Featured Speakers
- Dr. Angela Ward, Student-Centered Anti-Racist Educator, Transforming Education
Host
- Lauren Trout, Restorative Justice Practitioner, WestEd
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. 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