What do restorative practices actually restore?

Recently I have been pondering the question:

• What is it that restorative practices actually restore?

Obviously there are lots of possible answers to this question. For example, a school that was using Martin Seligman's approach to Well-Being would use restorative practices to restore the 5 main elements (PERMA) that contribute to success and well-being, namely,

1. Positive Emotions – experiencing joy and pleasure
   • While the outcomes of bad experiences are the opposites of joy or pleasure, it is important for people to ultimately feel more positive after dealing with the bad things that they have done, or have been done to them. 
   • Unfortunately, some traditional approaches leave people who have caused harm to others in the state of feeling bad (shamed) about what they have done as 'logical consequence'. However this is likely to result in on-going disengagement, resentment and other limiting factors.
   • Similarly, traditional approaches often fail to address the emotional needs of the person who has been harmed so that they continue to feel bad about what has been done to them
2. Engagement (or flow) – being consciously involved in our activities
   • Managed disengagement (isolation, suspension...) is also often seen as a 'logical consequence' of doing the wrong thing but this reduces the likelihood of productive engagement
3. Relationships – having enjoyable and supportive interactions with others
   • Damaged relationships are very often a result of wrong doing. Failing to restore damaged relationships is likely to result in a long term state of reduced success and wellbeing
4. Meaning – creating a purposeful narrative about our lives; being engaged with or serving something larger than ourselves
   • Having been harmed, or having caused harm to others, changes our personal narratives for the worse. Experiencing restoration of positive emotions, engagement, relationships... helps to restore constructive meaning in our lives.
5. Accomplishments – completing our goals and following our core values.
   • Those who have been harmed, or caused harm, are likely to experience a sense of failure. If unresolved this is likely to reduce a person's subsequent capacity to achieve and act in ways that better match their own core values.

Clearly restorative practices provide rich ways of restoring each of the five elements of Well-Being.

What is your school's answer to this important question?

The need for co-evolution of schools

Schools are complex adaptive systems. And the elements (agents) of complex adaptive systems, their interactions, and the system itself all co-evolve. We often experience this as 'everything is connected'.

But this is a big challenge in all attempts to improve education. Failure to understand the implications leads to the failure of most initiatives. Can you think of a recent large scale initiative that was a great success? Did the initiative focus on enabling one aspect of the 'system' (e.g., pedagogy) while constraining other aspects (e.g., structure, or assessment, or...)? Most do and as a result they impede co-evolution.

So many large scale professional learning and school improvement initiatives fail because they attempt to change some agents (staff) but not others (families, students) while keeping the system (especially structures and rules) unchanged. The latter is really preventing co-evolution. And change is emergent - it is not something that is the inevitable linear result of a specific initiative.  Change occurs over time.

For example, Tasmania Tomorrow tried to improve the system by imposing structural and organisational change on the system but did not allow sufficient time for the agents (particularly staff and employers) to co-evolve.

In response to resent attempts to close 10% of Tasmanian schools Professor David Adams outlined the need to attend co-evolution of schools and their communities (more...)

The current low-level use of ICT by most teachers and students is another example despite schools having had computers for more than 30 years and numerous major school improvement and professional learning initiatives. My PhD research showed that the schools that were doing best with ICT were clearly co-evolving with it.  Staff, students and the community were doing new and higher order things in new and better ways.

BigPicture makes a very interesting case study because to provides the philosophical and systemic requirements for nurturing emergence by addressing and enabling the co-evolution of staff, students, families... as well as the curriculum, pedagogy, assessment...

The people involved in BigPicture all have profound stories about the experience & challenges of co-evolving with BigPicture. At the leadership level, most of the challenges involved in implementing BigPicture are really about supporting and enabling co-evolution.

The "first-fit" error

We can't possibly process all the data that is available to us at any moment. Evolution's way of solving this dilemma has been to give us a strong preference for responding on the basis "first-fit" rather than "best-fit".  Choosing a "best-fit" response to each of the situations that we encounter would simply involve too time and energy.

The compromise of "first-fit" is frequently a satisfactory or good response, especially to critical situations. If we are on the African savannah and observe a very  large cat-like creature, with big sharp teeth bounding in our direction it would be wise to start with the assumption that this is a lion, and respond accordingly.

But nor all problems are like an encounter with a lion. For example, not all problematic behaviour is a result of poor social skills, even for those students with poor social skills. Personal circumstances, poor health, misunderstandings, erroneous assumptions... can also play a part.

In one instance, a school had decided that a particular student's problematic behaviour was associated with the student's contact with his father. The school psychologist was uncertain and consulted the student's incident data. As a result she was able show that the school's "first-fit" response to the student's behaviour was not valid. The school then had to look for the "second right answer".

It has been my experience over nearly five decades of working in school education that "first-fit" errors are very common.

The best way to reduce "first-fit" errors is to develop rich conversations with those involved in responding to matters needing to be addressed. Such conversations are based on insightful questions, e.g. the questions of Restorative Practices.

Conversations and supporting students

BASIC PROPOSITIONS


Perhaps conversations are to people what water is to fish: so ubiquitous and all encompassing that we has lost awareness of the conversations in which we are involved. But with increased awareness we will be able to make improved provision for all students.

The following propositions are worth considering:

1. Support for students is best constructed in rich conversations between the student, staff, family, stakeholders and/or  providers
2. These conversations are many and varied and occur over a wide range of places and times
3. The 'data' that informs these conversations comes from many sources
4. The 'data' that informs these conversations is increasingly unique and idiosyncratic for higher needs students
5. Capturing and working with key data (data that has the potential to make a difference for the student) requires well matched tools and practices
6. The conversations, tools and practices need to be consistent and coherent at, and across, all levels: individual student, class, year group, school, .... school system, external support providers and other agencies, ...

Data, sense-making and conversations

We naturally try to make sense of our experiences and the challenges they contain.  In the process, we attempt to construct knowledge that will enable us to make appropriate arrangements and anticipate the likely outcomes of our actions.

Conversations are a form of action learning:

(a) Insightful questions elicit tacit knowledge including hopes, concerns, activity, experiences, observations… from the participants: staff, students, family, stakeholders, support providers…

(b)  Additional insightful questions then draw on the tacit knowledge, stored data and existing professional knowledge in an attempt to

·   make sense of what is happening, and  

·  construct explicit knowledge, actions and arrangements in response

(c) As patterns emerge in the actions and arrangements they become practices

(d) Some of the explicit knowledge, actions and  arrangements may be captured as stored data  for future use and future conversations

Fig. 1 Typical conversations leading to actions

Not all conversations are one-to-one in real-time. We communicate with others in a variety of ways to share our knowledge and make arrangements that enable us to act. The recipients of this “data” then use it to make better sense of their own experiences and to create new knowledge and understandings. These interactive processes are at the heart of the everyday conversations in which we construct the knowledge, arrangements and actions needed to respond to the challenges we face including the needs of the students we support.

Thus conversations are central to the effective use of data to inform action. Having the right conversations with the right people is critical for the effective support of high needs students. These conversations need to be informed by rich data. They also generate new data for current or future use. 

School Improvement - one student at a time

School innovations are often associated with addressing issues such as retention, behaviour, failure to learn well. That is, the leading edges of educational innovation are largely about catering for each and every student.

But why is this an innovation?

Schooling, as we know it, emerged in response to the industrial revolution - perhaps as an aspect of the industrial revolution?

So there is a still widespread use of batch processing: classes, courses, year groups, terms, linear sequenced curriculum and syllabuses, bulk enrolment and examination periods, daily timetables of lessons and other activities....

In fact, here in Tasmania, schools are the only places where more than, say, 200 people start and finish work at the same time. Our schools are the last of our 'factories'!

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with such arrangements for many students.

But what about those students for whom this approach is very difficult, impossible and/or counter-productive?  These are the students who fail to get a full and rich education?

I see Solution Focus as being a very useful tool for creating better schools that provide for all students.

Making it explicit that "school improvement is about improving schools one student at a time" can be helpful. It is likely to reduce the tendency to see struggling students as a problem.

Rather, with this change of mindset schools can adopt a more natural solution-focused approach because they know that providing for each student is simultaneously improving the school as a whole.

Cost cutting - a cautionary tale

There was once a man who became so poor that he thought he could no longer afford to meet the cost of food for his small bird - his only friend in the whole world. He decided he would cut costs by training the bird not to eat.

In this he was very successful. The bird quickly learned not to eat. But then tragedy struck. Shortly after the bird was fully trained it died!!

So sad.

What lessons might we learn from this poor man's experience? For example,

• Why did the bird die?
• How successful was the man's strategy?
• Do a full cost-benefit analysis of what actually happened.
• What alternative strategies might the man have considered?
• What other insightful questions might be asked?

Yes,  it is made up story. So why does it make sense at all? Mainly because it parallels some of our actual lived experience. Worth having in mind in times of austerity.