Restoration Rooms Work for an Obvious Reason — Dedicated Staff Time
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder explains that restoration rooms' success comes from having dedicated staff, not from any special therapeutic approach.
Key Takeaways
- The 'secret' is just staffing - Restoration rooms work because they assign a dedicated person to work proactively with students
- Any setting with dedicated staff would work - Call it a restoration room, a behavior room, or detention — dedicated adult attention is the active ingredient
- Don't mystify what's simple - The success isn't about restorative ideology; it's about human resources
Transcript
It's really interesting how the language of therapy and trauma takes credit for things that we were doing anyway as a profession and kind of gets in the way of just common sense.
I saw this article in Phi Delta Kappen about how the School District of Philadelphia is using these restoration rooms, these places for calming and regulation, and it sounds like a nice room setup, but what really makes it work is that they have a staff member going around to each classroom and looking for kids who are struggling and pulling them out and giving them a minute to calm down, to play, to just get it together, to talk with a trusted adult.
That sounds really good to me.
What doesn't sound good to me is the therapeutic language that obscures why it's working because it's all explained in terms of regulation and trauma and...
And certainly lots of kids have trauma, but the problem with introducing this trauma language is we don't know which kids have trauma.
We don't know what's going on with any given kid on any given day other than what we can see.
And under any paradigm, if you have an adult going around and checking in with kids...
That's probably going to help.
You don't have to have trauma language or therapeutic language to explain what's going on.
Giving kids your time and attention is valuable.
And I think the approach works as it's being implemented in Philadelphia because they have a staff member other than the teacher who can proactively help.
do this kind of thing.
So we have to be clear that there's nothing magical to the trauma angle.
There's nothing magical about the room itself, although this article is largely about the rooms.
What makes a difference for kids is giving them time and attention and having specialized staff like counselors, and they have a different job title here.
But, you know, having people who can spend time paying attention to kids, looking out for them and being proactive, like it's not surprising at all that that works.
And I just think we have to not give this kind of therapeutic language more credit than it deserves for doing things that we've always wanted to do, maybe haven't had the staffing to do.
And that are like, it's just not surprising that it works because kids always benefit from us being proactive and intentional and giving them time and attention.
Let me know what you think.