Building on Kindness Through Restorative Justice Practices

Our story continues to evolve and grow. Last year, we focused on establishing a school matrix and building the waves of kindness. We continue to ‘ride’ these waves and build student capacity to name, notice and nurture kindness at school. We continue to refer to what kindness looks, sounds and feels like at school and how we can cultivate it. This work, like all work that happens in the beginning of the school year, requires us to take a step back before we can take several steps forward. With almost 60 new students at Westwind this fall, we’ve had to revisit these ways of being at school.

With the matrix framework, we can have more intentional conversations about kindness at school. In addition, we’ve been thinking about how to build ownership over behaviour and heal harm once it’s done. This work falls under the umbrella of restorative justice practices, where students are asked to consider:

Who was affected by what you did?

What do you need to do to make this right?

What were you feeling when you did X? (Powerful, embarrassed, angry, frustrated)

What do you think the other person was feeling when you did X? (Sad, angry, embarrassed)

This work involves a fundamental belief that those who cause harm can restore relationships when they’ve been fractured. We want learners to know that how we respond in a situation is equally as important as the action. Accountability is part of restoring relationships and moving forward in a kind way.  We want learners to know that moving forward requires us to go beyond ‘sorry’ and towards understanding what they were looking for in a situation and how they made someone else feel with their actions.

Our community knows this work takes time. Restorative practices ask us, as educators, to facilitate meaningful conversations between children. To move beyond beyond punishment and towards a better understanding of the motivation behind behaviour.  Ideally, students will lean into this work before escalation happens to solve conflict in a thoughtful way. We hope that students will learn to manage conflicts without the facilitation of adults. We know this is hard work, and it asks students to practice vulnerability and humility. Our current work is walking through the steps with students, so it becomes part of the fabric of our community.

To track behaviour and better understand how we are doing, we’ve created an online survey to see what conflicts are happening and how they are resolved. The survey will be completed by classroom teachers when the behaviour occurs. The survey will help collect data about the following:

What happened?

Who was harmed?

How was the conflict resolved?

Our hunch is that if we continue to weave kindness in all we do, along with restorative practices, we will see a decrease in unfavourable student behaviour and an increase in our students’ ability to solve conflict peacefully.