How FriYAYS!!! Supports Restorative Practices in the Classroom

A boy has done something. It does not matter what. He said the cruel thing, or he threw the thing, or he took the thing that was not his, and now he is sitting in the chair beside the teacher’s desk while the rest of the class works, and he is waiting to find out who he is now.

That is the moment everything turns on, and most schools get it exactly backward. We treat the chair as a verdict. He did a bad thing, therefore he is a certain kind of boy, and the consequence is the sentence handed down. He learns the lesson we did not mean to teach, which is that a person is the sum of his worst afternoon.

There is another way to run that moment, and it has a clinical name that I am going to set aside for most of this piece, because the name has started to do the thing all good names eventually do. It has become a program. It has binders. And underneath the binders is something a nine year old in my book describes better than any training I have ever attended.

Key Takeaways

• Restorative practice is not a program you install. It is a belief about whether a child is fixed or still forming.
• The question is never who was bad. It is what was harmed and what would repair it.
• A fresh start is worthless unless it is guaranteed in advance, before anyone has earned it.
• Repair requires the person who caused harm to still be welcome in the room while they repair it.
• No matter how many is the whole doctrine. A child who has failed repeatedly needs the fresh start most.
• Consequences end an incident. Repair changes the person and the room around him.
• The circle is where repair becomes ordinary, rehearsed weekly rather than summoned in a crisis.
• A child who learns he can begin again does not become careless. He becomes brave enough to admit what he did.

The Sentence a Child Should Not Be Able to Write

In FriYAYS!!!, there is a page that I did not expect to be the one educators would stop me to talk about. My narrator is describing her favorite part of the Friday circle, and she says this.

We talk about new chances to fix our wrongdoings, and get a fresh new start. I really like that part, because I’ve had times when my choices weren’t the best. Getting to start over helped me to grow from my mistakes—no matter how many.

Read the last three words again. No matter how many.

A child wrote that, in the world of the book, and it contains the entire philosophy of restorative practice compressed into a phrase a fourth grader would use. Not if I deserve it. Not the first time. No matter how many. The fresh start is not rationed according to the quality of her record. It is offered because she is a person who is still being built, and people who are still being built make mistakes at a rate that would exhaust any system based on desert.

A fresh start you have to earn is not a fresh start. It is a reward, and rewards are for children who did not need them.

That is the difference between a discipline system and a restorative one, and it fits inside four words spoken by an imaginary girl.

What Actually Gets Repaired

The word restorative points at the mechanism, and it is worth taking the word literally.

A punishment subtracts. It removes recess, removes privileges, removes the child from the room, and at the end of it the harm he caused is exactly as unrepaired as it was before, and now there is a second injury layered on top, which is his. Two people are worse off. The ledger the school cares about is balanced and the actual world is not.

Restoration asks a different question. Not what should be taken from him, but what was broken, and what would mend it. The friend who was hurt, is she still hurt. The trust that was spent, can it be rebuilt. The thing he did, can he be the one to undo it, with his own hands, in front of the people who saw him do it.

My narrator does not use the word restorative. She says fix our wrongdoings, which is better, because it keeps the wrongdoing attached to a person who can act. She is not asking to be forgiven, which is passive and happens to you. She is asking for a chance to fix, which is active and which she does.

And notice what she has to still be in order to fix it. She has to still be in the room. A child sent away cannot repair anything. The whole practice depends on keeping the person who caused the harm inside the community while they make it right, which is precisely the thing our instincts scream against, because our instincts want them gone.

Repair is only possible for a child who is still welcome in the room. Exile ends the incident and forecloses the mending.

Why It Has to Be Rehearsed

Here is where the circle earns its place, and where my book quietly makes its most practical argument.

You cannot invent restorative practice in the moment of crisis. The afternoon a child does the serious thing is the worst possible time to attempt a calm, structured conversation about harm and repair, because everyone is flooded and the machinery has never been used and it seizes.

The repair has to be rehearsed when the stakes are low, so that it is available when the stakes are high.

That is what the Friday circle is, in my narrator’s class. It is not primarily about crimes. Most weeks nothing serious has happened. But every week the class practices the moves. They talk about what could be done better. They sit in a ring where no one is above anyone. They rehearse the fresh start on ordinary weeks, the small ones, the I was short with my friend and I want to fix it kind, so that the mechanism is warm and familiar and load-tested by the time a real rupture arrives.

Then when the serious afternoon comes, the class already knows how to hold it. The boy in the chair is not being subjected to a strange new process invented for his humiliation. He is being invited into a practice he has watched work, every Friday, all year, for other people. He has seen classmates repair things. He knows it does not end them.

A restorative practice that only appears after harm is a fire drill run for the first time during the fire. The circle is the drill.

The Fresh Start Is a Promise About the Future

I want to be precise about the guarantee, because it is easy to soften into a platitude and it is not one.

A fresh start cannot be awarded after the fact, as a reward for sufficient contrition. If a child has to demonstrate remorse before the possibility of beginning again is extended, then he will learn to perform remorse, and you will have trained an actor rather than repaired a person. The fresh start has to be structural. It has to be a standing fact of the room, promised in advance, available on Friday whether or not anyone has been good.

My narrator says she has had times when her choices were not the best. She is not confessing to earn her place. She mentions it in passing, without shame, because in her class the fresh start is not contingent on the confession. The order runs the other way. Because the fresh start is guaranteed, she can afford to be honest about the mistakes. The safety comes first and the honesty follows.

Reverse that order, demand the honesty before you guarantee the safety, and you get silence. You get children who have learned that admitting the mistake is how you lose the chance to fix it.

Guarantee the fresh start first, and children will tell you the truth. Demand the truth first, and they will only tell you they are sorry.

What This Is Not

I should be honest about the limit, because this argument is often heard as an argument against all consequence, and it is not.

Repair is harder than punishment, not softer. A boy who has to face the person he hurt, name what he did, and do the actual work of mending it, is not getting away with anything. He is being asked for far more than a lost recess would ever cost him. The fresh start is not the absence of accountability. It is a more demanding form of it, because it requires him to remain present and responsible rather than simply serving a sentence and disappearing.

And no matter how many does not mean no memory. The class remembers. The friend remembers. What begins again is not the record but the person, released from the idea that his worst afternoon is the last word on who he is. He carries what he learned. He does not carry the verdict.

That is the practice, underneath the binders and the training and the clinical name. A room that keeps you while you make it right, and lets you begin again as many times as it takes, because it has decided that you are not finished.

Discussion Questions

For Educators

1. Think of your current most difficult student. Have you, privately, decided who he is? What would change on Monday if you treated that verdict as provisional?
2. When something goes wrong in your room, what is the first thing your discipline system removes? Does removing it repair anything that was actually broken?
3. Where in your week do students rehearse repair on low stakes, so the mechanism exists before a crisis needs it?

For Families

1. In your house, does a child have to prove they are sorry before they are allowed to begin again, or is the beginning again guaranteed first?
2. What is the mistake your child has made more than once? How does your response change on the third time, and what does the change teach?
3. Think of something you did wrong repeatedly as a child. What would it have meant to be told, out loud, that you could start over no matter how many times?

Final Thought

I did not write a book about discipline. I wrote about a girl who loves Fridays, and somewhere in the middle of it she admitted, without being asked, that her choices had not always been good, and that starting over had helped her grow, no matter how many.

I have thought about that line for a long time, because I think it is the most hopeful sentence in the book and also the most demanding one. It asks a room to keep a child through failure after failure after failure, on the theory that the child is not the failures, that the person is still arriving, and that the work of a classroom is to stay open long enough for them to get here.

That is not leniency. It is patience, which is harder, and it is the whole of restorative practice, and a child in my book already knows it.

Keep them in the room. Guarantee the fresh start before they earn it. Then let them begin again as many times as it takes, and mean it every time.

Sources

1. clinical name — https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/wce-positive-school-climate-restorative-practices-brief
2. Friday circle — https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-circle-practice-classroom/
3. grow from my mistakes — https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/growth-mindset
4. restorative practice — https://www.iirp.edu/restorative-practices/explained
5. discipline system — https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/safe-learning-environments/school-safety-and-security/school-climate-and-student-discipline
6. restorative one — https://www.cdc.gov/youth-behavior/school-connectedness/restorative-practices.html
7. restorative — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/restorative
8. mend it — https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/family_conflict_is_normal_its_the_repair_that_matters
9. forgiven — https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/forgiveness/definition
10. the circle — https://www.iirp.edu/news/the-power-of-the-circle
11. structured conversation — https://www.edutopia.org/article/restorative-communication-classroom/
12. flooded — https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/09/cover-resilience
13. sit in a ring — https://www.edutopia.org/article/implementing-restorative-practices-proactively/
14. rupture — https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/a_different_way_to_respond_when_kids_do_something_wrong
15. perform remorse — https://childmind.org/article/why-kids-lie/
16. structural — https://schoolguide.casel.org/uploads/sites/2/2020/12/2020.12.11_Aligning-SEL-and-RP_Final.pdf
17. honesty — https://childmind.org/article/how-to-help-kids-who-are-too-hard-on-themselves/
18. consequence — https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/restorative-practices-factsheet
19. accountability — https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a8.htm
20. person is still arriving — https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/college-growth-mindset