The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 252

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 252 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to explore some of the reasons discipline reform isn’t working in some schools.

Something has gone wrong in the way many schools are handling student behavior, and we need to talk about it.

I have been part of a larger push for discipline reform for nearly a decade now. I have promoted approaches to student behavior that prioritize things like relationship- and community-building, repairing harm, trauma-informed teaching, centering the voices of marginalized students, and reducing or eliminating exclusionary punishments. Many of these practices could comfortably fall within the larger category of restorative justice, an approach to conflict resolution with Indigenous roots that is becoming more common in schools every year.

While this should be a positive development, a shift that results in improved behavior in every school that moves in that direction, that’s not what’s happening in every school. For a few years now, I’ve been hearing from teachers in various spaces that the discipline systems at their schools have completely broken down, creating an environment where students basically do whatever they want with no consequences. This has made teachers feel frustrated, angry, unsupported, and in some cases, unsafe.

In at least some of these schools, what I think is happening is that leadership has gotten a broad, “restorative justice light” message that Suspensions Are Bad, that in fact, any consequences at all are now taboo, and teachers should stop sending students to the office for behavior issues. In the rare circumstances when teachers do find this necessary, the student in question should be given a snack and sent back to class. This is not at ALL what restorative practices are supposed to look like, so it’s no wonder this approach isn’t working.

To get a clearer picture of how widespread this problem is, I conducted a survey of my readers, one for teachers and another for administrators. I found that indeed, this is a big problem in a lot of schools. I’ll provide a link to the results over on the blog post for this episode, and if you read through them, you’ll see that a variety of problems are mentioned, including changes in student behavior since the pandemic, disengaged parents, and a shortage of qualified teachers, but I was most interested in looking at how the movement toward restorative approaches was impacting the overall discipline landscape. Here are a few numbers that stood out to me:

My gut tells me that the problem isn’t actually restorative practices; it’s the misunderstanding and misapplication of them. It’s poorly implemented or even barely implemented restorative practices. Because I don’t have the training, the experience, or the vocabulary to flesh out this theory, I invited two people who have all of those things to talk to me about this problem: Alex Shevrin Venet, who has been on the podcast three times to talk about trauma-informed teaching, and bink jones, a restorative justice educator who works directly with schools to develop and implement restorative practices.

And we had a really good conversation. Alex and bink are well aware that restorative practices are getting a bad rap for all the wrong reasons, they unequivocally validate the frustrations teachers are experiencing, and they explain what they think is going wrong in schools that aren’t seeing good results from this framework. They offer a path forward for educators who are desperate for a healthy, respectful, productive climate in their schools. This is one of the longest podcast episodes I’ve ever done, but it’s worth every minute. 

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Now here’s my conversation with bink jones and Alex Shevrin Venet about behavior in schools.

GONZALEZ: Alex and bink, welcome to the podcast. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Hi, Jenn. It’s so great to be back. 

JONES: Jenn, it’s nice to be here. I just waved, everyone. So that’s where we’re starting. 

GONZALEZ: Good to know. So to get everybody, and we were just talking before we started recording that this is Alex’s fourth time now on the podcast, but bink, this is your first time. So let’s start by having you just tell us a little bit about the work that you do and how it connects to the topic we’re going to talk about. 

JONES: Yeah. So I am bink jones, and my technical title is the lead consultant for education and implementation at Triad Restorative Justice in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I started my career as a teacher. I spent 10 years in Oakland public schools. I started at their community day school, which shout out to community day school. It was closed down last year, for better or worse, which was a place for students who had been expelled from OUSD. And so those kids that had a hearing to get in, a hearing to leave, and about 90 percent of my students were on probation and had ankle monitors. After differences with that administration, I moved on, and so closed my time in OUSD as the middle school intervention coordinator with a caseload of about 150 kids. And the cool part about my story is that I was in Oakland Unified in 2007, is when I came to the district. And in 2008 is when they started piloting restorative justice on a wider scale. They had finished at Cole and were ready to move out, and my school was one of the pilot schools. And so I am very lucky, I think, because I got to experience implementation in a large district, in a large school. I got a feel for what can go really well, what feels good, what’s supportive, what’s helpful. And I saw where things can go really sideways and become harmful and challenging. And so I try to bring that to my work where now I help support school districts, schools, and now community organizations who would like to implement restorative practice and want to do a true, full-scale, from the ground up, revamp of how they do things, how they see things, and what their culture is like. And then just because of the fact that I did not get here on my own, I want to shout out David Yousem, Rita Alfred, and Susan Andrien for really being the people that launched my journey into restorative practice in education. And I’m just very grateful for them because I would not be doing this interview if I didn’t have them in my life. 

GONZALEZ: And you were recommended to us by Triad who we reached out to, and actually Alex recommended Triad to me. And I reached out to them and said, “I need somebody who works in schools.” Not because, one of the things we hear from teachers all the time is we’ve got experts that come in who don’t have experience in schools, and they don’t know what it’s really like. And so you’ve got, are you currently working with schools now that are implementing RJ?

JONES: I am. We’re going at things a little bit differently. I’m working in Ashe County schools up in the mountains in West Jefferson and Jefferson, North Carolina. Absolutely incredible people. And so we were looking at what we could do districtwide and it’s hard. It’s challenging. And so we’ve been able to start piloting circles at one school with their sixth graders. It’s going really well. It’s super fun. I’m the one that gets to go lead circle right now as I train the teachers. So I feel spoiled. But yes, I’m doing work with them, and then we just closed a contract, we just closed, you know, I don’t know, a time with a school in the mountains in Boone. We were working with them for four years, and they kind of worked through their plan. They made it to the end and were ready to fly without us. So kind of a recent close to that — 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: — time with a school. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay, good. I’m really excited that you’re here. And then Alex, the reason that I brought you in is because, you know, we’re going to be talking a lot about restorative practices and RJ, but your primary background or at least the reason I’ve had you on over and over again is for trauma-informed teaching. And I feel like that also as a, as a movement in education, something that has built a lot of steam over the last few years, is also sort of part of this equation. So for people that did not hear you on all those other episodes, just give us a little bit about the work that you do. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah. So actually similar to bink, my first many years of teaching were in a small alternative school with students who weren’t being served in their public schools because of behavioral, social, emotional challenges, and that school was very much doing trauma-informed practice before that was a big buzzword in the mainstream. And also part way through my time there, similar to you as well, we started a restorative practices implementation. And so I also experienced that shift of okay, how are we learning about these concepts? How are we getting it started? Where does it go sideways a little bit? I’ve also taught in an after school setting in upper elementary and in community college, and these days I mostly teach teachers. And I’m working with quite a lot of teachers who are looking to make shifts in their own practices that are maybe in line with trauma-informed practice or in line with restorative practice when their school environment is not doing that. And so sort of that feeling of “I want to make this change but actually I have no institutional support.” And so I work with a lot of teachers in that mode as well. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So just to set the stage, the reason we are all here right now is that a lot of teachers are very unhappy with how behavior is being handled in their school. And I heard this sort of anecdotally from various teachers. I was pointed to Reddit threads, which I’m going to be linking to in the notes for this. And I then did a survey of my audience and got 800-plus responses from teachers about this situation in their schools. And over half of them said that they felt that the discipline was being handled ineffectively or very ineffectively in their schools. And so we’re having a conversation today about what is up, what is going on. The terms “restorative justice” or “restorative practices” is getting brought up a lot in these complaints about how things are going at their schools. And also language that sounds like what people are talking about is restorative practices. We’re hearing people saying things like, we’re not allowed to suspend kids anymore. We’re not allowed to issue any consequence anymore. And so to me that also points to probably some kind of an alignment with restorative practices or maybe restorative practices gone wrong. So we’re going to talk all about what we think is happening, where we think the problems are lying. But before we do, I wanted to just quickly make sure we have our terms straight. And so we’ll just quickly get into that, and then we’re going to start actually digging into some of the problems. So I guess, bink, you’ve probably defined this many times for people. So could you give us a sort of real quick definition of what restorative justice/restorative practices is? 

JONES: Yes. I will give you two very quick ones, because there is not a definition of restorative justice. This is our first big stumbling block with basically everything. 

GONZALEZ: Good, okay. 

JONES: There isn’t one. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: And that can make it a little challenging, and so the two explanations I brought to you is one from Fania Davis, Dr. Fania Davis, who’s the founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and sister to Angela Davis. And she says, a truncated version, “Ours is a justice system that harms people to show harming people is wrong. Restorative justice is a justice that seeks not to punish but to heal, a justice that is not about getting even but about getting well, a justice that seeks to make right the wrong rather than adding to the original wrong.” I think that’s pretty clear. And then I got permission from my Ashe County team. They developed this explanation after months and months of learning and processing the principles behind restorative justice and so they say that in Ashe County schools, “Restorative justice is a mindset and a set of practices that support your school community and coming together to build and strengthen relationships. Restorative justice also provides a structure for when conflict or concerns arise by helping us produce more authentic accountability through responsibility, relationships, and repair.” 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Is there a big difference between restorative justice and restorative practices? I tend to use those terms intermittently, and I always associate restorative justice more with the prison system, and I, maybe that’s just because it originated in prisons and indigenous cultures, correct? And it was more called restorative justice back then? 

JONES: Yeah. And so I, the way that I always distinguish it is, like, restorative justice is the outcome. Justice is where we get to. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: Restorative practices are the things we do to get us to justice. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Okay, great. And then in the responses to my survey, there were, there seemed to be some mix-ups sometimes of restorative justice and PBIS. If you could give me a general overview of what is PBIS and how is it different from restorative justice? 

JONES: Well, I can throw in my thoughts, and then I’d be curious, Alex, what your experience is. Because I, my school did PBIS before we moved into restorative justice. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: And so I think PBIS is kind of a cool bridge, or it could be. But the, the thing with PBIS or positive behavioral intervention and support is that it’s a concept of helping students learn and exhibit quote-unquote positive behaviors at school. And they use a tiered model of support, which is a cool concept, again, love that, about what percentage of students should be touched by each, you know, strategy that you’re using. What hits 100 percent of kids versus what hits 5 percent of kids. And I talk so much with my hands, which is not helpful right now. So yeah. So that’s a great connection to restorative justice is how we use the tier system. Also positively phrased agreements and expectations. Love that, you know, telling kids what we want to see versus what we don’t want to see is way more helpful, so I know what to do and the absence of what I’m not supposed to do. And so appreciate that. However, PBIS has a heavy reliance on extrinsic motivation and external rewards, and that is the first place where there’s a major divergence. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: There’s no authentic engagement with the expectations for young people and also it’s muddy whether or not their voice is included in the expectation. And so some schools that are doing PBIS do include kids in agreements and expectations and have them be part of that. Other schools come up with them and say, “This is how it’s going to be. And we’re going to teach you how to do this, and then you’re going to do this.” And so that’s not very restorative. And then lastly, there’s a move towards restoration with this concept of discipline versus punishment. Love that, that we’re shifting closer to this concept of like a consequence or an outcome. But it still uses a matrix. It still uses a prescription. And it still ultimately relies on exclusionary discipline and punishment when things don’t go right, like if you get to the very end of the line, you still have the same exclusion, the same removal, the same experience for kids who don’t meet expectations. So that’s where you have this diversion is it’s, it doesn’t involve the young person in their accountability in an authentic way. 

GONZALEZ: Okay, okay. Yeah. 

JONES: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Thank you. Alex?

SHEVRIN VENET: I would agree with those are, that was a great explanation and just a piece I want to highlight that I think will be relevant as we keep talking is that the philosophy behind PBIS and the philosophy behind restorative practices are very, very different. And the reason why that matters is because your philosophy about what makes people accountable or what makes people change or why people should make it right after they harm people or mess up, your philosophy about that will then guide so much of your actions. And so when I hear things like teachers saying, “I don’t understand why my administrator sent this kid back the way that they did,” or “I don’t get why this kid had a different experience than that kid.” If our philosophy is really muddy because we’re using both PBIS, which says that behavior change comes from the external punishment or reward you receive, and restorative practices which says that behavior change is relational and has to do with your community, if we’re using both of those, which are very different, then of course it doesn’t make sense what’s happening because there’s no logic about why are we doing the things that we’re doing. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Thank you, yeah. Those both kind of reflect my understanding of the difference, and I want to just make sure that when people are listening they hear that. Okay, so we’ve got two more terms I want to make sure that we’re clear on, and Alex, I’m going to hand this one to you, which is trauma-informed teaching or trauma-informed education. What exactly is that? 

SHEVRIN VENET: So trauma-informed teaching in general is when we use an approach that integrates our knowledge of trauma’s impact on students, on teachers, on the school environment, and on the community. Trauma-informed teaching often involves an emphasis on predictability, flexibility, connection, empowerment, and overall a sense of safety, both physical safety and psychological safety. Kind of similar to what bink was saying about restorative practice. There’s not a single definition or program that somebody, some corporation owns. And so you might see different interpretations of trauma-informed practice, and so I think — speaking of teacher frustration — I really want to validate teacher frustration if they go, “I don’t understand why my school is saying that this is trauma-informed and really it’s just chaos.” Because there are so many different approaches. You might have two trainers that seem like they’re teaching about the same thing, and it actually looks very different. So it absolutely makes sense that teachers would go, I don’t really get what this is all about or it feels very muddy because it can just look really different at different times. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So then the last term is exclusionary discipline, which is sort of, my understanding, and I’ve done restorative justice episodes before. And so my own reading and understanding is that that is sort of the thing that has brought restorative justice into schools is the desire to stop doing exclusionary discipline or at least that’s how it’s getting touted. So what exactly do we mean by exclusionary discipline, and why is it something that restorative justice is trying to do away with? And bink, I’ll hand this one to you. 

JONES: Okay. I’d say exclusionary discipline is fairly simple to define. It’s just the practice of isolating students from the majority of the school population, either in an on-campus suspension room, detention in the office, or an out-of-school suspension. Anything that keeps kids away from their usual school environment in the hopes of quote-unquote teaching them a lesson. And why restorative justice? Because there’s mountains and mountains and mountains of evidence that exclusionary discipline doesn’t work. I mean, we’re sitting here, you know, really frustrated right now with the behaviors that we’re seeing across the country. We have a group of traumatized children showing up to school being taught by traumatized adults. Like, we are not okay, and nobody is taking care of us. But we recognize that what’s happening with our kids is not working. They are not okay, and excluding them is not helping them. And so I think people are hungry for a different approach, a different outcome, and restorative justice, there are, there is evidence that when it’s done correctly, when it’s implemented well, those outcomes do change and in a genuine way. It’s lives changed, not numbers changed. Right? You have actual human beings on the other end of that that really have different experiences when you give them this opportunity instead of removing them and shaming them, and not teaching them anything and not having them be accountable to anything. What do I learn when I get sent home for a week? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

JONES: Then I can go kick it and then come back and who welcomes me back? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: So how am I refolded in? Yeah. Kicking kids out, we just know, it’s not working. And so I think people are looking at restorative justice because they’re trying to figure out something else that will work. And I think, we’ll probably get into this more, but one of the reasons that it’s floundering so much is because we’re starting with the end instead of the beginning. Restorative justice is not a discipline program. It’s like Alex said. It’s a new way of seeing, it’s a new way of being. It begins with connection, it begins with community, and everybody’s trying to start with the end, and it doesn’t work that way. And it creates massive frustration and a massive lack of safety for teachers. I mean, when I hear teachers telling me about what’s happening under the name of quote-unquote restorative justice, I get why they’re hungry for exclusionary discipline too because it feels like the only thing that will save them. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

JONES: It’s scary to feel like you don’t have any support, to feel like you don’t know what to do when a student isn’t meeting expectations or starts to behave in a way that is unsafe for you or the other kids. And so yeah, if I don’t know any other option, exclusion is the best thing I can think of because that’s what’s going to keep me alive. 

GONZALEZ: And that, I think that’s a really interesting point is that the exclusionary discipline does not work to change the student’s behavior, but in the eyes of all of the people in the building, it’s keeping everybody else safe, it’s keeping the environment sound for the other kids to continue learning. And that, I think, that’s what I’m hearing the most often is that this removal of exclusionary discipline is tying their hands, and it’s making other kids unsafe, it’s making the teachers unsafe, and at the very least, it’s disrupting the environment so that nobody can learn. And so at the very least, the exclusion restores that environment for everybody else. 

JONES: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: It doesn’t fix the problem with the kid that’s doing the thing, but it’s helping everybody else. 

JONES: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: And so that can be argued, and I want to make sure, we talked ahead of time about wanting to make sure that the teachers who are frustrated feel heard in this episode. So before we start digging into some of the issues, Alex, did you want to say anything else about that last point, about exclusionary discipline or anything? 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah. I think that it’s just important to name here that part of the why we’re looking to move away from exclusionary discipline, beyond the heaps of evidence that it doesn’t work, right, it also, it harms, and that’s part of where trauma-informed practice works against exclusionary discipline as well. There’s evidence that exclusionary discipline can cause trauma and stress to kids that’s really long-lasting. There is tons of evidence that exclusionary discipline can work towards what folks know as the school to prison pipeline that ends up criminalizing kids for developmentally appropriate struggles in school. And so there’s a huge justice issue connected to this as well where it absolutely makes sense that teachers are feeling like this exclusionary practice, it works, it brings things into control, it makes me feel safer in the moment, but there’s a tradeoff. A momentary feeling of safeness for other folks is maybe potentially causing a very long-term lack of safety for the students who are impacted by it. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. I’m glad that you mentioned that. It’s disheartening how often now I see the expression school to prison pipeline put in quotation marks as if to mock it, as if to say it’s not a real thing. And I know that later on I was asking for other resources, and you mentioned Monique Morris’ book “Pushout” and I saw that and I thought, hey, I interviewed her in 2016. So we’ve got a whole podcast episode about the book “Pushout.” But it is a real thing in that it’s taking a problem behavior, and it is putting that into an environment where it’s going to just continue to get worse and escalate. It’s not going to — so even if the person’s whole goal is self preservation, it’s still coming back to you in another form somehow, societally or something. This is not actually fixing the problem. So we’re going to move into some of the specific complaints that teachers have had, and I’m going to skip over the first one, which is inconsistent consequences because they’re talking a lot about how different administrators issue different punishments irregularly and inconsistently. But I almost think that that is a byproduct of the bigger problem, which is just a misunderstanding of what exactly are we doing here, which is the misapplication of either restorative practices or something that they think is restorative practices or that they have been told — I think, I’m even hearing from some schools where they’re saying our district has told us we can’t suspend kids anymore. And that’s literally the entire message that they’ve gotten, and therefore they’re just not even using the expression restorative practices, but I think that’s where it’s coming from. So what do you think is happening that’s causing this problem? Maybe if you could sort of, you said you’ve seen this happening in some schools. We’ve got teachers who are being told you can’t suspend kids anymore, and also teachers saying, now the responsibility is all on me. I’m not allowed to send them to the office without 10 steps of other things that I’ve done, and so I just can’t, we can’t even discipline kids anymore. So what are you seeing, bink, in schools that, where this has just gone haywire? 

JONES: Yeah. So in our prep, you had asked about people responding about misapplication, and I said it’s not even a misapplication. It’s a complete misunderstanding because the thing that you’re talking about the most, this idea of I either can’t send a child out or when I send a child out, they come back to me with candy and a sticker. I hear that so much. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

JONES: And that’s not restorative practice at all. So let’s say foundationally where that goes wrong is what’s happening in that classroom to begin with. What tools and time was that teacher given to build connection and community in the classroom. Are they allowed to take an hour a week to do circles, to do check-in, to have time with their kids? Or are you pushing them to just get ready for every test that is possibly coming their way? So that’s always my first question is what support has the teacher been given to create an environment where everybody feels like the responses could work? If the responses aren’t working, to me that says there’s not good preparation. And then when you have this disconnect between what happens with the admin and the teachers, a lot of times what happens is administrators don’t attend professional development. It’s so interesting to me. They have other stuff to do, more important things to do. And I can’t think of anything more important than this when you’re really, if your goal is to change the culture of your school, every single person you can get in that room needs to be in that room. And if my administrators aren’t there learning what I’m learning or being asked to do what I’m doing, how could they possibly support me? How could they possibly provide what I need? Because they don’t even know what I’m doing. They just know what the district said on a piece of paper or what the new code of conduct says, but there’s no actual, like I said, there’s no practices, there’s no skills, there’s no intention that they’re being given. So you have this kind of imaginary situation where everybody’s behaving like their hands are tied but really we need to start looking at how we’re spending our time, how we’re investing our resources, and what we are saying are our priorities so that administrators do show up and learn what they’re asking their teachers to do, so that they can support them so there’s a common language, a common understanding. I know, I may not know the exact action that my principal will take when a student lands in their office, but I do know the concept and the philosophy they’ll be approaching things with, and I know that in that conversation, they’ll have my back, and I know they’ll come back to me if I need to be accountable for something too, right? That’s the other part of it that does get missed is we mess up. I lose my temper. I get crabby. I owe my kids apologies sometimes. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And so if I trust my administrator, if I know they’ve gone through this learning with me, and they understand what I’m going through, it’s a lot easier to know when the kid comes back with something what happened on the other side and that there’s going to be follow-up. If I never get follow-up, there’s no restoration. That is not restorative justice. That’s some other weird alternative consequence system happening that doesn’t have a name. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Right. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: [crosstalk] supposed to be happening because that definitely came up a lot in the survey too —

JONES: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: — is teachers saying that they weren’t hearing anything else after this kid came back from the office. 

JONES: Restoration involves everybody who was involved in the original conflict and harm. And so if you’re, just like fundamentally, the definition thing, right, if you are not involved in looping back in with what happened with your student, that’s not restorative justice. You were never restored. Period. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Right. And I think what we’re talking about is this idea of those fundamentals and the philosophy kind of being missing, and part of that being about schools, you said before, trying to skip to the end, skip to the accountability practices without first building relationships. Like something I’ve heard a lot in restorative justice trainings is you can’t restore to a relationship that didn’t exist in the first place. If we don’t have a relationship, if I don’t really care that I impacted you, then why would I care about making it right with you? And I think even stepping a little further back to big picture, another reason I think that this is so challenging to really implement in schools is because like bink said, restorative justice is not a program, it’s a paradigm. And it’s actually a very radical paradigm shift. If you really look at it, what you’re asking schools to do when they implement restorative justice is reject what American society says about how we hold people accountable for harm and do something completely different. That is a huge ask. That is a huge ask, right? That’s taking what people have been taught their entire life about how should people be accountable when they break a law. What should happen to someone when they steal from you? What should happen to someone who commits violence? These are the core questions that restorative justice looks at and really tries to shift of, hey, throwing them in jail doesn’t work. Giving them a fine doesn’t work. What does work is having tighter-knit communities where people are truly accountable to one another. It’s a lot messier than throwing people in jail and giving them a fine. It’s a lot slower than throwing people in jail and giving them a fine. And so it really is, it’s just a huge shift. And so applying that to school, you’re not only asking people to radically rethink student behavior, you’re also asking them to radically rethink all of their assumptions about right and wrong, and the legal system in America, and then you’re also asking them to be able to articulate that well enough so when a parent calls you and says, “My kid says that their classmate ripped up their project. I want to know why that kid doesn’t have a detention.” And so in my work at this alternative school, one of my roles was doing some case management, and so I was communicating with parents when they would say, “Hey, I heard my student got in a fight. Why isn’t the other student suspended today?” And it took quite a lot of training for me to be able to articulate the whole philosophy in that moment in a way that the parent could understand, they could see what we were doing, they could feel comforted that their kid’s needs were being met. So I think that’s part of where the disconnect is coming is that schools are giving five professional development hours to restorative justice and saying, “Great. We’re done.” Right? How could you do that in five hours? I think what bink was saying about you just worked with a school for four years, and now they’re ready. That’s more of the commitment that we need and most schools are not doing that. 

JONES: No. I think the hard part is in the end product where this has worked, those parents are part of the community too. They aren’t calling asking what happened to the other kid because they already know, and they know what will happen to their child if, not when, when their child makes a mistake, because they’re gonna, they’re kids. It’s what happens. So when you really have a thoroughly restorative culture built, you don’t have those calls that often because most people understand what’s happening. And then the other thing, Alex, that you brought to my mind is just about the paradigm shift, the hard work here is that we spend, I spend the first year, the first two years sometimes, just talking about this mindset, just trying to convince people that this could work, that this is a way we could see accountability, that it is possible. And so that’s the other thing is all these grants come out and they want to see outcomes in the first year. They want to see suspensions change and detentions different and attendance is up. It’s like, dude, by the end of the first year, hopefully I have teachers who are now feeling comfortable with the possibility that maybe this could work. And the last part I’ll say is when I do work with people, I let them know, you’re not changing the way you do things at school. If you try to make this something where it just turns on and off as you walk in and out of that door, it’s not, it’s not going to work very well because this really is what Alex said. This is about changing the way you think justice is produced and changing the way you think that community is formed. And so my own personal relationships became dramatically better when I started to learn about restorative practice because I was able to function more justly in my life. But yeah, I think if you see this as a program, it can be a little bit doomed to fail. 

GONZALEZ: I’m going to recap a couple of the things that I’ve heard you say because what I’m starting to see is sort of a theme here because I’m hearing these are all things, like if this is happening, it’s not restorative justice. If this is happening, it’s not restorative justice. So if the teacher gets no follow-up from admin after an office referral, it’s not restorative justice. If your school only did a five-hour training and that was all of your professional development, it’s not restorative justice. If parents are not on board, if they’re not brought into some of these trainings and educational things, it’s not restorative justice. If the focus is only on numbers and data and reducing the number of suspensions, because I started looking for, you know, somebody in these Reddit threads was saying “there’s no research that restorative justice works” and I thought, “That doesn’t sound right.” But then a lot of the numbers I was looking for only said, it’s working. Our numbers of suspensions are down. I’m like, hold on. That doesn’t tell me anything at all. That tells me you probably have a lot of pissed off teachers in your building actually because if that’s the only measurement you have, and this, I could be wrong in this, but if that’s the only metric that you have, that couldn’t, that could mean nothing at all. Right? 

JONES: Not just that but Alex, I’m curious what your experience is with this on the equity piece, one of the big drivers in Oakland was that they were having disproportionate suspensions of kids of color, particularly young men. And that’s kind of been the trend across the country. People are implementing restorative justice to try and ameliorate disproportionality that’s happening. Those numbers, like you said, don’t mean much because what I’ve also seen happen is that the on-school suspension or in-school suspension room becomes a quote-unquote restorative center and guess who gets disproportionately referred to the restorative center? So you just have kind of this new problem, like the same problem but in a new outfit. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

JONES: And so you’re right, numbers on the surface really can’t tell us that much about true culture shift. You need, you need deeper data. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Alex, what do you think? 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah. I think that like anything, if you don’t unpack the ways that bias is present, racism is present, ableism is present, all of those things, then the way that you implement your restorative practice or your PBIS or literally anything else is going to contain your bias, and your racism, and your ableism. So it’s, like I said, it’s not a simple thing that you can just do in five hours. There’s actually a lot of very interconnected pieces of the work that have to happen. But, you know, I think that, I’m sort of anticipating your next question, Jenn, which is okay, so if you’re a teacher and you’re listening to this and going, all right. So my school would have to make a massive investment for multiple years for any of this RJ stuff to work. What the heck am I supposed to do about that, because I can’t wait another year to just get the philosophy. I can’t wait four years to get stuff to change. And so I think that this is where it’s helpful to recognize that although all those things you just said mean that your school is not implementing restorative justice, teachers actually can use a lot of the pieces themselves, even without that systemic support and can find, actually, a lot of traction with smaller strategies underneath the umbrella, even if you don’t have the systemic support. And I personally work with a lot of teachers who are really using sort of an experimentation mindset, a lab mindset with their classroom management these days because everything is so hard just sort of experimenting with different little strategies to shift how they’re doing things. So one that I’ve had a lot of teachers try lately is there’s a tool called a restorative conference, which is where after an, we’ll call it a behavior incident but maybe an act of harm or student disruption or just something went wrong, a restorative conference is to meet with the student and it can be like two minutes, and just say, “What happened? What were you thinking about at the time? What have you thought about since? And then what do you think could make this as right as possible?” So not necessarily guiding the student to apologize but how are you just going to make this situation better for the people who were impacted? You don’t need a whole school implementation of restorative justice to do a restorative conference. And the teachers that I’ve worked with that are experimenting and just trying this out almost without fail, they have that conversation, they go, “Whoa, okay. I learned something behind this behavior that I had no idea was going on.” “Oh my student really stepped up into accountability with a creative idea I wouldn’t have thought of.” Or even just, “I think the student trusts me a little more because I didn’t drop a consequence on their head. I invited their perspective.” And so I think that we can validate the frustration that, oh my gosh. My school is totally going sideways with this and you can still have pieces that you try out on your own. 

JONES: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

GONZALEZ: A teacher can have a more restorative classroom, basically give themselves the tools that their training didn’t give them to start managing things better. And you all had pointed this out earlier that without the relationship and community-building piece to start with, you’re never even going to be able to have those kinds of conversations. Because I’m imagining a teacher who already has kind of a hostile, adversarial relationship with many of their students, you can’t, I mean, I’m imagining a student responding to some of those questions and say —

JONES: Right. 

GONZALEZ: — don’t trust the teacher. 

JONES: Yep. 

GONZALEZ: And so, yeah. 

JONES: Well, or if you’re a teacher’s mindset is, “What happened? What were you thinking?” Right? 

GONZALEZ: The tone is so different. 

JONES: “What are you going to do to make things, what are you going to do to make things right?” Holy cow, man. Okay. All good. I’m just going to back up. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: So yeah. That’s why that mindset piece is so important because it changes your tone. 

GONZALEZ: So where would they start? 

JONES: So I have some ideas, mostly resources, that I refer to. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SHEVRIN VENET: But I think as far as actions to take, what I kind of advise is spend your summer thinking about what you want your classroom to feel like. When you started teaching, how did you imagine it was going to feel to be in your room? And start writing down what you think is needed to create that space. What do you need from your students? What do you need from yourself for that to happen? And then when you show up to school, you can share with your students what your dream is for your classroom, and you can ask them what is theirs? And then how can we create the space that we both feel safe in, that we all feel good in together. And hey, when we step out of our agreements, when I mess up, this is how I want you to let me know. When you mess up, this is how we’re going to let each other know. You create that container inside and ideally, you’re getting to teach these skills, getting to build this community without content, with just being able to talk with each other around humanness but if you don’t have an administrator that’s supportive, if you do have somebody that’s on you and kind of pushing content from the jump, it’s just about kind of looking at what personal connections can you bring in. And even if it’s math, the conversation could be about what parts of math do you feel confident in? And what about math can be scary? What about math will you need help in? You can come together and have a circle in math. “About 90 percent of us missed this problem. Let’s go around and talk about how we do long division.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And so there are spaces for these conversations to happen, for you to hold them, even if the people above you aren’t giving formal space for restorative practice. I think yeah, I mean, like Alex said, I was doing restorative justice long before I knew I was doing restorative justice. And then people just came along and pointed out what I was doing and said really the goal is to become aware of the things you do that make your classroom great so that you can do them with intention, and so that you can get to them when you’re dysregulated. Because if I know what I do that makes my classroom great on purpose, when it’s not just an accident, it means why I am about to flip my lid, I can remember the practices I have that I do. I don’t go so dysregulated that I just hope I do the right thing. And so I think that’s it. I think setting agreements with your kids or involving them in classroom guidelines is really, really important because I am much more likely to abide by something that I had a voice in creating, and I can hold you accountable more easily to something you had a voice in creating. It’s not my rule alone. You agreed that this would be what makes the functional classroom, or we all agreed this is what makes a functional classroom, and right now you’re just not meeting an agreement, so how can we get you back? How do we pull you back in? I think taking the time to think about how would you like to establish student autonomy in your classroom while still knowing that at the end of the day you are in charge. Ultimately, you are the safety keeper. Ultimately, if the kids come up with an agreement that is off the wall, you work through that and talk about, okay, what is actually going to help us? And then I think learning certain frameworks, I had posters all over my room. So Alex just named that five-question, we call it a restorative chat. Usually when we say conference, we’re referring to that more formal kind of you’ve done a lot of preparation and interviews and stuff. But yeah, this two-minute, hey, what happened? What’s going on? I have those questions hanging in the back of my room. My students knew that that’s what we were going to talk about when I pulled them to the side. It wasn’t this surprise conversation that all of the sudden they had to think about the answers. They knew that that’s what we were going to go through to get to the other side. I use nonviolent communication. “When this happens, I feel” or “because I need or value.” Would you be willing to? So when people are tapping their pencils on their desk, it distracts me because I need more quiet when I’m thinking. Would you be willing to tap your pencil on your leg instead? 

GONZALEZ: I’m still trying to listen to this from the — because I’m imagining classrooms where the relationships are already there, and I’m picturing a teacher who is just so over this stuff and has a bunch of kids who are just not wanting to be there even, and are over all of it, like “I don’t even care about this,” who would have smart-ass answers for even those five questions. Things have just sort of broken down. Because everything I’m hearing you say, I’m like, that sounds totally reasonable. That sounds like something I would have been able to do with my students no problem. So I’m trying to figure out, how do we reach those teachers who are just like, this is all bullshit. I just don’t — you know what I mean? And they’re just so over it, you know. And so, are there schools that are doing restorative justice that are also doing some kind of removal of students who are creating a problem? Or is that not — do they not exist? Let’s address that. 

JONES: No. 

GONZALEZ: Can they coexist? 

JONES: Yes, they can coexist. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. What does that look like? 

JONES: Let’s be, I think, be real that it, if we’re going to say restorative, authentically restorative, all the way around — 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: That’s not possible. Institutionally, our society is not created for any institution to be authentically restorative from beginning to end. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the structure. Like Alex said, if your school is doing this thing that is completely counter to society —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: — that’s very, that’s very hard to do and not rely on any of the social tools that we have. And so what I suggest is if you get to the point where safety is so challenged somebody needs to be removed, that’s when you have something called a COSA or a circle of support and accountability. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: Like I had a kid that was a great kid but he was a bully, and he was picking on all these kids, and we did these alone little chats and chats and chats, and they weren’t getting anywhere. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And so I said we need to do something deeper. We got his parents. We got two teachers that really cared about him. We sat down together. We had a conversation about what’s going on and the big picture. And what do you need, what’s causing all this? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: How can you make connections in a more healthy way? And then we move forward, and things went really well. His trajectory did shift. And so like Alex said, there’s a slowness, unfortunately, that comes with this. But I do, yes, there is time when sometimes we don’t have any other option, we don’t have another place to go. So the question becomes what do you do after that? How do you welcome that student back in? How do you make sure that you address what caused them to leave to begin with? How do you make sure that the teachers feel safe and comfortable with the student returning? How do the other kids — you know what I mean? It really depends on how deep things went, but yes. The question becomes if I have to remove you, if I can’t figure out any other way, then I need to focus on how do I bring you back in? 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: And that’s where I can restore things. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. And probably in a lot of schools that rely on exclusionary discipline aren’t doing that part of it. It’s just —

JONES: Right. 

GONZALEZ: — take them away and then bring them back. 

JONES: Nailed it. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SHEVRIN VENET: And I think, I think this is where you get one of those misinterpretations of trauma-informed practice. People go, oh well, you can never ever remove a kid because trauma-informed practice says you can’t remove them or whatever. But trauma-informed education is about people need to feel safe, and so if I cannot ensure that everyone’s going to be safe if these two kids or if this group and that group are in the same room together, people cannot commit to really basic safe behavior, then the trauma-informed thing is to create some space. And so that might look like this kid is not in the classroom for the rest of the week. But the difference between that and exclusionary discipline is that that time out of the class is very active. It’s doing a conversation like what bink just said. Maybe it’s doing educational pieces. Maybe there’s family meetings. There’s active time connected with the person who’s being removed with the goal of let’s recommit to the base level of safety so we can get you back into that classroom. But we’re not ever sacrificing student safety in the name of reducing time out of class or whatever, but we’re just doing it in a way that really holds, again, that philosophy that kids are not going to change by the shame of being kicked out of class. Kids are going to change with support and with understanding of what was behind the behavior in the first place and addressing what’s going on for you as opposed to, I’m just going to send you home for five days and hope that you figure it out yourself. 

GONZALEZ: It almost seems like the removal is almost just like a tourniquet. When you’re out in the woods and somebody has gotten injured, you’ve got to do something right now — 

JONES: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: — to stop things from getting any worse, but you’re not, that’s not the healing part of it. That’s just a temporary safety measure, basically. 

JONES: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: I think I’ve got two things I want to ask because there’s the end of sort of what do people do? There’s the question of funding because a lot of what you’re saying requires schools to have staff available for this extra support because I’m even thinking, if I’ve got 35 kids, how am I pulling a kid aside to have this two-minute chat if the rest of my class is already kind of, eh, and then this idea of who’s going to be supporting this child when they are being removed for a temporary time? Who’s doing this work? Because the teachers are all saying, “I’m already overburdened.” So in some ways I think the only way this actually gets solved is if somebody, teachers or parents or somebody in the community, actually starts advocating for more funding for support staff for these things to happen. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: There’s only so much individual teachers can do if they’re fully loaded. 

JONES: Yeah, yeah. You need a restorative justice coordinator, whether that’s your school guidance counselor who does RJ coordinating part time or you have someone who — a lot of schools have found the money for ISS and OSS. So if you can find the money for in-school suspension and on-school suspension, you can transform that person into what Alex was talking about, and you can have a truly restorative center on your campus. You can have a space where kids do go to process what happened, where they do figure out how to avoid this happening again, and be prepared to take accountability with that follow-up piece that we talked about. Going to the restorative center alone is not enough. There needs to be a reconnection with whoever asked you to go there. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: But I think we find, we have the money in places. We just have to decide to reallocate it. Right now the school that I’m trying to [inaudible] circles in I’m competing with a new literacy curriculum. I am not going to downplay the importance of literacy, but I am going to tell you that if your kids are showing up traumatized and disconnected, it doesn’t matter how awesome that program is. It’s not getting through. So I think it’s just about remembering what the foundation is and where we start, and letting that be the guide. But I don’t, yes, funding would be awesome. Money for people to come in, if people could afford me more, that’d be really rad. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: I would love that. And right now, the administration actually just jeopardized what Alex and I do pretty tremendously. There is an executive order to return to quote-unquote common sense discipline. And so I’m very scared of what’s coming. I’m very scared of our ability to access this work for kids, to help bring about these changes for kids and what we’re about to potentially return to. And that’s why I think what you’re saying is so important, Jenn, and what Alex is pointing out. Your locus of control is everything, and you might not be able to change your whole school system, but you absolutely can transform what happens in your room. You can be that teacher that everybody looks at and wonders, why do all the kids feel safe in there? How come everybody wants to go there for lunch? How come that teacher’s always being asked to run clubs? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And some teachers are going to be jealous, and some teachers are going to want in. And that’s how you get to spread the word. You get to be the seed because people are going to start to notice that your room feels good, that you’re happy to come to work, that you don’t feel so frustrated anymore. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: And that you do feel connected with your kids, and they’re going to want to know why. They’re going to want to know how. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And so I don’t want people to feel like just because their principal is on them and their school insists on using punitive discipline that their hands are tied. Because it starts with you. It has to. 

GONZALEZ: We’ve done a lot of talking just now about not focusing too much on the end, on the exclusion and on the end result, and we’ve also talked about the very beginning, the relationship building and the foundation and community building. Could we quickly kind of go through some of the standard RJ practices? There’s circles, right. I know a lot of people brought up, when they were asked in this survey, does your school do restorative practices, a lot of people said, “We did circles for a while, but they didn’t work, so we stopped.” So the message is out there for sure that something to do with RJ, circles is something to do with that. Maybe, is that, that is a foundational practice, correct, of restorative practices? What should it look like? 

JONES: Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s another thing is circles, usually not done well or with integrity, and that’s because teachers are not trained. Again, they’re not given the tools or the time of a practice to get good at this. So if you’re hearing this and you feel like, “Dude, my circles just were trash,” it probably was not you. It was probably whoever helped you get ready. So circle has to be planned. It can’t be something that’s just spontaneous. It does take intention. It does take thought and preparation, and I think one thing I see go wrong is when people try to wing it. Be prepared, being prepared allows you to go wild if you need to, because you at least have your base, you know what you could come back to. But if things start to slip and you haven’t prepared. For instance, I had a teacher who wanted to do a circle about favorite foods, but she didn’t have guidelines in place first. So she wasn’t prepared for the fact that kids were going to go “ew, gross” to some of each other’s favorite foods. 

GONZALEZ: Interesting. 

JONES: If I had planned that circle with intention, as I’m introducing it, I ask the kids, “Today we’re going to be talking about favorite foods. What are some guidelines we might need today so that people don’t feel icky when they share what their favorite food is?” And eventually we would get to the idea of “don’t yuck my yum.” Ah, okay. “So when you hear somebody say something that you would not enjoy, what are some ways you can respond?” “Oh, that’s interesting.” “Hmm.” Like, we practiced, but I could prepare for that because I thought my circle out ahead of time. I didn’t just dive in and then I have kids start yucking each other, and now I have this problem of disrespect, and I’m like, “Oh, what do I do?” 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: So I think you asked about resources, and I do think circle is huge. Like, I’m sorry, I just think it’s a great practice. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: Other things you can do are nonviolent communication, I mentioned that, responsive framework for when you do need to respond. It’s also really good for when you honor things. When people clean up the classroom and pick up trash even though it’s not theirs, I feel really proud because I value our space, and it feels really good to see you value our space too. And you can do that without the “would you be willing.” And I think Alex has got some wonderful practices in her books. And I really recommend looking at trauma-informed education for the practices that you want to do if you’re trying to be restorative, because I think what Alex said about you can’t restore something that wasn’t there. And so what should you be doing if you’re trying to build this and not just respond, look at what trauma-informed practice says to do because those are restorative practices. If you, you know, the way you greet your kids, the way you remind them to get back on track, the way you check in with them. And I’ll remind you, we take two minutes to pull a kid aside if they’re struggling, right? If you’re not getting two times three, I do kneel down next to your desk, and I do take some time with the other 33 kids doing whatever. 

GONZALEZ: Yep, yep. 

JONES: — to figure out, why can’t you do two times three? So if I have two minutes to kneel down and figure out why you can’t do two times three, I have two minutes to kneel down and figure out why did you throw your pencil in the trash can instead of get up and walk to it. You know what I mean? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

JONES: Just remember you do have that time. You are skilled. You have those moments. Throw a hangman up on the board. Put a vocabulary up on the board. Get a kid that knows how to do something, a problem on the fly, you all are creative. You’re brilliant people. I know you are, and so it’s just about what’s that quick little distraction you can throw up and have the conversation on the side. Again, they become easier when the kids are taught this is what we do when we respond to conflict. This is how we have these conversations. So that way it is a two minute conversation because you’re not trying to convince them that this is how you communicate. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: They already know this is how we communicate. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: And so that’s the thing. It’s a practice. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: It’s always practice. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

SHEVRIN VENET: One other practice that I want to highlight that’s part of RJ but also I think just in general sort of a more empowering approach to classroom management is the idea of solving problems together as a community. This is something that if there’s any Carla Shalaby fans in the house, that she talks about in her book “Troublemakers” and in her work. That often in schools we take something that’s actually a community problem and we treat it as an individual one. So for example, a kid who is constantly buzzing around and not sitting down in the circle and distracting everyone, that’s actually a community problem. Our community is having a hard time because not everybody in our community is showing up to our morning circle together. But we often treat it as just that kid’s problem, and we think about, how do I, how do I give a consequence to this kid? Or how do I separate this kid because they’re being distracting? What happens when we bring to the whole class, hey, sometimes in our morning circle, not everyone’s sitting down. What should we do about that as a group? Again, this is sort of what bink was saying before with your tone of voice. You can’t do it in a way that is shaming or is calling out certain kids, but there’s actually quite a lot of opportunity for us to bring things to the whole group and say, how do we solve this together? How do we support one another together? And I’ll bridge this to something else I really wanted to say on this episode, which is that we talk a lot about this behavior crisis in schools and discipline crisis and kids are struggling these days. I don’t know if any of you have been to a grocery store, an airport lately but everybody is struggling. The adults are having a behavior crisis. One of my, I work in retail for one of my side gigs, and the adults are having a lot of behavior problems that I’m experiencing up close when I’m, when I’m interacting with them. We’re going on, you know, it’s been five years since COVID. Our political situation in the US is words, all kinds of, it’s a cluster is what I’ll say about that on the air. And everyone is stressed, and the kids are picking up the stress of all of the adults around them. The adults are not feeling well resourced and grounded and regulated. So of course the kids are not feeling grounded and resourced and regulated. And to me, one of the things that happens when we’re so stressed and overwhelmed is we feel that sense of isolation and us versus them, and let me just protect myself. And one of the antidotes to that, especially if we look from a trauma-informed lens, is community and connection and actually how are we in this together? And when we add on the layer of these practices are going to be under attack from the government. We’re going to see a lack of funding. We’re going to probably see additional criminalization in schools. And a lot of us want to really push back against that, and the only way to do that is together. And so when we take the time in the classroom to model to our students that when your peer is having a hard time, we all can help with that. We all can be responsible together. When one of us is struggling, all of us are struggling, but the option isn’t just get them out of here so I can go back to my work. It’s how do we support them? It goes back to what bink said about what if we tried to respond to harm in a healing way? And so to me it really gets at this bigger picture of actually when we do these practices in schools, we’re helping disrupt some of these really harmful dynamics that we’re seeing out in the world right now. And I think that if people come in feeling skeptical about why should I put in all this work? To me, it goes back to that really big reason why I want to work in education is let’s help really shift these things. So I wanted to make sure to say that. 

GONZALEZ: I’m glad you said that, because I think a lot of teachers are under so much stress right now that they have completely forgotten why they started to do this in the first place. And it’s understandable. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: I think too, something that I thought you were going to say, which I think is another piece of this too is us taking care of each other as adults, not just in an us versus them way. 

JONES: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: But there’s not, so many teachers I’ve heard this sentiment in the last few years of just nobody’s taking care of my needs, so how can I pour out to somebody else? And maybe if our admins aren’t going to be able to do that, and I think admins are suffering from a major loneliness crisis too. They’re not helping each other and support, they’re not getting their support either. 

JONES: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: So it’s just trickling down. 

JONES: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: But maybe teachers can also nurture each other in a way that doesn’t make the kids the enemies but it’s just, we also need, you know, support and community building too. 

JONES: And I think that’s the thing in a school when you have a whole school that’’ gone to a restorative culture, you do have regular staff circles. That’s something that’s part of it is people having an opportunity to check in with each other as human beings. And it could be as simple as just a five minute quick connection question at the beginning of staff meetings before you do launch into business. But a restorative school is taking time somewhere for that. And so if you’re a teacher that isn’t in the restorative school but that is feeling isolated, that is feeling siloed, there’s a book called “Circle Forward” by Kay Pranis and Carolyn Boyes-Watson that is wonderful, and it actually has circle plans specifically for teachers to talk about how they’re doing, to talk about what’s happening at work for themselves but also just how you are as people. And so there is a resource there for you, and if you just searched online for circle format, you could figure out how you wanted to do it. But you can create that space to come together, and I think problem solve is good. You can problem solve without going us versus them. Talk about what’s happening, where are you seeing success, where are you needing support, and work together that way, even if the people above you are not necessarily creating that. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So what are some action steps that you would recommend to teachers or administrators who just feel like they’re in the middle of a crisis right now? 

SHEVRIN VENET: I think that I would start by just kind of what I was saying just now which is that we’re all struggling and so to remember that it’s not just your students, it’s not something wrong with your students. It’s not something wrong with you as a teacher but what you’re seeing is a reflection of the moment that we’re in. And part of that recognition is actually really practical and important, which is to both cut yourself some slack, right? Allow yourself to go, “I’m not going to solve this all right now because this is much bigger than me.” And also to recognize that this is a really big and complex and long-term thing. There’s no shortcut to behavior change. There is no shortcut to get from an unhealthy community to a healthy community. And so reorienting ourselves that since there’s not a quick fix, what I want to do is experiment. I want to try some things and see what works and what doesn’t, reflect, talk to my people, figure out what I do next. To me that feels way more sustainable than going, “I’m going to put all my eggs in one basket of a certain strategy or a certain program, and then when it doesn’t work, I’m going to give up.” So for me, that kind of lab mindset of “let me try some stuff” helps. If you’re an administrator listening to this, being crystal clear with your school about the philosophy behind discipline is so important. Like we talked about at the top today, helping everyone be really clear and being very transparent about what are the considerations going into your choices about discipline. What is the philosophy? Are you working off of a behaviorism philosophy like PBIS? Are you working from a restorative philosophy? What is guiding that? And so even if you are going to in the future want to embark on some changes, just get really clear right now, how do I describe my choices? And if in that you go, actually I have no idea, that’s a good thing to know. And then just a really practical activity that you can do either on your own, for teachers, either on your own or with a group or this would be amazing to do with the whole school, this comes from Ross Greene’s work who I highly recommend his books if you want to look into alternative behavior approaches. One of the things Ross Greene talks about is that not all behavior is the same, right? We know that. And that actually you can kind of group it in three categories. You can say there’s some behavior that needs a consistent response every single time across the board. And that’s usually something that has to do with safety, right. So if a kid hits another kid, that needs a consistent response. Every single teacher needs to be on the same page. Then you have behavior that actually sometimes I’m just going to ignore or maybe I’ll respond to it, maybe I won’t, but who knows. I think of a kid saying the word “hell.” It’s not the worst swear they could say. It’s not the best. Maybe sometimes I’m going to go, “Hey, don’t say that.” But sometimes, to be quite honest, I’m going to hear it, and I’m just going to go, “I have bigger fish to fry, whatever.” 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SHEVRIN VENET: So I’m going to move on. And then the third category is things that do need a response but they maybe have some room for you to do that experimentation or try a restorative chat or see if you can talk about it as a class. So maybe that’s more like a conflict between students or a persistent attention thing or disengagement or some of those kind of more gray areas. And so the activity you can do is get together with some teachers, write down on Post-its as many examples of behaviors that you can think of, that you’ve seen this year, whatever. And then make space for those three categories, so always needs a consistent response, I can ignore them sometimes, or needs a response but we can be creative. And then sort the behaviors out. And then get on the same page with folks about what are the things we’re always going to be consistent about. What’s okay for us to use our discretion and maybe let it slide, and then what are we going to support each other on to be creative and to try to do these different practices. And I think just getting that clarity and transparency would help a lot of schools to really get rid of that feeling of everything’s chaos, there’s no consistent responses. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SHEVRIN VENET: I have to be overwhelmed with all of it. Just getting really clear on what are we talking about. 

GONZALEZ: I want to also clarify one of the things that you said. I think that it’s important for schools or teachers to not necessarily confuse the idea of this always gets a consistent response with zero tolerance. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Right. 

GONZALEZ: Because zero tolerance policies, again correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that they are a major contributor to the school to prison pipeline in terms of just —

SHEVRIN VENET: Right. Yes. 

GONZALEZ: And I think that they are meant to communicate to parents this is a safe school. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Right. 

GONZALEZ: These bad things will never, ever be tolerated. 

JONES: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: And it ends up leading them to do very extreme things. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: You’ve got a kid who’ll bring a Tylenol to school and gets expelled for it because we have a zero tolerance policy for drugs in school. And it’s just like, okay. 

JONES: No, I know a kid who got, who got expelled for having a butter knife in his backpack. A table knife. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: Because his mom had left it in there for his lunch. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah, so that’s a great clarification that —

GONZALEZ: Right. 

SHEVRIN VENET: — consistent response is not zero tolerance. It just means, you know, if a kid hits another kid, I’m never going to go, “Oh, I’m going to not do anything about that.” Right? 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

SHEVRIN VENET: You’re going to have —

GONZALEZ: The response can be different things. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Or it, yeah, it doesn’t have to look like kicking the kids out of school for it, yeah. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Right, right. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. And that’s the thing. We’re hitting on so many things that really deserve their own hyperlink to a separate whole article because we’re sort of assuming a whole lot of understanding in the audience right now of why some of these things are a problem. Okay. So, and then your last piece of advice for schools too was just about it not being a shortcut type of a thing. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah, so just to really lean into the idea that this is, this is the long haul. It’s going to be messy. I think bink said the example earlier of “I tried circles and they didn’t work,” right? Let’s have a commitment where if I’m trying them and they’re not working, but I believe that it’s important that my students know how to sit together and talk, then let’s try a different approach to it. Let’s try more support. Let’s figure it out. And just really holding that idea that there’s no such thing as a shortcut to a healthy community, and so we just need to be in it for the long haul. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Before we move on to just the, we’ve got just a list of resources that, you know, we mentioned Monique’s book, Monique Morris’ book “Pushout.” You mentioned Ross Greene’s work which, by the way, we’re going to have, I’m going to make sure I’ve got links to everything in the article that goes with this so people can learn more. We’ve got your book, Alex, “Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education.” 

SHEVRIN VENET: Thanks. 

GONZALEZ: There was this book by Jeffrey Benson, “Hanging.” You want to tell me about that? 

SHEVRIN VENET: Yeah, so it’s called “Hanging In.” This is my favorite hidden gem classroom management book. It has different chapters with different stories about students who were challenging to kind of hang in with through challenging behavior. And what I love about it is that Benson gives really creative ideas about responding to behavior, but every chapter also has guidance about how to work with the other adults who are working with that student, and their parents or family. How to have conversations on the adult team that support the kids. It’s a pretty good short read, so if you’re looking for something this summer, I highly recommend that. 

GONZALEZ: Awesome. All right, thank you. bink, anything you want to share in terms of either final thoughts or resources or both? 

JONES: I’ll go with resources. I will say, I guess, final thought is I am a gatekeeper. I’m not even going to front. I gate keep hard. And what I gate keep is response. What I gate keep is discipline, and I’m really cautious about handing out tools or handing out processes that are responsive when I haven’t done any work with people that is proactive. 

GONZALEZ: Interesting. Yeah. 

JONES: Like Alex said, community is the root. And so I’ve had contracts end where people were frustrated with me because I wasn’t willing to give them posters or wasn’t willing to give them pocket cards yet, and it’s like, well because I’ve never sat down with your teachers and talked to them about how they feel about punishment. And so I really urge you to consider this fact that it is, it starts in community, and as you’re seeking resources and wanting to learn more, I think it’s beautiful and great to learn more about the outcomes, about that discipline process —

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JONES: — so that you can have a vision of how everything would work. But I urge you to begin your own practice with connection, with community, not trying to respond first but building that restorative base so you have something to restore to. So yeah, that’s what I will say first, and then some awesome resources that are beautiful are these, t’s a book series called the Little Books series. And there’s a ton of them. And the ones that I highly recommend for educators are “The Little Book of Restorative Justice In Education,” “The Little Book of Restorative Discipline,” and “The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice.” I think those are three that are 100 pages apiece, if that. They have storytelling in them so you get real-life examples of scenarios. They’re written by people who are actually in practice, in the field who are educators, or who have been educators, not just consultants or theorists. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And then anything by Margaret Thorsborne. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JONES: Anything by Margaret Thorsborne and Joe Brummer. Those are my, those are my two that I just, everything I go back to with them works. And Alex, but I feel like that’s self explanatory. Yeah. If I were to read three people outside of those Little Books, I would read Alex and Joe Brummer and Margaret Thorsborne. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Based on, I guess I’d like to end on a positive note. Based on the experiences that you have had with some challenging situations, are you feeling optimistic that people who work in challenging situations actually can turn things around? That was a closed ended question. Maybe if the answer is yes, say more. 

SHEVRIN VENET: I do feel optimistic about it because I work with teachers all the time who are in this, who are motivated to make things better for their students, who are motivated to kind of, that bigger picture work we talked about, if they want to create a better world through the way they’re teaching. I hear all the time stories of interactions with students they had, interactions with families they had where they really shifted the energy or where a student who was struggling is struggling less or even bigger success stories. So I get hope from all of these teachers that I’m talking with. And despite how grim things are on a national and global level, I just always come back to the idea that these systems from above, the federal Department of Education, that was never going to be the reason that we had communities in schools. It was always going to be us working with each other. It was always going to be us helping each other. That idea of community care is that the system isn’t here to take care of us. It’s not coming from above. We’re here for each other and I see every single day, not just in education, but in so many places right now people really leaning into that. And that really gives me hope that we’re going to get through all the things together. 

GONZALEZ: Oh I love that so much. Thank you. 

JONES: Yeah. I’m 100 percent with Alex. As many, as many things as we can see that challenge us, there are counterparts that are working for the greater good, and I agree. I’m working with a group of teachers right now that can’t wait to do this and who have recognized some inequities that were happening in their, in their practice just by watching circle happen. They’ve got other parts of their practice that they’re realizing they want to shift just because of how they’ve seen their kids interact in that space. And so I have a whole lot of hope because people do want something different. Teachers do want to feel good when they go to school. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: You do want to remember why you started this work. And so that’s what I do a lot of times when I start with people. The first place I ask you to go is to that dream of what your classroom was going to be like. Because you can make it that way. We have the power. There are people who want to help you, and so much literature and podcasts and YouTube channels out there that the resources exist for the people who want them, and this podcast. I don’t feel like, for the most part if you’re listening to this, I don’t feel like I’m having to convince you that there is an alternative way to hold each other accountable and to have justice. And I just want you to be able to get back to what felt so good about being a teacher to begin with. And yes, yes, yes, outcomes for kids and all that fun stuff, but I want you to show up to work every day so excited that you’re there to be with your kids. And there are many adults who feel that way, and many adults who maybe aren’t feeling that way but want to. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JONES: And I do think yes, we are, we have everything we need, and I love a quote, you know, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” 

GONZALEZ: Thank you both so much for, you know, I didn’t even check with you to see if it was okay to go this long. But I didn’t see any sign that you were itching to go, and both of you responded so positively when I asked you to have this conversation, because you’ve been having this with a lot of teachers also. So just thank you. Thanks for giving so much of your time today. 

SHEVRIN VENET: Thank you. 

JONES: Thank you. Yeah. This is huge. 

For a full transcript and links to other resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 252. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.