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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid is at a Quaker school and has been since he was 4. He’s in high school now. They’ve been using restorative justice since before there was a fancy name for it. It is not a replacement for boundaries and consequences, and those things happen too. It also can be really unsatisfying to see a kid who can’t seem to behave continue to misbehave and be disruptive or hurtful. But overall it has produced a really good community in my kid’s school, and my kid behaves and is kind not because he is afraid of punishment but because he wants to do right by people. Other types of discipline certainly create those same results.

It isn’t a fad, but it also isn’t easy and it doesn’t scratch the very human itch for punishment when something bad happens to someone you love. But if you can drop the belief that people misbehave because they aren’t afraid enough of consequences, it is a robust and challenging and meaningful way to be in community.

Consequences still happen, because if someone is unable to keep themselves from hurting or disturbing others they can’t come to school. The purpose of that isn’t punishment, but protection.[/quote]

+1  I think it's honestly the strongest way to build a functioning community, but it's hard and not without problems (esp. in a public school where it's harder to say someone can't come to school for the protection of others and there is less time devoted to it).  But the benefit is that the majority of the community really gets a sense of what it means to be a part of the community.  I think it works best when there's a structure that even "small" things get addressed so kids who are generally well-behaved but with some blind spots become more aware and empathetic about their impact of their actions.  And when there isn't an expectation of consensus--or that the majority is "right" but rather that as a community we make communal decisions that respect differing viewpoints on an incident.

One time I saw it work really well is in a school that started off with discussion of only hypotheticals in the youngest grades (e.g. made up cases) and didn't move to discussion of examples in the classroom until a particular class community was good and fair-minded in discussion of hypotheticals.

When it's not done well it's only trotted out when there's a bigger issue and people don't have the skills to see issues in a proportional way.[/quote]

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