of a deeper understanding of the work and know that as you use it, how powerful it is and how it actually can change the trajectory of somebody’s life and even your own life in particular.

And so, we hone in on that. It is a practice. That you can’t restore what you don’t have and that relationships and community are key. And we have to build a community of people who actually believe in the work. And that starts with the people who are leading and the people who will implement and the people who are in front of kids in order to be able to make that happen. And that community does not just involve the school, but we have to be inclusive of parents, partners, and everyone else who comes into contact within our space in the world.

Lauren Trout: Thank you, Rose. Bev, I saw you come off mute. If you can speak to this for a second.

Beverly Maxwell: Yeah, something that Rose mentioned just kind of it made me make a connection that I had not made before. And in Georgia, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s a national issue. You all know it’s a national issue, but teacher retention is a struggle. We have so many schools in Georgia that are without teachers and the burnout is high. So, I was thinking about how the Toolkit is slowing down the process of jumping the gun and training during pre-planning and then expecting implementation and the Toolkit with the administrative team, how it addresses the adaptive piece, I think could have a big impact on teachers just feeling that they’re seen and heard, like, if it’s something that the leadership team is living out and if there’s actual connection and the humanity is brought back in. Does that make sense?

So, I was just thinking about how if the adaptive piece, if the admin team is excited about that part and they believe in that part and they see that it is the foundation of restorative practices, then I can just imagine the power and the magic of teachers feeling seen and heard in that way, how that would just kind of strengthen their resilience muscles. I had not thought about that before, but it’s just something that’s always on the foreplan of our plates right now. We’re always talking about teacher retention and so many times I go in schools and what they want is restorative practices, but it doesn’t, even if you filter it through those mindsets through their behavior management plans, they’re night and day and so, they’re expecting teachers to do something that in practices there’s no structure for. So, yeah, I loved the adaptive piece and it’s made a huge game change in my life.

Lauren Trout: Yeah, thank you both for those answers. Something that I really want to lift up that I heard Rose say is “like, this is the long game.” When we’re talking about this work and moving it forward in education and in society, this is the long game. And I just want to uplift that because I think so often we kind of have this, I don’t know where the idea comes from, but we get it that “we’re going to implement perfectly and see the exact results we want August through May in exactly a non-linear timeline” and this is not that. And the other thing I want to lift up is something that I think, Bev, you were speaking to as well, and I think this is maybe a good segue into our next question, is really you’re making me kind of reflect back on the question itself about what does it mean to train teachers or educate teachers in adaptive work?

Maybe it’s not so much about training them as much as giving them the dignity of the experience of being restorative with them. What happens when people have the experience of being restorative? Where does that bring them in their own understanding of it? I’m so appreciative of that. I think that leads to my next question, and so Bev, I would love to keep going with you. Is this kind of experiential part, which is that as I mentioned in the intro, the Toolkit offered this complimentary technical assistance in the form of small cohorts of restorative practitioners at the school, district, COE, and state levels.

And the goal as the facilitator and designer was to continue to give practitioners who often get in this role and then we’re like, “Okay, now the trainer go train,” was really to give practitioners a space of community and experiential learning. So, the intention was to use the principles of the Toolkit to build really needed community for us as practitioners who are often siloed in their work and for us to examine the field and try out different practices that are embedded into the Toolkit’s framework. So, I would love to take a couple minutes and hear you all share a bit about what that experience was like for you being in the cohorts.

Beverly Maxwell: Absolutely, yes. I think I was on the second cohort, is that right? I was on the second cohort and what a motley crew we were. It was so much fun to connect all over the United States, but I’ll start with just a, first of all, “hi again” from Atlanta, and I’m on the land of that was originally the Cherokee people and so, I just wanted to make that point heard and known. And honestly, when I was thinking through what I wanted to share, I did want to say that I was living a life that was incongruent with a restorative mindset, and yet I was training and coaching on restorative mindsets. I was encouraging them to develop restorative cultures and mindsets and those were not alive in me, if that makes sense at that time.

So, when this came across my email, thank you APS, Atlanta Public Schools, for passing this on to me. I read it and in education, I don’t know if you feel this way, but there’s a lot of options on things that we can do, but they’re not always worthy of our time, and connection though is always worth it. So, I knew that I needed there to be a shift in my heart’s posture and I needed to be restorative in my own life prior to expecting them from others or inviting people into it, I shouldn’t say expecting, inviting people to walk in it. It was such a safe place to land; it was a gentle place to land.

There’s not many places when you work for—in a regional level—that you can show up with humility and a tenderness and also wave your flag and go, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” There’s all these pressures for perfectionism and it was a delight, I’ll say that word again, a delight to link arms with peers all over the nation. It’s something that we don’t get to do very often in our regional jobs or even in district work. It feels like we’re in silos and I didn’t know how thirsty I was to hear perspectives from people outside of my little bubble.

So, I felt like every session, I didn’t just have light bulb moments. It was that. Yes, it was that, but I left energized. I felt like my soul was being buoyed if you will, every time I would leave lighter, and that’s not usual for professional learning groups. I’m grateful. Let me just say that for doing this extra thing, because I think it really changed how I’m doing work and I hope it’s contagious in how other districts that I get to serve are doing work. But this is me speaking not as a trainer, a leader, or an educator standpoint, but I felt like the cohort really humanized me. I saw that other people had the same visions, but also the same barriers.

I heard creative stories about how they’ve kind of wiggled around and it was so impactful to break into small groups to untangle some of those things. It was like somebody was telling me, “lift your head, Bev, lift your head.” Like you’re looking through a straw. You’re just looking through a straw and if you would just lift your head and see all the possibilities. I think of what I learned in this cohort was how to genuinely invite voice for marginalized groups. I feel like I’ve awkwardly tripped through that process as a White person and I just learned a lot.

And this is the biggest thing that I think I took away, one of the biggest things, I got to experience—and we as leaders don’t get to experience often, we’re usually the ones doing—and I got to experience co-creating an agenda. I know that sounds just really simple from the get-go, but Lauren ensured that the agenda met our desires and our current needs. It wasn’t something that we were given carpet burn, they were just dragging through. It was flexible and it was fluid, and I think it was so helpful to be in the learner’s and the participant’s seat and be a part of that because I felt seen and respected and it made me want to do that for anybody that’s in any of my classes. And it just added flesh to the adaptive piece that, I think, what I’ve been serving schools is bones. I think I’ve been doing that. I’ve been saying it’s important that teachers believe in this, but I haven’t been giving them the tools to build that belief system.

So, I think that piece is just hugely altered how I’m going to work with the districts that I serve and the ones that I have served already. So, I’m utilizing that Toolkit in my collaborative planning sessions with administrative teams and it s-l-o-w-e-d down the train, and I needed that. I needed the train to be slowed because I was just eager to get in and train and it was falling flat. So, assumptions were not made in the cohort and it was so beautiful to be a part of that curiosity, I feel like was just maintained. And that was also just a breath of fresh air. I think it rewired my energy in coaching, if that makes sense, being one who’s getting to experience it.

So, I think and this might simplify it too much, but being a part of the cohort, it gave me a taste of living the restorative mindset of fair process. And I think I teach the fair process and I try to apply it but being a part of fair process, I didn’t realize that how infrequently I’m in a position where someone is involving me in decisions and it was just, it felt like, yeah again, just a breath of fresh air. So, it’s impacted my coaching, it’s impacted my delivery, and also it’s just I feel like I’m giving myself more grace than I was before because I heard from all over the nation that we’re all experiencing a lot of the same things.

So, in my work, I get to support seven districts, but in the metro area, we have 12 to 13 districts that I get to provide TA for, and coaching, and training. And what we’ve created is a restorative practices consortium where leaders in restorative practices come together and meet. And it is my hope and my desire looking forward that this group, we have our first meeting coming up in two weeks or something, we meet quarterly, that it functions like this WestEd cohort. I want that same energy; I want that same centralizing the adaptive. So, I think it’s helped me reframe how I’m looking at that group.

Jill Gurtner: It’s interesting to hear you, Bev, because you are thinking of it so much from that training and support perspective at the higher level. For me as a practitioner, somebody who’s served as the principal and been struggling my way through trying to create and maintain a restorative culture for 15 years now, for me the most important piece of it was the opportunity to have the safety of the group along with the commitment that we were truly using a restorative lens. That struggle in that fast-paced day-to-day really tough situations. But the situations that most need us to sit in our restorative commitment don’t have clear answers. They’re often very, very mucky; they’re tough situations. And unless we intentionally build communities that are very clearly committed to maintaining a restorative approach, my experience has been that I describe it as a secret hatch door. We use restorative except for when it gets really tough and then we go back to our old practices.

And to have a group that I knew wasn’t going to use the secret hatch door, [laughter] I, of course, because I’m a principal, had a tough situation that came up during the time that we were in the cohort and I knew that I could bring that to the space and not have anybody try to solve it, not have anybody say, “Well, maybe you can’t use restorative practices in those conditions,” but to really give me the space to collectively work through that. And I think for me that was such a powerful reminder of when we are building these systems, we have to build in those spaces for those who are implementing to have that safety and that commitment to “we’re going to work through these tough situations together.”

And I think the processing guide that came out since then is exactly what we need. There will be tough situations—that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing—to really make sure that even in the hardest cases we are building community and building connection rather than doing further harm. So that opportunity to process in a way that allows us to do that effectively was really, really valuable.

Lauren Trout: Thank you, Jill. I want to highlight something I heard and I think is an interesting segue to the next question, which is yeah, you said we’re restorative until it gets hard, it’s such a good way of putting that experience. So, what does it mean to really keep trying to be restorative? So, I think to Rose’s point before of—especially as practitioners—we go through training, we get these positions, and then it’s like our personal learning journeys with it just stop. So, what we are also in commitment to be growing as restorative practitioners. What does it mean to stay restorative when it gets hard?

So, I think my segueway is that part of the motivation for me for writing the Toolkit was the noticing of this phenomenon around restorative practices and education. That there’s this increasingly widening spectrum of restorative work in schools. This spectrum of how it’s being implemented, a spectrum of how it’s being defined as successful or not successful. I think even a spectrum of how people understand it and what schools understand it as, which is all to say, I’m curious to hear of you all’s observations about restorative practices in the education field. I feel like we’ve spoken to it a little bit, but I’m curious, and Rose, if we can start with you for a minute or two, what are your noticings about restorative work in education right now? What’s the field looking like from your vantage point?

Rose Prejean-Harris: I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around what restorative practice is and what it is not. So, when people hear restorative practices, they think of it in terms of restorative justice. Right? Because we Americanize everything, [laughter] which is why it was important for people on this call and people in our cohort to recognize the Indigenous roots of restorative practices. So, they think it’s a quick fix and it’s not. It’s really a long-haul piece of work that truly can transform how we do schools, what schools look like if we trust the process. And I think the ability to let go of and really truly work on the equity pieces of the work in education is going to be important for us to continue to do in order for things like restorative practices to truly fall in place and change the culture of schools. We have to change the culture of schools. And why not start with us as the people doing the work?

And of course, it only takes a seed. You plant a little seed, and that seed grows, and we want it to grow. So, the more people we touch as practitioners, the more practitioners come into the space and the more we change the culture and community of schools, but we have lots of work to do. There is just a lot of miscommunication around what the work really is and what it’s intended to be rather than really honing in to changing culture, changing practices, changing systems so that they are more safe, they are more supportive, they are more equitable. And we are charged to do that. We have to do it.

Lauren Trout: Thank you, Rose. I remember in our cohort, you speak so much to restorative practices as not discipline. This is a way of how we show up to each other and how we are in relationship to each other. And I really am appreciating the way in this question of “what’s the field looking from your vantage point,” you’re like, “I want to zoom us out and talk about the just word of being restorative.” And Toby, if I can shift it to you for a second, if you don’t mind because you’re at a COE level, so you’re also a little bit in the air and working to meet the needs of schools, districts, and teachers. What’s the field of restorative practices and education looking like from your vantage point?

Toby Espley: That’s such an important question. So, one of the things when we’re looking at a multi-tiered system of support, how we organize our efforts is we really want to match the support to the need. So often we’re in this paradigm or mindset of “give me” and just like Rose said, “Give me the tool so I can fix it.” And I said, “Wait a minute, what you’re perceiving is the support for that need may not be a match.” So, everything comes in this responsive state, what brings you to this training today for restorative practices? We have all these behaviors, we need to fix it, we need to pull these youth into small groups, and we need to supplement and intensify this. I said, “Hold on. But we want to make sure we’re matching the support to the need and we have to look at all the pieces.”

And something that I’m seeing with all the districts and really across the state is I said, this gives us a chance to be really granular. This gives us a chance to match that, to really take a look at it. It’s not as guessing what we think is needed but being able to ask. So, I would even tie that into how you facilitated the cohort because I was able to facilitate that back into the county, into the districts, and hope that goes into the hands of the leaders to their stakeholders and to their education staff to say, “let’s make sure we’re matching this. Do we have all the pieces and do we understand?” So, like I said, it’s taking from where everyone’s at, give me something to fix. Yes, take a step back and look at all the moving pieces.

Rose Prejean-Harris: Yeah. Thank you, Toby. Can I just add to what Jill said? So yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting with all of our training, all of our assistant principals. So, we had this entire cohort of assistant principals for the year and we are doing the restorative practices work with them. So, I’m excited about that. We started this summer and we were supposed to have a full-day training this past week and we ended up having to break it up into a half day and a half day. What was so great about that experience yesterday was everybody was upset that they could not have a full-day training, first of all, because they needed to work on the work. And they said that this finally felt like support. Like what we’re doing now, being able to move at the pace that we need to move at for our school environment—if some of us need to take baby steps, we’re able to take baby steps.

If some of us are ready to take the more giant leaps because we’ve set up the culture for that, then we’re able to do that and we’re able to have conversations around it. This is one of the most helpful things that we’ve done in years and we want to make sure that we’re doing the work right because we believe in the work.

So, they had from the beginning of June to August to process the restorative practices piece, the theoretical pieces of it, and what that might look like and internally for you, how does that match with your beliefs and your systems? And then our conversations yesterday went to, “how do you know your community? How do you know especially with the social discipline window?” And when we talked about the characteristics of what that might look like in the classroom, what that might look like in a student home, the challenge question was, “how do you know that’s true?” and is that because of your story or do you know the story of the kids and the teachers in your school?

A powerful question, a powerful “aha” moment for lots of them, and an opportunity to really reflect and then giving them this, “what are you really going to work on?” Think about the structures, think about the adaptive piece, the relational pieces, the structural pieces, the technical pieces, the four elements from the Toolkit. “What is it that you as a school community really need to work on?” And I appreciate having the assistant principals to do this work and to lead this work in schools because they set a lot of the culture, they model a lot of what happens to kids. So, I wanted to say that that was important. That that piece is important, that we understand the right people to touch once we are doing the work to help the work to really move and deepen.

Toby Espley: Can I add just because that ignites so much, but when I had mentioned that matching the support to the need, the need is to be proactive. All of those pieces are proactive, all the things we set ahead of time but we think what we need is to be reactionary. But everything we’ve been talking about and everything that I’m hearing from my colleagues is about what do we set up ahead of time to not be that magic wand to get rid of every barrier but it’s going to reduce the likelihood of it. And if we need our instructional minutes back, and we need efficacy, agency, and sustainability, it comes in the 80% the proactive lens of this work.

Lauren Trout: Yeah. Thank you, both. I think you’re speaking to so much about I think our traditional ways of implementing in schools as a school says, “Oh my god we need this,” usually because something has happened. And then we as practitioners show up, we give the two-day training or the four-day training and maybe there’s some after support, but in really thinking about what needs to be in place for this to actually land? What is the proactive front-end work that sets the conditions for people to show up to a training and be like, “I get it. Deeply in my body, I get it.” And I want to shift to our last question, and Jill, I’m curious to have you start with this and answer in a handful of ways as I think in this panel are most on the ground person as a principal.

I’m curious to hear about your vantage point and I think what we’re speaking to is the last question I have to you all, I think as practitioners, especially in this current moment in time within education that y’all are referencing—pandemics, racial reckonings, teacher shortages, increasing politicization of education—we are in a time of exponential change and we seem to be at a bit of a precipice as a system and I would say as a society too, about whether we are going to double down on what doesn’t really seem to be working or we are going to shift and transform. So, I’m curious and man, this is a big question for you Jill, and all, but what does it mean to be restorative practitioners doing restorative work in this current moment in time? The way that we implement this work is either one more thing to do or the thing that helps us transform depending on how we’re doing it. So yes, I’m going to stop but Jill can you speak to what do you think about being practitioners in this particular moment of exponential change and as we sit at this precipice together?

Jill Gurtner: Thank you for that. So, I am a big believer that times of massive change and shift or even collapse of systems that we have come to believe in, those are opportunities. Those are opportunities to watch for and build on what is emerging. I’m big fan of Adrian Murray Brown’s work of emergent strategy. The moment we are in is so ripe for what restorative practices and the wisdom of the Indigenous cultures and going back to the wisdom of the restorative beliefs, we have all sorts of crises. We know in schools we are being impacted all of the time by a serious mental health crisis facing our children, facing our adults. We have global problems; we have local problems. These are complex challenges that simply cannot be solved in those technical approaches that unfortunately our system has become pretty heavily dependent on.

So, I think we’re seeing a rise in interest and passion about restorative practices and I think that’s because the skills and the dispositions that we develop. I love Rose’s connection to the practice of yoga, like, what we all young and old develop through practicing, maintaining, developing, enhancing restorative cultures, those are the exact skills and dispositions we need in this time. We need to learn to sit, we need to learn to deeply listen to honor everyone’s experience.

As we were answering the last question, it occurred to me we haven’t really even talked about circle, like the power of circle to hold everyone. The power of circle to expand, to continually make more room for everyone to be included, and the power of us bringing our collective energy to making the choices about what’s the right next. So we are in a time that is really none of us know exactly where things are going next. None of us can predict it. Those that are holding onto a belief that we can continue to predict what’s happening next are really struggling.

So, for me as a leader, as a mother, as an educator, these are exactly the things that we need to be doing to pull together. I always say the human super capacity is to connect with others and to use our differences to maximize the benefit for all of us. And that’s what restorative practices, that’s what it does for us. It gives us the skills and the dispositions to actually do those things and to create the possibility that we’re going to come through this and come through it in a way that makes us stronger and better as a world and as a human species in that world. And I think that’s for me, this is the time for us to do it and to do it well.

Lauren Trout: Thank you, Jill. I want to lift up something you said in our initial kickoff call and to drafting what we wanted to talk about today and you were speaking to the same thing so incredibly, but you said this thing that just really hit me deeply and has carried me and my professional and personal life so many places already. You said, “in collapse, where does our energy go? Is it to hold on as tightly as possible to what feels most comfortable even if what is most comfortable is not helpful, is not good for us, is not comfortable for everyone? Or is it to let it break and maybe even help it break and transform?”

And I just feel like I’ve already had so many points in my life where I’m like, “this is a moment where I get to choose where my energy goes. Is it holding on tightly to what isn’t for me anymore or is it to shift?” I want to really hold that and thank you for that. And yeah, I’ll offer it to other folks. This precipice we’re in as an educational body, as a society, what does restorative practices and restorative justice play in that?

Rose Prejean-Harris: So, I’m going to speak from the work that we’re doing here in APS in particular this year. I sit in the office of Teaching and Learning and one of our big mission this particular year and moving forward also is to really think about culturally responsive practices. So, as we are thinking about those culturally responsive practices, as we are thinking about the implementation of personalized learning, and all of these big pieces that are supposed to be transformative in our work as educators because we know central to the work that we do in schools is teaching and learning. We have to know who we are; we have to know who we touch. And restorative practices is just another way to bring that home. When we do those circles, when we do those adaptive pieces, even the technical pieces of restorative practices, it brings us back to what we need in order to have those culturally responsive practices.

So, we have an opportunity to really transform what education is. And as we talk about personalized learning and making sure that we see, hear, and value the voices of everyone that’s in the room, the educator as well as the student, then I think it’s important that people understand that restorative practices helps us to bring that community in place, that helps us to know each other. I could say “I see you,” I could say “I hear you,” but until I really know you, I’m not truly valuing who you are as a person. So restorative practices helps us to do that. It helps us to really know who each other are so that we really understand where we connect, what our true values and beliefs are, and how when we walk into the room we understand the value that we bring to that space.

Beverly Maxwell: I love that, Rose. I guess in the community that I’m in and I think about Elena Aguilar, what we actually can control and what we’re responsible for, and how those are different. And I guess just to summarize, I guess my hope for how restorative practices can transform communities, whether it’s in school or neighborhoods, is that it’s loving people into their best selves and allowing other people to love you into your best self—so, not being okay with staying how we are and seeing inherent value and dignity in everyone.

Lauren Trout: Go for it, Toby.

Toby Espley: I was just going to say, restorative practices, if we’re doing all the proactive pieces, the circles, effective statement questions, or even if we’re responding to something in the conferencing, what we do in that allows us to belong. Not fit in but belong because when you fit in, you’re trying to transform to what you think others want of you, but when you belong, you’re accepted for who you are. So, I think that’s just a core of what this work that we’re doing in restorative practices empowers in all of us.

Lauren Trout: Wow. I’m just so inspired by all of you all and each of you all. I think before we close, I just want to offer any final thoughts from our panelists. Anything that you didn’t get to say that you want to speak to? Anything that you particularly want to shout out before we close?

Jill Gurtner: I do! The Toolkit—the Restorative Practices Toolkit by Lauren Trout—will take you beyond implementation fidelity. “Did we do what we say we wanted to?” But it takes us into implementation integrity. “Do we believe it? Do we understand it? Is it part of who we are?”

Rose Prejean-Harris: I think to the audience that we’ll probably listen to this recording, this podcast, they are coming to find information, right? They think that they need a wealth of information to start. I would just say start. The Toolkit is a perfect place to start. To say, “Okay, I can do this and I can do it in little chunks and I can take all of these different pieces and bring it together.” You might already be doing some of the things that the Toolkit—it helps you to understand that you already might have some of these pieces in place, you just need to make the connection.

So, I would say use it. Use the Toolkit with fidelity, use it as a thought partner, use it as a conversation piece with the people who you are putting to row in the boat with you, and know that you can start but you want other people with you to row the boat. So, find the early adopters to help you row the boat and use the Toolkit.

Toby Espley: I love that. And would say for me, one of the things I’d learned both in the process of implementation and I really, really appreciate about the Toolkit is different people enter this work in different ways. I’m super comfortable in the adaptive, that’s where I live and it makes sense to me. Some people really need to start in the technical and find the adaptive through the guide of the technical. And for me, one of the things I love about the Toolkit is it does give you those places that you can enter in different spaces and then really come back to the why. “Why are we doing this?” But it really makes it very, very accessible for everyone.

Beverly Maxwell: And I’ll just end with the encouragement, get in a TA group, find your people to flesh things out with. Yeah, it rocked me in a really good way. And I think in order to be in this work, you have to be committed to constant self-awareness. And I think that happens in the TA. So, find your people and keep working it out with them.

Lauren Trout: Cool. You are all so great. I want to just sincerely thank each of you for joining today and for the wisdom and vulnerability and insights are so incredibly helpful. You all are moving the field forward in your sharings and in your work, so sincerely, thank you. For more information about the Toolkit, please go to the resource section at selcenter.wested.org, and thank you to the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd for their support.