Here's How We Can Tell If Restorative Practice Actually Has Potential — Or Is Just a Gimmick

How can we tell whether restorative practice does work if we do it right or whether it's just doomed from the start?

This is a fair point that a lot of people are making that fidelity of implementation matters and restorative practice advocates will often talk about how it is a commitment, it is an investment, it does take training, it does take buy-in, it takes a lot really to make anything work and we shouldn't expect restorative practice to be any different.

You know, you have to do it right for it to work because if you don't do it right, what are you even doing, right?

You're not doing the thing that's supposed to work.

So it doesn't make any sense to say that implementation doesn't matter.

Of course, implementation matters.

But that doesn't mean that we should just blindly accept that if something is not working, it's because we're not trying hard enough, right?

I think there are limits to that.

And there are some tests that we can apply to see if something actually has promise, actually has potential, and we should just stick with it.

Or if the whole thing is just kind of a grift.

And I want to be careful not to accuse anybody of participating in a grift here.

But at some point, if it is never working and we're continuing to invest in it and continuing to pay for trainers and continuing...

to push something that is not getting results, well, at some point it does become a grift.

So here are some tests that we can apply to see if restorative practice actually has potential.

The first is clarity.

Can we actually get clear on what it is that we are supposed to do And can we get on the same page about what that would look like?

And one of the big reasons that the religious language that I talked about in my last video is so alarming is because it makes that clarity impossible, right?

There's no way to tell if you're doing it right if it's all this vague language about centering people and building community.

Like, what does that actually mean?

What do you actually do?

And when you're not clear about what people should actually do, the things that people actually do have no connection to the reform.

So one of the big problems that we've seen with restorative practice is that in the absence of any specific guidance on this, principals are not removing students from class or suspending them from school for even very severe violence, right?

framework itself, if restorative practice itself doesn't say anything about what to do about that, people are going to be left to make their own decisions.

And of course, unintended consequences are going to proliferate.

So the second test is we need to be able to think about unanticipated consequences.

What might happen if we lean really hard into this and do a very good job of it and really push for fidelity of implementation?

What unintended consequences could we expect?

And some of the unintended consequences that we see now are highly predictable, completely able to be anticipated Like when you remove consequences for bad behavior and just have conversations, well, it should have been completely predictable that a lot of students would say, hey, you know what?

I'm not really gonna get in trouble for this.

I'm just gonna have to have a conversation with somebody or we're gonna have to have a restorative circle.

No big deal.

I'm gonna do whatever I want.

if you have ever met a teenager, you should be able to anticipate that that kind of thing will happen.

So we need to have clarity about the model.

We need to be actually able to explain it and what it means and what it looks like and how you do it.

And we need to be able to anticipate unintended consequences.

The third test is we should be able to contrast it with what we have been doing.

And This is where I think restorative practice often steals from existing educator best practice with things like caring, like the idea that educators do not already care, the idea that caring about your students is innovative in some way.

I don't think that's the case.

Now, that doesn't mean every educator is as caring as they could possibly be all of the time.

I'm sure we have room for growth in that, but it's not an innovation.

It's not a new idea.

And when we position things as if they're completely new and we ignore that question of, well, compared to what?

Like, what is this a contrast to?

Then we get further lost in the ambiguity of the initiative.

So I hope that is a helpful three-part test around determining whether something actually does have promise and potential and we should continue to invest in it and emphasize fidelity of implementation or if it's actually doomed from the start and just a grift.

Let me know what you think.