Definition
Restorative justice in schools is a discipline philosophy and set of structured practices that prioritize repairing harm over administering punishment. When a student breaks a rule, bullies a peer, or disrupts a community, the restorative response asks three questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? Who is responsible for meeting those needs? The answers shape a structured process — typically a facilitated dialogue or circle, that holds the responsible party accountable while rebuilding the relationships the incident damaged.
The concept draws directly from restorative justice in criminal law, where it originated as an alternative to purely retributive sentencing. Applied to schools, restorative practices operate on two levels simultaneously: reactive (responding to specific incidents) and proactive (building the relational trust that prevents conflict from escalating in the first place). Both are necessary. Schools that use restorative conferencing only after harm occurs, without investing in community-building circles beforehand, see limited results because the relationships required to make dialogue meaningful don't exist yet.
Historical Context
Restorative justice as a formal framework emerged in the 1970s through the work of criminologist Howard Zehr, whose 1990 book Changing Lenses provided the first systematic account of its principles. Zehr argued that crime is fundamentally a violation of people and relationships, not merely a violation of rules — a framing that translated directly to school discipline.
The practice has older, deeper roots. Indigenous communities in New Zealand, Canada, and Australia had long used circle processes to resolve conflict and restore community bonds. The New Zealand government formalized these practices in the 1989 Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, creating Family Group Conferencing as a legal alternative to juvenile prosecution. This model caught the attention of education reformers in the United States and United Kingdom during the 1990s.
Educational psychologist Ted Wachtel founded the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1994, specifically to adapt restorative frameworks for school settings. His work produced the foundational training protocols and the "social discipline window", a matrix plotting high expectations against high support, that most school programs now use. By the early 2000s, districts in Oakland, Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia were running formal pilots, and the U.S. Department of Education's 2014 guidance on school discipline explicitly encouraged restorative approaches as evidence-based alternatives to zero-tolerance policies.
Key Principles
Harm, Not Rules, as the Frame
Restorative practice redefines what a discipline incident actually is. A suspension for fighting is framed as "you broke the conduct code." A restorative conference frames the same event as "your actions hurt Marcus, damaged trust in this classroom, and you need to understand that and make it right." This shift is not semantic. Research on moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg (1971) and later Carol Gilligan (1982) shows that adolescents respond very differently to rule-based accountability versus relationship-based accountability. The latter produces internalized behavior change; the former produces compliance that evaporates when surveillance is removed.
Inclusive Dialogue
Every person affected by an incident has a voice in the restorative process. This includes the person harmed, the person responsible, bystanders, and in serious cases, family members and community representatives. The facilitator uses a talking piece to ensure no one dominates, and a structured sequence of questions guides participants from describing what happened, to describing the impact, to agreeing on what needs to happen next. No one is talked at; everyone speaks.
Accountability Through Relationship
Restorative justice rejects the idea that accountability means suffering a consequence in isolation. Accountability, in this framework, means facing the people you harmed, hearing what your actions cost them, and doing something concrete to repair it. This is harder than serving a suspension, not easier — which is a point educators often miss. Students required to sit across from a classmate they hurt and hear the impact firsthand experience a far more demanding form of accountability than sitting in in-school suspension.
Proactive Community Building
Restorative practices include regular community circles that are not tied to any incident. Teachers run weekly or biweekly check-in circles where students and adults share responses to a common prompt using a talking piece. These proactive circles build the relational foundation that makes reactive conferencing possible. Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy Mullet, in The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools (2005), describe proactive circles as the "immune system" of a restorative school: without them, the reactive work cannot function.
Staff as Practitioners, Not Just Administrators
For restorative practices to work, teachers, not only counselors or administrators, must be trained facilitators. A restorative culture requires that the adults in a school use restorative language in daily interactions, address their own conflicts restoratively, and model the vulnerability that circles require. When restorative practices are delegated entirely to a dean or counselor, students receive them as a formal disciplinary intervention rather than as the culture of the school.
Classroom Application
Proactive Circles in a Middle School Homeroom
A seventh-grade homeroom teacher runs a fifteen-minute community circle every Monday morning. She places chairs in a circle (desks are removed or ignored), selects a talking piece (a smooth stone passed hand to hand), and poses a prompt: "Share one thing you're proud of from last week and one thing you're worried about this week." No phones, no side conversations. The teacher participates as a full circle member, modeling disclosure. Over two months, students begin to reference each other's shares in conversation throughout the week. When a conflict between two students erupts in November, the circle provides the relational groundwork for a repair conversation that takes twenty minutes rather than two weeks.
Restorative Conference After a Serious Incident
A tenth-grade student is found to have been spreading rumors about a classmate on social media, causing the classmate to miss three days of school due to distress. Rather than a one-week suspension, the school counselor trained in restorative conferencing convenes a meeting with both students, both sets of parents, and the student's advisory teacher. Using the IIRP's affective questioning protocol, the facilitator asks the responsible student: "What happened? What were you thinking at the time? Who has been affected, and how? What do you need to do to make things as right as possible?" The harmed student answers parallel questions. The conference produces a written repair agreement: a private apology, a commitment to remove the posts, and a monthly check-in with the counselor for the remainder of the semester.
Re-Entry Circles After Suspension
When a student returns from suspension, a five-minute re-entry circle with the student, an administrator, and the teacher whose class was disrupted prevents the cold re-entry that typically produces re-offense within two weeks. The re-entry circle asks: "What happened? What has changed? What do you need from us to succeed today?" It takes almost no instructional time and communicates clearly that the student is returning to a community, not just a building.
Research Evidence
The largest and most rigorous evaluation of restorative practices in schools is a randomized controlled trial conducted by the RAND Corporation (Augustine et al., 2018) across 44 Pittsburgh Public Schools. Schools randomly assigned to receive restorative practices training saw a 16% reduction in suspensions compared to control schools, with larger effects for Black students specifically. The study also found modest positive effects on math achievement and school climate ratings, though effects on reading and attendance were not statistically significant. The authors noted that implementation quality varied substantially, and schools with higher fidelity showed stronger outcomes.
A longitudinal evaluation by Anita Wadhwa (2015) documented Oakland Unified School District's five-year implementation. Oakland saw a 52% reduction in suspensions between 2011 and 2016, with the largest reductions for African American students, who had historically been suspended at rates six times higher than white students. Wadhwa identified proactive circle practice — not reactive conferencing alone, as the critical factor distinguishing high-implementing schools from low-implementing ones.
Gregory et al. (2016), studying 20 high schools in Virginia, found that restorative practices reduced racial disparities in discipline specifically when teachers used restorative language in everyday classroom interactions, not only during formal circle processes. Schools where restorative practices were confined to the office showed no reduction in racial discipline gaps.
The evidence has real limitations. Most studies rely on suspension rates as the primary outcome, which can be reduced by policy change alone without any actual behavior change or harm repair. Few studies use validated measures of relationship quality or student psychological safety. And implementation fidelity is notoriously difficult to sustain; training without ongoing coaching produces short-term enthusiasm and long-term reversion to punitive defaults.
Common Misconceptions
Restorative justice means no consequences. This is the most persistent objection from teachers and parents encountering restorative practices for the first time. Restorative justice does not remove consequences; it reframes what a consequence is for. A student who assaulted a peer may face both a restorative conference and a period of removal from the classroom. The conference determines what repair looks like; administrative consequences for serious violations remain on the table. What restorative practice opposes is punishment as the sole or primary response, disconnected from any process of understanding impact or repairing harm.
It only works for minor conflicts. Some of the most documented restorative work occurs after serious incidents: weapons possession, assault, sexual harassment, racial incidents. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and New Zealand's youth justice system handle extremely serious harms through restorative processes. In schools, formal conferencing protocols developed by the IIRP are specifically designed for high-severity incidents where exclusionary discipline has historically dominated. That said, restorative processes require genuine willingness from participants — they are not appropriate when the safety risk is ongoing or when a participant refuses to engage.
Restorative practices are only for students. Restorative practices change adult culture or they change nothing. When teachers resolve their own conflicts with colleagues through conversation rather than avoidance, when administrators respond to staff complaints restoratively, and when a principal uses circle language in a faculty meeting, students experience restorative culture as something their school actually believes in. Schools that train students in circles but leave adult culture unchanged produce students who are skeptical of the process and right to be.
Connection to Active Learning
Restorative justice and active learning share a foundational assumption: people learn by doing, not by being done to. A student who participates in a restorative circle is actively constructing understanding of their impact on others, practicing perspective-taking, negotiating repair, and rehearsing conflict resolution skills they will use for the rest of their lives. None of this happens in a suspension.
The fishbowl methodology is a natural structural partner for restorative work, particularly for whole-class conversations about community norms, classroom incidents that affected multiple students, or discussions of systemic issues like bias or belonging. In a fishbowl, a small group discusses openly while the outer circle observes silently, then groups rotate. This mirrors the restorative circle's emphasis on structured listening, full presence, and deferred response — skills that transfer directly to formal restorative conferences.
Town-hall formats serve the proactive dimension of restorative practice. Regular, structured whole-class forums where students raise concerns, celebrate community wins, and discuss shared expectations build exactly the relational trust that restorative circles require. A classroom where students have practiced speaking and listening in a town-hall format enters restorative conversations with far less friction.
Restorative practices are most fully realized alongside social-emotional learning, which provides the explicit skill instruction, empathy, emotional regulation, responsible decision-making, that restorative dialogue draws on. Students who have never been taught to identify their own emotional states cannot meaningfully answer "how did this affect you?" without that prior SEL scaffolding.
The relationship with PBIS is complementary and structural. PBIS defines and teaches behavioral expectations school-wide; restorative practices provide the response protocol when those expectations are violated. Schools that implement both report stronger outcomes than those using either alone, because PBIS reduces the frequency of incidents while restorative practices improve the quality of responses to those that still occur.
Finally, restorative practices are inseparable from trauma-informed teaching. A student who responds to a restorative circle with aggression or dissociation may be reacting from a trauma response, not defiance. Facilitators trained in trauma-informed approaches recognize these responses, slow the process down, and adapt accordingly. Without this integration, restorative processes can inadvertently retraumatize students, a serious risk that poorly trained implementations overlook.
Sources
- Zehr, H. (1990). Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. Herald Press.
- Augustine, C. H., Engberg, J., Grimm, G. E., Lee, E., Wang, E. L., Christianson, K., & Joseph, A. A. (2018). Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. RAND Corporation.
- Gregory, A., Clawson, K., Davis, A., & Gerewitz, J. (2016). The promise of restorative practices to transform teacher-student relationships and achieve equity in school discipline. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 26(4), 325–353.
- Stutzman Amstutz, L., & Mullet, J. H. (2005). The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools. Good Books.