Restorative practices are used in schools to foster an equitable and positive school culture. Restorative practices focus on strengthening relationships and connections between individuals, both youth and adults, in a school community.
What Are Restorative Practices?
Restorative practices offer schools a relationship-centered alternative to the traditional discipline approach. So, instead of relying on punitive measures like suspensions or office referrals—which disproportionately impact students of color and low-income students—the restorative method focuses on healing, accountability, and connection.
At their core, restorative practices are about strengthening relationships across the school community and addressing conflict in ways that repair harm rather than remove students from learning environments. This shift helps create a more equitable, inclusive, and supportive school culture where students feel safe, respected, and empowered.
Educators typically use two types of restorative practices:
Proactive practices are used to build community, foster healthy relationships, and teach communication and conflict resolution skills before issues arise.
Responsive practices are used after conflict or harm has occurred and offer structured ways for students and staff to reflect, rebuild trust, and make things right.
Many schools implement these practices through strategies such as circles, peer-led programs, and restorative conferences. But understanding the terminology can help bring consistency and clarity to how these approaches are used across classrooms and schools.
Key Terms in Restorative Practices
Restorative Practices: A framework that centers relationships, community, and accountability—aiming to prevent conflict and repair harm when it happens.
Restorative Justice: A formal, responsive process used after harm has occurred, bringing together everyone impacted to share perspectives, reflect, and collaboratively repair relationships.
Restorative Circles: Safe, inclusive group conversations—often guided by a talking piece—where participants listen deeply, speak openly, and build mutual understanding.
Affective Statements: “I” statements that express how someone’s behavior affected others (e.g., “I felt hurt when…”), helping foster empathy without blame.
Restorative Questions: Open-ended prompts such as “What happened?”, “Who was affected?”, and “What can be done to make it right?” that help guide reflection and accountability.
Informal Conversations: Brief, everyday check-ins between students and teachers that address issues early and help prevent escalation.
Community Conferencing: A structured meeting involving all parties affected by a conflict to discuss what occurred and decide, together, how to repair the harm.
Peer-Led Practices: Programs like peer mediation or student-led circles that empower students to take an active role in resolving conflict and supporting one another.
Tools for Restorative Justice Practices
How do schools implement restorative practices? Watch how restorative practices are being used in Oakland schools to foster an equitable, respectful, and positive school community. Restorative practices, an outgrowth of restorative justice, provide ways to prevent and/or constructively address conflict and harmful behavior. Restorative practices in education are intended to build community and maintain healthy relationships. Since all learning is social by nature, strong relationships fostered by restorative processes play a powerful gatekeeping role. They help educators and an entire learning community understand each student’s individual needs in order to create a more equitable experience and outcomes.
These video tools take you inside two schools to hear from students and teachers. You will observe students owning, leading, and participating in restorative processes such as fostering shared values and utilizing positive communication in face-to-face discussion.
Conflict Resolution at Edna Brewer Middle School
Restorative Circles at MetWest High School
Additional School Examples
- Restorative Justice at Fremont High School: Building Trust through Positive Relationships, Sarah Kevan, Learning Policy Institute on the Next Gen Learning Blog. Restorative practices in school isn’t only an alternative to discipline. As seen at Fremont High School, it transforms relationships and culture so students can thrive.
- Connection before Content: Operationalizing the 80/20 Rule of Restorative Practices, Kate Merrigan, Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter Public School on the Next Gen Learning Blog. After a visit to Casco Bay High School in Maine, these five approaches stand out as essential to creating a school culture that supports academic success, strong attendance, and a sense of belonging.
- Surrounded by Water: The Powers of Restorative Practices When Schools Are Immersed, Marcell Kirk, Distinctive Schools on the Next Gen Learning Blog. Restorative practices rely on staff buy-in, modeling restorative conversations in front of students, and developing deep and trusting community connections.
Purpose: Creating a Sense of Community
Part of designing more equitable school models includes community-building: shifting away from traditional disciplinary practices and “command and control” school cultures to embrace collaborative community, co-created values, and accountability for upholding shared ideals.
There’s no evidence that punitive measures make schools safer. What’s more, they’re often disproportionately used with students of color and those from low-income families, with serious negative consequences for those students. Zero-tolerance-style policies push out and further disadvantage the very kids who need learning and community connections the most. (See, for example, Closing the School Discipline Gap.)
Oakland Unified School District has committed to using restorative practices to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. As a school district, Oakland has prioritized keeping more students of color, students from low-income families, and students from challenging circumstances enrolled, progressing toward graduation, and out of the criminal justice system and local detention centers. They view restorative practices as essential to realizing the spirit and goals expressed in their equity pledge.
Oakland’s example shows what’s possible when schools prioritize relationships and equity over exclusion. But they’re not alone—many schools across the country are seeing powerful outcomes from investing in restorative approaches.
Benefits of Restorative Practices in Schools
Restorative practices help schools become safer, more inclusive spaces where students and staff can thrive. By centering relationships, accountability, and empathy, these practices promote healthier learning environments and more equitable outcomes.
Key outcomes include:
Fewer Suspensions and Expulsions: Addressing the root causes of behavior reduces reliance on exclusion and keeps students connected to learning.
A More Supportive School Climate: Circles and restorative conversations promote trust, respect, and a shared sense of community.
Stronger Relationships: Regular engagement in restorative practices helps deepen connections between students, teachers, and peers.
Greater Student Engagement: When students feel heard and respected, they are more motivated to participate and succeed in school.
Improved Equity: Restorative practices offer alternatives to punitive systems that disproportionately affect marginalized students.
- Social-Emotional Development: These practices reinforce core SEL skills, helping students:
Reflect on emotions and behavior (self-awareness)
Regulate impulses and emotions (self-management)
Understand diverse perspectives (social awareness)
Communicate effectively and resolve conflict (relationship skills)
Make choices based on empathy and accountability (responsible decision-making)
By embedding SEL and restorative practices into daily school life, educators create environments where students feel safe, valued, and empowered to learn.
Restorative Justice
Restorative practices focus on resolving conflict and healing harm. Restorative justice seeks the root cause behind individual and group behaviors instead of treating the behavior as an isolated symptom or judging students as good or bad based on isolated incidents. These practices assume that all students are worthy and deserving (a fundamental equity assumption), that behavior is learned, and that a specific incident is an extension of some other issue needing resolution.
Sujatha Baliga, Director of the Restorative Justice Project at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. From the 2013 Workshop on Mindfulness in Legal Education at Berkeley Law.
| Traditional Paradigm | Restorative Paradigm |
| What rule was broken? | What harm occurred and how has it impacted our relationships? |
| Who broke it? | What needs and obligations have arisen from that harm? |
| How do we punish them? | What harm occurred and how has it impacted our relationships? |
Restorative justice utilizes talking circles and honors distributed power among students and the sharing of power between adults and young people. Students practice agency and engage in a form of self-governance as part of their shared identity in the community.
In addition to building an equitable and productive community, these practices help students acquire valuable social and emotional skills. Students practice listening with empathy; constructively communicating needs; problem-solving; honoring and embracing differences in opinion, perspective, and experience; and taking responsibility for personal feelings and actions to repair harm. With regular engagement in ongoing dialogue and reflection, students also build leadership, facilitation, and critical thinking skills.
Use Restorative Justice: Building Healthy Schools
More and more educators are asking, how do schools implement restorative practices? Use these videos from Oakland to help your school staff better understand what restorative practices are, why they’re important to equity in education, and what it could look like in your school. Engage your school team in a review of the research on restorative practices and building collaborative learning environments, such as WestEd’s Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools: A Research Review.
Next, examine the data in your community about disciplinary actions, from referrals to suspensions and expulsions to see if the national trends are repeated locally. Then, invite your team to unpack assumptions behind discipline procedures to reflect upon the extent to which they support and motivate equitable learning. Bolster or accelerate this inquiry using the discussion protocols and design principles found in this toolkit.
Abundant resources exist to help you make the case for restorative practices as a key component of an equitable and healthy school. Once your school team or district commits to the effort, as Oakland did with its equity pledge, seek training for facilitators and build restorative practices into the curriculum and classroom practices. That’s how they will become part of regular school operations and contribute to an overall safe, respectful, and productive climate. In Oakland, the shift away from rules toward strengthening relationships has resulted in better attendance, fewer suspensions, and more positive and productive culture in these schools.
Considerations for School Leaders
- Do you have community partners already interested in implementing this work? If so, could they be an ally or resource to your school? Many urban areas have community organizations (e.g., Oakland’s Community Works) that can lend expertise, training, facilitation, and parent communication support.
- Your school may want to couple the restorative practices with other student supports, such as Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), social-emotional learning (SEL) initiatives, and mindfulness practices. Together these efforts build community and create powerful synergies in the school culture and climate. See the Breathing love into communities TEDx talk from Holistic Life Foundation.
- Attending to your school culture pays dividends. If you don’t already, survey students to find out how they feel about their school climate and culture. Do they feel safe? Respected? Heard? Valued by other students and adults? Dig into their responses. Listen. Then try out something new. Instead of using punishments and rewards to influence the way students behave, try a restorative approach to your classroom management. It will help you uncover underlying reasons for students’ hurtful behavior and nurture their intrinsic desire to treat others with care and respect. Use listening circles in your classroom to host constructive racial and cultural communication among students (and teachers). The listening circles create a safe space to model how we all make mistakes, how mistakes can be healed and overcome, and how to practice empathy for and with one another.
Extended Resources
- Unearthing Hidden Gems in an American Public High School: A Three-Pronged Approach to Meeting the Needs of Diverse Students, from NGLC co-director Carlos M. Beato and his co-author Daniel J. Sass for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice. Infused with personal stories of students who are English language learners and recently-arrived immigrants and refugees, this essay explores how International High School at Langley Park (IHSLP) in Maryland leverages restorative justice practices to begin the long overdue healing process for students, families, and community members.
- Repairing our schools through restorative justice, Jean Klasovsky at TEDxWellsStreetED. Jean makes connections between classroom and school restorative practices that benefited kids in her Chicago public school. Don’t miss her powerful “what if” questions (12:00 min). Is it time to redesign old school discipline and control measures (that don’t work anyway) in your school?
- Restorative Justice: Resources for Schools. This Edutopia blog by Matt Davis includes links to guides, example school programs, tips and resources, and research.
- Bringing Restorative Practices to Your School. This Edutopia article by Laura McClure provides six lessons learned from a New York City-based effort to replace punitive discipline with a community-oriented, restorative approach.
- Pursue professional development at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP). Their advanced programs will prepare you to make systemic changes in your community.