Safe, Supported and Empowered - article published in Kappan, the journal of PDK International

by Annie M. White and John Kenneth Weiss
November 28, 2022

Published in Kappan, the journal of PDK Intenational
Full article: https://kappanonline.org/safe-supported-and-empowered-white-weiss/

Restorative practices and student voice play crucial roles in fostering a safe climate for students to thrive in school.

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The Esteemed Grizzlies is an advisory group of high school students from a predominantly Black and low-wealth district in metro Detroit. The advisory group was created in December 2020 with the Neutral Zone. This Michigan nonprofit provides a venue for social, cultural, educational, recreational, and creative opportunities for high school teens. The organization’s Youth Driven Spaces seeks to center student voice in school climate and culture issues.

The students in the Esteemed Grizzlies represent the high school’s various cliques and social identities and are admired by peers. The students serve as change agents. They participate in monthly workshops and work on projects to improve school climate. Three faculty members support the group, serving as advisers. (We have changed the group’s name to protect its identity.)

A bullying incident and a physical fight between two members in March 2022 damaged the group’s reputation. Faculty advisers asked Neutral Zone facilitators to lead a restorative conversation to repair the harm and discuss how to build back the group’s reputation. Restorative practice (RP) is a powerful and research-based approach to keep students safe, supported, and engaged in schools (Lodi et al., 2021; Zehr, 2015). RP aims to build communities through explicit agreements, authentic participation, and strong relationships. It includes proactive strategies to build community and relationships and reactive tools to bring issues and conflicts forward in nonpunitive ways.

The Esteemed Grizzles show how RP can help schools build and maintain a positive climate and deal with issues of wrongdoing, even when they include physical violence. When schools create the conditions for problem solving, accountability, and empathetic understanding, students not only participate but also are eager to take ownership and shared leadership in making it happen.

The Esteemed Grizzlies’ restorative circle included 16 students, two faculty advisers, and two facilitators. The circle explored what happened and how people were affected. Facilitators guided students through six rounds of questions:

How are you feeling about what happened? What impact has it had on you?

Who do you think was impacted by what happened and in what way?

What are you most worried about moving forward?

What do you need to help yourself heal?

What are you willing to do or contribute to help others heal and to help restore the Esteemed Grizzlies?

What expectations do you have for yourself and for others to be an Esteemed Grizzly?

The circle lasted more than 2½ hours. The students listened and spoke with an uncharacteristic vulnerability for youth. Students spoke about how it had harmed them to have their reputations damaged because of the fight among group members. The faculty advisers, whom the students care deeply about, spoke about the time and energy they put into the group and how the fights deflated them. The students involved in the fight apologized and committed not to engage in conduct like that again. The restorative circle ended with everyone feeling heard and valued and agreeing that the issue had been resolved to their satisfaction.

Student voice and restorative practice

School climate is created from the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators with the norms, goals, values, relationships, education practices, and structures in place at the school (Thapa et al., 2013). Building community and fostering a positive school climate are complex, multidimensional processes. Student voice and engagement are missing links in building a positive school climate where youth feel safe, supported, and empowered. Students make up most of a school’s population and can easily influence the climate. Students have the most to gain when school climates are safe and supportive and the most to lose when they are not.

Student voice activities can range from those at the most basic level, in which youth share their opinions on problems and potential solutions in schools, to the more complex, in which young people collaborate with adults to address those problems or even take the lead to make changes (Cook-Sather, 2002; Fielding, 2001; Levin, 2000; Mitra, 2007). Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a useful, concrete, and widely tested process to mobilize student voice to improve school culture, policy, and practice (Anyon et al., 2018; Cammarota & Fine, 2010). YPAR engages students in research about an issue (e.g., school climate) and then uses the knowledge gained from that research to drive change as students develop projects or make recommendations.

Several descriptive and correlational studies show a link between the use of RP and perceptions of positive school climate. RP may improve school climate, in part, because it empowers students and encourages student voice (e.g., Brown, 2017; Gregory et al., 2016) and because of the relationships students build with one another and with their teachers (Fronius et al., 2016; González, 2012). It also may be associated with decreases in bullying, racial disparities in discipline, student conflict, and suspension rates (e.g., Baker, 2009; González, 2012; Suvall, 2009). Though experimental research is limited, one study found a causal link between RP and teachers’ improved perceptions of school climate (Augustine et al., 2018).

Coaching students and teachers in RP

We began working with the Esteemed Grizzlies in December 2020 to develop a training, coaching, and professional development series that helped student-faculty teams a) examine, prioritize, and address school climate issues, and b) learn about and incorporate restorative practice strategies to improve school climate.

For two academic years, Neutral Zone staff met with students and teachers from the Esteemed Grizzlies’ school and another high school in a total of 13 online and in-person sessions. An average of 13 students and two or three teachers attended each session.

Student voice and restorative practices guided the design of the initiative. The use of the YPAR model enabled students to develop concrete projects that gave them a meaningful way to shape school climate. And restorative practices (circles, affective statements, community building, and restorative conversations) were built into all the student advisory meetings and spread schoolwide through staff training.

During the first year, Neutral Zone introduced students to the concept of school climate. Students defined the climate of their school and then generated ideas to improve it. The student and teacher teams at each school selected two ideas to focus on. In the second year, students planned, organized, and implemented school climate projects using YPAR. Students surveyed their peers and received more than 300 responses to inform project planning. They finalized details and created plans to implement their projects. This included meetings with administrators, teachers, and other students. Students began implementing projects and created plans to continue working on projects next school year. One of these projects was the schoolwide implementation of restorative practices.

Students were introduced to restorative practice through both formal training and immersion in RP practices. Neutral Zone facilitators and adult advisers integrated restorative language and practices such as running proactive community-building and dialogue circles. For the Esteemed Grizzlies, Neutral Zone held a session explicitly about circles, and then the student members prepared a community-building circle they could lead. Teachers, including 18 staff at the Esteemed Grizzlies’ school, participated in Neutral Zone’s two-day training in RP and circles at the end of the project’s first year. The two-day introduction provided the theoretical basis for RP, strategies and practices to effectively implement RP, and an overview of the history of RP as it relates to Indigenous and Native peoples. The goal was to train a critical mass of staff in each building to use the practices and strategies to build an RP-centered school. Also, Neutral Zone trained three staff members from each school in its train-the-trainer course to train new staff and build internal capacity to sustain RP work.

Learning to make change

To assess the success of the program, we collected session observations, facilitator logs, and program artifacts (e.g., student notes from sessions). We also conducted surveys and student and teacher focus groups each year. After two years, students expressed more confidence in their ability to work for positive change in their schools. A retrospective pre- and post-test showed a statistically significant increase in the students’ belief that they had choice, voice, and agency at school after the project. We saw the greatest increases in students agreeing that they had more voice in resolving conflict; opportunities to lead learning activities, such as discussions and work groups; and opportunities to give teachers feedback.

Students also described learning skills to advocate for their needs and to speak up for change. For example, one student shared, “I feel more empowered to lift student voices and be a leader/change agent within the school by showing others it is possible for students to be drivers of change.” Groups of students applied their learning by speaking at school board meetings and meeting with school administrators to talk about where they wanted to see change.

Finally, we saw increases in students’ confidence to change their school climate. For example, one student shared:

The biggest thing is [now] I feel I can do something in my school. . . . Neutral Zone helped me figure out how to do things, feel more confident, and hopefully, if there’s a problem I see, I can help change it.

Students used their newfound advocacy and leadership skills to implement their school climate projects. One group created a podcast for their peers to support and spread a school climate that prioritizes safety, respect, and inclusion. Another group of students created a resource document to provide other students at school with information on available services, such as counseling, social work, and after-school opportunities. Through these projects, the Esteemed Grizzlies could put their skills into action and work toward change within their schools.

Three lessons for implementing RP

Many best practices around RP and student voice undergird the success, to date, that this work has in fostering a safe and thriving climate for students in their school. We learned some key lessons for strengthening school climate through student voice and restorative practice.

Be patient

First, introducing new approaches takes time and intention (Streshly & Bernd, 1992). The Esteemed Grizzlies’ ability to address harm through restorative circles was built on 15 months of collaborative work in relationship- and community-building. Students could discuss their stories and feelings after building trust and connection with one another. In fact, 96% of participating students agreed or strongly agreed that they built strong relationships with other students and teachers because of this initiative.

As we tell people in our restorative practices training, “you can’t repair a relationship unless one exists in the first place.” RP should be used proactively 80-90% of the time as a strategy for building community, strengthening relationships, group norming, and teaching and learning. Reactive harm repair should only be 10-20% of the restorative work.

Garner support

Second, when implementing a new approach such as restorative practices, it is important to include a critical mass of building staff and provide support to implement and spread the practice. Research demonstrates that support from just 25% of a team can be the tipping point where a new practice begins to move from minority to majority support if there is opportunity for practicing with fidelity (Centola et al., 2018).

Going into the second year of this project, approximately 50% of instructional and support services (counselors and social workers) staff received two days of training in restorative practices. The rollout has been slower than planned because of COVID and other factors, and teachers just began to try out restorative practices during the project year. However, during the 2022-23 academic year, most staff will receive at least two days of RP training, and four trainers will be in place in the building. We expect to reach the tipping point this academic year.

Address real challenges

Third, when creating a structured way to elevate student voice, such as a school climate advisory or RP circles, it is imperative to address the increasing challenges that schools face. This includes its foundational element — to keep students safe. Adults often don’t see students as mature enough to be partners in change initiatives. Such a mindset may prevent school leaders from including students’ perspectives about school challenges and how best to design effective change strategies.

In this project, we found that bringing student voices into established structures helped to push forward their perspectives on school climate to one another and to the adults around them. The Esteemed Grizzlies attended several school board meetings last year and helped to abolish uniforms. They were then engaged by the superintendent to advise on other issues, including how to promote equity and inclusion and improve student-teacher relationships.

Partnering with students to improve school climate

This student engagement initiative offers several important takeaways for schools that want to make students partners in improving their climate. If we expect students to make meaningful contributions to the school change process, they need professional development. The education field is steeped in professional development for teachers, but students also need training and coaching to help them organize, plan, and act to bring about change in their school.

A high-functioning advisory group requires a focus on intentional group development and community-building supported by training and coaching. Part of the training should include institutional structures like an action team to organize the work they are learning to do. Students need time and support to meet regularly and to implement their projects and initiatives.

This student engagement program was based on the theoretical underpinnings of youth-adult partnerships (Zeldin, Christens & Power 2012). Successful student advisory groups work in partnership with adult advisers who help to support group development and the implementation of authentic work. Participating adults must be committed to letting students have a strong voice in their work, supporting their ideas, and helping students build on their experiences to continue taking on greater challenges in an unfamiliar system.

Finally, the most important element in successful student voice efforts is permission. Successful student voice work requires permission for students to form a group, to participate in training, and to have meeting time to conduct their work. Most of all, students need permission to act on their ideas to improve their schools. Permission is a simple thing for adults in schools to provide students, and it might be one of the most transformative ways to provide students genuine empowerment to make their schools feel like safe and supportive spaces that welcome their ideas.

Note: The work profiled in this article was supported by the RNR Foundation.

References

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This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 4, pp. 18-22.