Building and Sustaining a Restorative Classroom Community
Why build Community? Connection before Content or Correction
Restorative Practices (RP) is all about relationships and building community. Therefore, the key to establishing a restorative classroom is to connect students to students, students to teacher, and students to the classroom environment. Taking time out to create a cohesive classroom community, especially at the beginning of the school year can save time later, and even save time spent on discipline.
Creating a cohesive classroom community is really the key to managing student behavior and motivating academic risk taking necessary for learning. Discipline from a restorative perspective is comparable to a checking account. This account or “relationship account,” is based on mutual respect established within a caring community. If the work of community building has not been done, the relationship account is bankrupt and the student has nothing to lose by misbehaving or by being defiant. Below are suggested community building and classroom management strategies in the interest of investing in relationship accounts with your students in order to increase motivation and engagement, and decrease disruptions during important content teaching time. 80% of discipline is prevention!