Restorative Practice

Last year I went to a 3 day seminar with Marg Thorsborne to learn about Restorative Conferencing.  I found her messages extremely powerful, particularly the one that says "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got".  I think with behaviour management of primary school students this is very true.
At our school, at the time, we had some fairly challenging students and we were all aware that we needed to explore different ways of working with this group.

After returning to school with a lot of new learning it quickly became apparent that restorative thinking and practice needed to established throughout the whole school and  couldn't be confined to the leadership team so we organized a two day seminar for Marg to work with the whole staff.  The outcomes I hoped was that we would get consistency across everyone in the school with how we dealt with our students, (make it the talk of the school), and we would review our behaviour management processes and move from a punitive approach to a restorative one.Our review will consider how restorative thinking will become part of how we speak with the students, management the students and what we teach the students.

It has been interesting to see what elements of restorative practice have been adopted already without any direction.  Circle time was become a key part of class programmes and student are becoming more adept at saying what they think and sharing their feelings.  Mini-conferences are common sight during break  times where students collaboratively solve their differences supported by a staff member and students are being taught to give and receive an apology.

I am looking forward to our review meeting and our reflections on where we are then were to next.