Restorative Principles

Conflict Matters: “Restorative Principles”

I recently attended a conference where there was a lot of discussion of “Restorative Principles”. If you have school age children the words may be familiar as many of our primary and secondary schools have adopted these principles ( “PB4L”) and experienced significant improvements in behaviour as a result.

“Restorative Justice” is formally recognised in a few laws here in New Zealand but it is the underlying principles which are rapidly spreading through our schools that I want to highlight here. One way to get a quick grasp is to make a direct comparison between “traditional” ways of dealing with unacceptable behaviour and “restorative” ways.

Both ask a few basic questions. The conventional questions are along the lines of:
What rule has been broken?
Who broke it?
What punishment is deserved?

The restorative questions for the same situation would be more like:
Who has been hurt and what are their needs?
Who is responsible and what are their obligations?
What can be done to demonstrate accountability and promote healing?
How can we prevent this from happening again?

This is the difference between seeing the problem as someone breaking a Rule and seeing the problem as essentially Relational: the fourth R (after Reading wRiting and aRithmitic) is “Relationships”. One of my teachers¹ famously says: “The emotional climate or culture of the school matters enormously. People don’t care what you know, they want to know that you care. School children will only care about what the teacher is trying to teach them if they know the teacher cares about them. They will only invest time in learning if they feel the teacher is investing time in them. They will only internalise values they see modelled by the teacher”

If this rings true for you, fire up Google and do some research! Meanwhile, over the Christmas holidays, let’s celebrate some of the things Chris identifies as basic human needs² and these include the need to:

To belong. To love and be loved. To care for somebody else and to be cared for. To feel respected and valued. To feel that they matter to somebody else. To have responsibilities. To feel they have a contribution to make.

Have a great holiday season!

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