Restorative and Trauma-Informed Approaches Don't Contain Any New Good Ideas
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that restorative and trauma-informed practices have simply rebranded existing good teaching practices as something new.
Key Takeaways
- The good parts aren't new - Caring about students, building relationships, and understanding their backgrounds are things good teachers have always done
- They take credit for existing practices - Rebranding universal good teaching as 'restorative' or 'trauma-informed' is marketing, not innovation
- The new parts aren't necessarily good - What is actually new — like replacing consequences with circles — hasn't proven effective
Transcript
One of the things that bothers me so much about some of the bad ideas that have come into our profession in the name of restorative practices or trauma-informed practices is that a lot of the good ideas within those sets of practices are nothing new.
They're just rebranded, they're just repackaged, they're just given a different name.
And then they're bundled with things that are really unproven and turning out to be pretty harmful.
Like one that I've talked about a lot is just the lack of consequences that a lot of schools are putting in place or the willingness to let classrooms be destroyed by students rather than intervene and stop a student from destroying the classroom, flipping furniture, things like that.
There are good practices in there.
because we've always used those practices.
And it bothers me that new sounding things, new programs, new approaches, take credit for things we've always done and then treat everybody else like they haven't been doing those things all along.
That's where I feel like veteran educators get a bad rap if they have any kind of questions about something new like they don't get credit for the things that they're doing that are also in the new thing the new thing steals the credit for the good things like caring about kids like I can't tell you how many times I've heard defenders of unproven and destructive new practices accuse people who are resistant to those practices because they're unproven To not care about kids, like accuse them of not caring about kids or of not being compassionate or of like just the slander that's embedded in a lot of the defense of these new approaches is just kind of gross to me.
And then that covers over.
the unproven and questionable and often just illogical and ridiculous aspects of those new programs like you can't stop a kid from destroying a classroom or you can never send a kid home from school because you're denying them the right to an education all of this stuff as a package smells okay and the the work that is done to market that package makes it fool enough people for long enough that it gets some traction.
But I really feel like we're increasingly living in two different worlds now, where we have some schools that are adopting these ridiculous approaches and allowing their staff to experience violence and allowing their students to witness and experience violence every day, and those that don't.
And a lot of people will comment on my videos, say, what are you talking about?
Like, where is this even happening?
And they can't believe that it is happening in thousands and thousands of schools because to them, nothing has changed.
You know, in a lot of schools, nothing has changed.
but the schools where things have changed for the worse, I think are just going to experience a huge exodus of staff and lawsuits from parents and all kinds of stuff.
So I don't know.
I know I'm being a little bit vague here, but let me know what you think about the new stuff that contains old stuff, but also some unproven new stuff.
Like, does that make sense?
Let me know what you think.