Hacking School Discipline: 9 Ways to Create a Culture of Empathy and Responsibility Using Restorative Justice

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my guest, Brad Weinstein. Brad is Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. And he's the co-founder of Behavior Flip, a restorative behavior management system. And he's the co-author with Nathan Maynard of Hacking School Discipline, Nine Ways to Create a Culture of Empathy and Responsibility Using Restorative Justice, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

So Brad, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] SPEAKER_02:

Great having me on. I'm really glad and excited at the opportunity to kind of share what we do with Behavior Flip and also talk about the book.

[00:54] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, let's jump right in to this concept of restorative discipline, restorative justice. We hear a lot about it these days. It's one of those things that's kind of exploded in the popular consciousness, but I think without a lot of training, without a lot of authoritative expertise out there. So I was very excited to see your book hit the market. and share a perspective on restorative justice. So I wonder if we could start just with that.

[01:18]

What is restorative justice and why do we need it in our schools?

[01:22] SPEAKER_02:

That's a good question. Restorative justice is a way to get at the root of the problem. I mean, if you were to simplify it, it is taking what is going on with the students and what they're doing and getting down to the why behind it. So in other words, it's a way to build empathy also for others. So what you have happened in a lot of schools is you have predetermined punishments. So in other words, if you get so many infractions, you have first stage, which is a detention.

[01:48]

You do it so many other times, the next stage, which is an in-school suspension. If you do it again, you're suspended. So basically, a lot of schools have predetermined punishments that don't really fit the crime or the act, I would say. So in other words, we have a kid who's tardy 30 times The punishment, and I do use that word punishment that many schools do, is to suspend the kid. So in other words, they're missing class, so we're going to punish them by missing more class by suspending them, right? Restorative practices would be getting down to the root of, well, why is the kid being tardy to class?

[02:19]

So let's sit down with the kid in a restorative circle, and let's talk about what issues the kid's having. Do we need to go to the kid's locker and figure out that the kid is disorganized? Is the kid not really understand the importance of coming to class on time? So why are you coming late? Do you not value coming to class on time because of I can make it up quickly or what is the issue going on? But more importantly, how is what you're doing impacting others?

[02:43]

So kids aren't naturally born with empathy. It's not something they're hardwired with. How is what I'm doing impacting others and myself? So in a summarization, restorative practices is taking a lot of things that would otherwise result in suspensions and expulsions and getting down to the actual root cause of why they're doing it, having students build empathy for others and how they're impacting others. And another big component is having students repair the harm of their actions. So in other words, if I caused some kind of harm to others, how do I make it right?

[03:16]

And you don't make it right in a system where a kid gets kicked out of class and they sit in a room all day in a detention. That's not making it right. That's just a punishment. A consequence, on the other hand, is when I do something and I have to own up to it and I have to make it right.

[03:31] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that makes total sense to get away from some of the illogical consequences that we often find in schools like, you know, if you miss class, if you cut class, then you're suspended. Well, which kind of exacerbates the problem of missing class. What does this look like in cases where the student personally is the one who is suffering, from not doing their work, from not being prepared, from engaging in behaviors that kind of contribute to that slide toward academic failure. How do we intervene in a way that doesn't make things worse, but that does actually help the student do better, right? Because we know that punishment can serve as a deterrent, but it doesn't necessarily change the behavior or give the student what they need to do better. So in a restorative justice approach, what are some ways that we can actually set students up for greater success for their own benefit and not just to stop causing problems for others, but to actually, you know, increase their chances of success, which I think is what we all want.

[04:30] SPEAKER_02:

Well, in a traditional system, if a kid doesn't do their work, the punishment is a zero, right? And a lot of people don't let people turn things in after they've missed a deadline or a due date or something of that sort. So typically speaking, school is not built with traditional grades to allow students to repair the harm of their own actions, which might be a detriment to myself, such as not turning in my homework or not coming prepared to class. In restorative justice, what we would look for is a kid who is having some sort of problem with doing their work. we would want to get down to the root of that, right? So we would want to get them to understand maybe we need to hook this kid up with a mentor or someone who had a similar situation as that student.

[05:09]

Maybe we need to get that kid looking at the future, find that kid something that sparks their passion, such as a career, a college, something of that nature. So we need to get down to why does that kid not care about their schoolwork? It might be because at home it's not valued or They feel like no one cares about them or they feel like they don't really have someone to look up to. So it wouldn't necessarily be something that they would be repairing the harm about if they were not doing their schoolwork because it's impacting only themselves, right? So in other words, it's getting down to the motivation behind or the lack of motivation behind doing something that we work on with that kid. So in order for that to happen, we also have to have teachers on board who also believe in a similar mindset.

[05:51]

So if I'm not seeing a kid, you know, really engaged in class, And I let that kid just continue to do so. So if so-and-so is going to keep their head down, I'm just going to walk by and not bother them. And if they don't do their homework, that's their fault. And that's going to only impact them. So you need an empathetic teacher who wants to really get down to the why behind that kid. And more importantly, to motivate and inspire that kid.

[06:13]

So in other words, we can't just sit there and passively let kids choose to fail. Because a lot of times, it's not a lack of, I don't care. It's a lack of, have I found the right inspiration or role model to really help that kid yet?

[06:27] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and this sounds like the kind of thing that if we only had one or two students, we would just do through our relationship, right? These are the kinds of things of building empathy, of figuring out what motivates a kid, of helping them make choices that will set them in the right direction. But when we think about the school level, and especially thinking about our audience of principals, assistant principals, maybe deans responsible for attendance and discipline and academic progress and things like that, You know, we're typically talking about so many students that it's not something that we can just say, OK, I'm going to use my relationship with this particular student to help them through this problem. You know, we've got hundreds and in some cases thousands of kids. So what does this look like at the school level? Because one of the things that I'm seeing at the district level sometimes is that restorative justice gets established.

[07:16]

some attention it becomes recognized as a promising approach but then it gets rolled out to schools in kind of a misunderstood way where things like suspensions might be banned entirely and schools are thinking okay well we used to just suspend kids and now we can't suspend kids so we have no idea what to do You know, so for a school that is trying to use restorative practices at the school-wide level, you know, but doesn't really know where to start, you know, what does this look like as a system where it's not just, you know, one-on-one with a particular kid, but as kind of a policy even, what does it look like?

[07:50] SPEAKER_02:

I'm glad you asked that because, you know, we don't want to always be reactive to behaviors and a kid who's having an issue or a group of kids that are having an issue. So a lot of people use restorative justice as a, you know, a bunch of kids did this. Now, what are we going to do? We're going to talk about it versus a proactive approach. So if you're doing full implementation, you're doing restorative circles in your classroom. So, you know, you start off the class in a circle and you kind of talk about what's going on.

[08:14]

You have community building. So in other words, you have to continually work on the community in your classroom and in your school. If you want to do this effectively, it has to become part of your culture. If a student is having a problem with another student or a bunch of students are off task in your class, call a quick classroom circle and talk right now about what's going on, what the issue is. Let the kids own up to how they can fix the problem. So in other words, a restorative circle is not just something you do when a kid's in trouble.

[08:40]

It is something that's part of your classroom culture in school. If you take five minutes at the beginning of every period to do a little restorative circle and kind of talk about the day, kind of talk about what's going on, kind of talk about the importance of what you're going to do. You set your clear expectations for the day. then it just becomes part of your culture. If you have a kid who's throwing stuff in class, you know, another kid might have an issue with that and be proactive and actually talk about, you know, why throwing a pencil in class is really detrimental to me learning and that kind of thing. Also, what you want to do and what people don't often talk about in schools is you want to have very engaging teaching practices and people who are very good at building relationships with kids.

[09:18]

So You can have an advisory in your school where you have a homeroom where you have a very close-knit community. Your classroom instruction needs to not be completely boring and unappealing to kids because a lot of off-task and problem behaviors come from really the kid is bored. The kid is sitting there going from period to period to period being lectured to every day about things they don't care about. I would say a full school implementation is that you have tiered things that happen to students to help them be coached. So The problem we ran into and the reason why we made the behavior flip specifically is because of what you just said. There's no great school-wide implementation way to do this kind of thing.

[09:58]

So what we do is we have kids who are doing the same thing repeatedly every day. So every day they're not bringing a pencil. You're not going to have a full restorative circle with your class because the kid's not bringing a pencil to class, right? Every day a kid is off task and doesn't care about their work. So what our system did was we have a way to measure these kind of deficiencies and And we have a way to measure the strengths of students daily. So what we do is once a student has done a certain behavior so many times, our system will automatically tell you that a student has done this so many times.

[10:31]

And what we'll do is we'll get together with that student. We'll talk about how they're, you know, how is this actually hurting you because you are not bringing a pencil to class? How is that impacting your teacher because you're not bringing a pencil to class? And to come up with a plan, for how a kid is going to be more responsible and how they're going to actually come prepared to class, which might be, I'm going to set a pencil jar over here on the side, and you're going to come in, you're going to pick it up, you're going to leave, you're going to put it away, and we're going to establish this routine. So the school-wide implementation is, you know, you have a whole lot of circles and community building constantly with your staff and some might argue, well, that's going to take away instruction time, right? But the reality is how much of our instruction time is useful if kids don't care about the content and don't care about the community and don't care about each other.

[11:15] SPEAKER_01:

Right. They're already missing that time. Even if we're quote unquote teaching, they're missing that time.

[11:20] SPEAKER_02:

Yes. So we're doing a whole lot of teaching, but we're not doing a whole lot of learning, which is very different, right? If you invest a little bit of time into community building and every class and every period, you're going to have a much more productive 45 more minutes, then if you just do 50 minutes, no engaging content, no community building, straight academics, and what you're going to get is maybe 10 minutes to 15 minutes of productive time from students.

[11:44] SPEAKER_01:

So it's a small investment in relationship, in connecting with students, in setting them up for success as a community that pays off in increased time on task.

[11:55] SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. It's kind of like the brain break concept or the recess concept where they've shown that the more recess, you know, in the elementary schools, the kids are actually more productive. And in some countries, they give a lot more recess than United States schools do. So it's investing the time into relationships that will make all of the other times so much more beneficial and keep the kids actually caring about each other and their work.

[12:14] SPEAKER_01:

Now, one question that I think a lot of our listeners might be wondering about is the possibility for students to kind of realize that if they do something that's not okay, the immediate reaction of the adults might be just to talk about it. Like it might be a non-punitive response. And for some students, I don't know what percentage of students might tend to think this way or might be tempted by this possibility. But it seems like there is the potential for students to take advantage of this and to say, you know what, nothing bad is going to happen to me. I can, you know, deck somebody if I'm mad at them and we're just going to sit around in a circle and talk about it. You know, and I think there's that fear that a lot of educators have that if we move in a restorative direction, then students will get wise.

[12:58]

Students will take advantage. Students will feel like they don't have any boundaries at all. and chaos will break out. And I'm assuming that in the schools that have been successful with restorative justice, that chaos has not broken out. So how do we manage that potential or that risk for students to just see this as a game that they can play with us and we get to sit in a circle if they act terrible and there are no consequences for their actions? How do we keep that from happening?

[13:21] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's funny that you ask because what we do typically is give punishments for everything that you just mentioned, right? The punishment teaches me that if I do something, I'll get punished for it. you don't know why you're being punished for it. You're not making it right. You're not repairing the harm. So suppose a student didn't turn in their homework and they would rather take a zero than have to actually do the work.

[13:42]

So if a student, for instance, failed a test and the teacher gives them an opportunity to retake that test and then mom calls and they're all upset because their students failed in the class, you'll be like, what are you talking about? They can retake the test at any time. And then mom's mad at the kid, not at the teacher, right? So in other words, it's actually more work to do restorative practices for the kid than it is in the opposite. So if I were to, for instance, throw food in the cafeteria, which I know never happens in any school, I'm sure every cafeteria is very well taken care of, and no kid has ever done anything wrong in the cafeteria at all in any school, but let's just pretend maybe one day a kid throws food. What might be typical was that if a kid threw food, he was in a detention or he was in a lunch detention the next day, right?

[14:28]

So the kid is just sitting there twiddling their thumb for half an hour buying time in a traditional system. Or they get suspended and they go home and they have a one-day vacation where they're playing video games. How is that any kind of deterrent to behavior versus I throw food in the cafeteria, I'm going to have to go and talk to the custodian about, you know, what the custodian does all day and how this impacted him or her, I'm going to talk about how the environment is no longer clean for the other classmates. And you know what I'm going to have to do? I'm going to have to go and clean the cafeteria because the way to repair the harm that I did by dirtying the cafeteria is by cleaning the cafeteria. So in other words, I take something that is logical as a consequence to repair the harm it's not just a whole bunch of sitting around in circles talking about our feelings.

[15:17]

That is a big part of it, the empathy building process. But if I'm having a beef with another kid, the last thing I want to do is have to talk about my feelings about it and have to sit in a circle and then have other stakeholders involved and kind of all those kinds of things. So it's actually, in a kid's mind, it's actually more of a process and harder to repair the harm than it is to just take your punishment and not care. So what you have is kids having a beef with another kid, you put them in a circle, we actually get down to the why behind it. And then we figure out nine times out of 10, it was just a misunderstanding. Or the kid posted something about the other kid on social media.

[15:52]

And then all the other friends pressured the other kid to fight the kid. When the reality is, is that it was just a big misunderstanding. And the kid realized that, you know, posting something about you on social media, it's not really how I felt. I was just mad at the time because of X, Y, and Z. So nine times out of 10, something is squashed before it even happens just by talking about it. And what kids don't do is talk about things before they act, right?

[16:16]

And in doing that, we are also building the skills the kids need to next time when they're getting, you know, kind of upset with someone to actually talk about and communicate about it versus just throwing fists. So long story short is that there are consequences in restorative justice, and they are actually harder to repair the harm than it is to just take your punishment, which is not part of restorative practices.

[16:38] SPEAKER_01:

I love the emphasis on empathy and on communication and relationship that runs through all of that, because, you know, if I think about, you know, harsh consequences, you know, do X and you're suspended, you know, get your cell phone out in school and you're suspended. You know, what's missing there to me is that relationship piece and that empathy and that teaching that occurs through that relationship when we can work with a student and say, OK, here's what happens. Here's the harm that's caused. when you do this thing that we happen to have a rule against. And making that relationship, making that empathy building the focus of the work rather than just a consequence, I think is a powerful idea.

[17:14] SPEAKER_02:

It takes some time, obviously. It's much quicker to just put every kid who acted bad in a room at the end of the day, right? But what you do by doing that is that same kid is going to do that same behavior next week. So when you put it in a time ahead of time, you front load relationships and you front load restorative practices. what you have is a much smoother running school. It just takes some time to get there.

[17:35]

So in other words, it does take a lot of time to do restorative practices, but what you're doing is you're changing kids. You're actually building empathy, building problem solving skills that are going to cause less problems in the future.

[17:47] SPEAKER_01:

And in chapter eight, when you talk about support in your book, hacking school discipline, you say to focus on the small things. And I wonder if you can just briefly explain what that means to focus on the small things.

[17:59] SPEAKER_02:

When I say focus on the small things, what we do is we're reactive to big issues like a kid fighting or a kid doing some kind of major behavior or destroying school property or something of that sort. The reality is that there were many warning signs before a kid got to that point. So when we say focus on the small things, it's really important that if a kid is forgetting a pencil every day or a kid's not doing their homework every day, that's going to lead to a long-term consequence for that child and their future. So when we say focus on the small things, we should actually be focusing on the fact that that kid has started to class a whole lot of times. We should be focusing on the fact that that kid is having a problem working in a group every day. So all these kinds of minor behaviors kind of get pushed aside and not focused on because teachers are busy.

[18:45]

Administrators are busy. Everyone feels like they're too busy to deal with the small stuff. When the reality is a small stuff, a bunch of times turns into the big stuff. And in our system, the behavior flip system, what we do is we record all of the little things and we don't have a big intervention in a circle. You know, if you were tardy two times, but if you're tardy five times, the likelihood of you being tardy 10 times is astronomically increased if you don't have an intervention right there. So in other words, We need to focus on these little things that are causing kids to not be successful, but we need the data to be able to do so.

[19:17] SPEAKER_01:

Brad, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio to talk about hacking school discipline. If people want to learn more about your work or about the Behavior Flip platform, where's the best place for them to get in touch with you online?

[19:30] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you can go to our website, www.behaviorflip.com. You can also email us at brad, B-R-A-D, at behaviorflip.com. And we would be happy to answer any questions.

[19:44] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Brad, again, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[19:47] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Have a good rest of the day.

[19:49] Announcer:

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