But whichever way you slice it, variations on ye olde 'crime and punishment’ model have been prevalent in Australian schools for well over 200 years now.  

Many of these versions have been mandated by departments/systems and, in other cases, relics have bobbed up in times of challenge, even in schools who claim to be relational or restorative in their approach.

My best guess is that 200 years of projecting these practice habits onto the national teaching psyche is hard to shake.

Sometimes it can also seem too much like hard work to to start all over again and ‘unlearn’ that sanction-based approaches are ethical, or even useful, when working with young people.

That is, unless you’re Romaine Park Primary School in Tasmania.

The staff there are only just commencing their unlearning journey and also their relearning of an authentic and practical restorative practice methodology.

But they’re reporting that students have taken just ten days to commence independently requesting our 9-minute P3P3F3 method for repairing harm and taking responsibility.

I think the lesson here is that the trip from the old model to the new is shorter and less arduous than you think.

I think it’s also that your school’s unlearning journey starts with a simple reckoning that 200 years is long enough for the old system and its thousands of reinvented cousins to prove their worth.

Social and emotional Vygotsky

I feel for senior secondary educators who teach and lead young people who’ve never known anything other than adversarial, blame-based, rule laden or judicial models at school.

Not only are they still stepping in as judge, jury and executioner every time their students experience conflict or make a mistake, they’re doing it with kids who’ve spent up to 13 years mastering the art of dodging personal responsibility in such systems.

It’s exhausting and it’s unproductive.

In social interactions, I like the idea of applying Vygotsky’s famed gradual release of responsibility principle, which has underpinned so much of our pursuit of academic success with students.

 When I walk through a restorative past-present-future model for social screw-ups I’m:

  • Saving a lot of time that’s routinely wasted in the company of lying students while I still have no idea what on earth happened with these kids.
  • Teach them through relevant experience a simple methodology that they can use themselves to resolve future problems.

What I’ve found is that students are happy for me to run the process, then to share the responsibility for the process and then to enact the process themselves.

The final step is when I’m not even aware the process happened. 

My favourite example was seeing the evidence of conflict resolution done on a concrete footpath in chalk.

They’d made the conflict resolution process their own. What they didn’t need any more … was me.

 I’ll get over it.