Restorative Practices at a Glance
The Value of Restorative Practices
Thinking about investing in Restorative Practices but unsure where to start? Whether you’re trying to strengthen staff-student relationships, reduce behavioral disruptions, or build a more connected school culture, it helps to begin with a clear snapshot of what Restorative Practices actually look like—and why they work.
In today’s classrooms and schools, Restorative Practices are much more than just a trend—they represent a thoughtful evolution in how educators foster connection, address conflict, and build a community where everyone can thrive. At a glance, Restorative Practices offer an approachable view of this evolving discipline, helping both seasoned educators and those just starting out make sense of what genuinely works in real school settings.
While there is a growing buzz around applying these practices, understanding their roots, core components, and most effective uses—especially in classroom contexts—can make all the difference between a fleeting initiative and a true culture change.
What Are the Five R's of Restorative Practices—and Are They Enough?
Restorative Practices are often summarized using the "Five R's": Relationship, Respect, Responsibility, Repair, and Reintegration.
You’ve probably heard of the Five R’s—but if you’ve tried implementing them in classrooms, you may have noticed something’s missing. Values alone don’t shift culture. Teachers need clear tools and real-time strategies that actually work with students.
A quick look at the five R's:
Relationship: Emphasizing the importance of deliberate and proactiveconnections between students, staff, and the broader school community.
Respect: Promoting an environment where stakeholders receive information, are given opportunities for ownership and input, and everyone treats each other with dignity.
Responsibility: Encouraging accountability for one’s actions, both individually and collectively.
Repair: Focusing on practical steps to make things right after harm occurs.
Reintegration: Ensuring that individuals who’ve made mistakes are welcomed back into the school community.
Despite their popularity, the five R’s can miss vital elements that make Restorative Practices effective, especially in elementary and classroom settings. Notably absent are practical skills such as the ability to calm oneself, supporting others in finding calm, and carving out intentional moments for reflection before jumping to a resolution. These tools are crucial for teachers and students alike—without them, conversations and conflict resolution tend to falter or remain surface-level.
The five R’s also risk being interpreted solely as values, rather than being integrated into everyday routines. For Restorative Practices to truly shift school culture, these principles must be translated into explicit actions, language, and habits.
Taking a pause to reflect, self-regulate, and understand what is truly needed in a moment of conflict is often the missing link. Training sessions with hands-on practice enable teachers and students to develop these competencies together, making Restorative Practices more than just a philosophy—they become a reliable process that equips everyone for real-life challenges in the classroom and beyond.
The Core Principles of Restorative Practice
At Collaborative School Culture, we’ve taken the widely recognized restorative principles and translated them into concrete, teachable practices that actually work in schools. These aren’t just ideals—they’re actionable strategies that help educators and students relate, reflect, and repair in real time. Restorative Practices in schools are guided by these foundational principles that serve as touchstones for creating meaningful change in school culture.
The core principles of restorative practice commonly referenced by practitioners and researchers are:
1. Engage with High Expectations and High Support (The Engagement Window)
This principle lives at the heart of restorative work: holding high expectations with support. Instead of relying on compliance or control, we help educators lead with warmth and clarity. We teach staff how to set boundaries, uphold accountability, and build relationships at the same time—so students feel both challenged and supported.
2. Use Fair Process to Promote Shared Accountability
Restorative schools don’t just hand down decisions—they create opportunities for voice and choice, especially for those affected. When leaders and educators use shared accountability and collaborative decision-making, people feel heard and invested. This builds trust, reduces resistance, and strengthens school culture.
3. Teach Strategies to Reflect, Express, and Address Harm and Needs
Core to our training is giving staff the tools to address harm and needs—without shame or blame. We teach how to use affective statements, restorative questions, and structured reflection tools like the Compass of Shame. These strategies help students move from reaction to reflection, and help adults stay grounded while navigating behavior challenges.
4. Build and Repair Relationships Through Explicit, Embedded Practices
We don’t just talk about community—we systematize it. Practices like circles, curbside conversations, and restorative conferencing are taught not as add-ons but as routines that build healthy relationships and support reintegration and restoration after harm. Whether it’s a daily check-in or a re-entry meeting, these practices help make relationships the fabric of your school—not just a goal.
5. Regulate Before You Relate: Calm, Reflect, Then Connect
One of the most overlooked aspects of implementation is emotional regulation. Before any meaningful repair can happen, people need to feel safe and calm. That’s why we help educators model co-regulation—providing support before expecting problem-solving. Our approach teaches staff how to calm themselves, help others regulate, and then move into relational problem-solving.
Four Restorative Practices You Can Weave Into Daily Routines
Restorative Practices don’t have to be reserved for special moments or formal events—they’re most powerful when integrated into your school’s everyday routines and systems. Four core Restorative Practices typically referenced in classroom and school settings are: circles, affective statements, restorative conversations, and conferencing. Each of these fundamental approaches provides educators and students with clear, actionable strategies for building relationships and addressing conflict. Below, we’ll explore each of these practices in a bit more detail:
Circles: These serve as both proactive and responsive tools in elementary, middle, and high school classroom settings. Whether used to start a morning or check in, discuss academic content, check for understanding, resolve a minor disagreement, or discuss everyday classroom issues, circles create a structured environment where voices can be heard and mutual respect is fostered.
Affective Statements: These are brief, “I feel” statements that communicate the impact of a student or colleague’s behavior on others. For instance, a teacher might say, “I feel concerned when you haven’t completed your work because I don’t want you to get too far behind.” These statements promote awareness of emotions and the impact of actions, enabling students to develop empathy and self-regulation.
Restorative Conversations: These structured dialogues are designed to navigate conflict or harm in real-time. Unlike an exclusively punitive response, these conversations invite students (and sometimes staff) to reflect on what happened, how it affected others, and what can be done to make things right. They also take the sole focus off the person causing harm and provide some time to hear out the person harmed.
Conferencing: This is a more formal restorative process, facilitated by a trained staff member, where all stakeholders—including those who caused harm, those harmed, supporters and family members—come together. The focus is on understanding the incident, the needs of all involved, and crafting a shared plan for repair and moving forward. Conferencing can be used in lieu of or alongside other consequences and supports reintegration with dignity.
Choosing the Right Practice for the Situation
Not all scenarios require a full conference, nor is every issue best resolved in a group setting. Staff must feel empowered and prepared to decide which practice matches the situation—whether it’s a quick, affective statement, a more involved restorative conversation, or bringing the class together through a circle. This capacity only develops through reflection, peer modeling, and real-world practice.
Ultimately, while these four restorative practices are foundational, their power lies not in their mere application but in thoughtful, skilled, and context-aware use—skills that flourish best in schools committed to ongoing professional development, authentic modeling by leaders, and a culture that values learning from each other in person.
What Are the Five Restorative Questions?
The five restorative questions are a well-known set of conversation prompts designed to guide students and staff through conflict resolution and harm repair conversations. These questions serve as a roadmap for reflection, accountability, and healing, applicable to both the individual who has caused harm and anyone who has been affected.
The restorative questions for the person causing harm include:
What happened?
What were you thinking at the time?
What have you thought about since?
Who has been affected by what you have done? In what way?
What do you think you need to do to make things right?
For those who were harmed, the questions are adapted to promote their voice and needs:
What did you think when you realized what had happened?
What impact has this incident had on you and others?
What has been the hardest thing for you?
What do you think needs to happen to make things right?
These questions aren’t a script to be followed rigidly but a scaffold that helps both parties move from an emotional reaction toward understanding, ownership, and resolution.
Adapting the Questions for Elementary and Classroom Settings
Young learners often require restorative questions to be simplified and customized for age-appropriate conversations. For example, instead of "Who else has been affected?" you might ask, "How do you think your classmate felt?" or "What can we do now to help everyone feel better?" Using visual aids, such as feeling emojis and pictures and age-appropriate supportive language helps elementary students participate actively in the restorative process.
Restorative Practices at a Glance: Examples in Action
Effective Restorative Practices in schools aren’t simply theoretical—they come to life through daily in-person activities and interactions that can transform a school’s procedures, systems, and eventually atmosphere. When these methods are woven into a school’s culture, they become routine touchpoints for building trust, resolving day-to-day conflicts, and nurturing strong relationships.
Classroom Circles: Connection and Conflict Resolution
One of the core examples of Restorative Practices in the classroom is the use of circles. Circles bring students and staff together—in a physically arranged circle—to get to know each other, process an event and discuss feelings, for an academic lesson, to reflect on daily experiences, or address small conflicts in a respectful and open setting.
Staff Modeling and Real-Time Application
When faculty openly use affective statements ("I noticed," "I feel," "I need"), they demonstrate vulnerability, accountability, and healthy communication.
Staff who skillfully engage colleagues or students in curbside conversations—brief, respectful dialogues in hallways or before returning to class—set the tone for the entire community. This real-time modeling is a critical factor in normalizing Restorative Practices across classrooms and grade levels.
Elementary School Implementation Examples
Elementary classrooms are full of opportunities to embed RP into routines. Some schools use storybooks to launch circles around themes like fairness or inclusion. Others set up quiet “reflection corners” with age-appropriate prompts to help students cool down and think through what happened before rejoining the group.
One school created a routine where students involved in a conflict met with the teacher for a quick, structured re-entry conversation before returning to the class. Another school hung posters of simplified restorative questions in the hallway and encouraged students to use them during peer conflicts with adult support.
Middle and High School Implementation Examples
In secondary schools, Restorative Practices thrive when embedded into advisory periods, support blocks, and behavioral response systems. Many schools begin with weekly community-building circles in homeroom or advisory to strengthen relationships and create a safe space for student voice. In response to conflict or disruption, trained staff lead restorative conversations or re-entry meetings to help students reflect and repair before returning to class. Peer mediation programs—where students facilitate low-level conflicts using restorative questions—are especially powerful at this level. When implemented schoolwide, RP becomes more than a discipline alternative; it becomes a culture where adolescents feel seen, respected, and responsible for their role in the community.
Customizing Restorative Practice to Your School’s Culture
There is no one-size-fits-all formula. The most effective schools integrate Restorative Practices into their standard operating procedures, ensuring they fit seamlessly with routines such as PBIS/MTSS, behavior response systems, arrival and dismissal protocols, and staff meetings. Collaborative School Culture specializes in helping administrators and teachers pinpoint which RP strategies are sustainable given their unique culture, schedule, and priorities—whether that means launching short daily check-in circles, designing faculty coaching sessions, or creating a menu of quick restorative interventions for teachers and support staff.
When Restorative Practices become "how we do things here," schools see deeper relationships, fewer repeated conflicts, and a climate of shared responsibility among adults and children alike.
How to Find the Right Restorative Practices Training and Resources
Not all Restorative Practices training is created equal—and a misstep here can stall progress before it starts. Whether you’re looking to deepen your implementation or just getting started, the right partner will help you build real capacity, not just check a box.
Skip the generic online searches. The best place to start is by talking to educators and trainers who’ve done the work in real school settings—those who know how to integrate Restorative Practices into the fast-paced, high-pressure environments educators navigate every day. Practicality, adaptability, and school-based expertise matter.
What Should You Look for in a Restorative Practices Training Provider?
When evaluating a training provider, consider:
School Experience: Trainers who have applied Restorative Practices in real school settings are invaluable. Ask about their experience with elementary, middle, or high school staff, and their ability to adapt training to your specific context.
Practical Application: The best training moves beyond the basics, focusing on how staff can effectively apply Restorative Practices in their daily routines, not just during high-profile incidents.
Engagement: Effective trainers create interactive sessions where staff can role-play, collaborate, and troubleshoot challenges they actually face, including parent communications, staff tensions, and classroom conflicts.
Follow-Up and Support: Look for trainers who provide ongoing support, practical resources, and coaching as your team begins to embed practices school-wide.
Conclusion: Building a Culture of Repair and Growth in Schools
Restorative Practices provide more than a toolkit for addressing conflict; they lay the foundation for a thriving school community centered around transparency, ownership, growth, understanding, and genuine connection. Instead of seeing Restorative Practices as a checkbox or a short-term intervention, it’s helpful to approach them as a journey—one that continually shapes the culture and climate of your school.
No matter where you are on this journey, remember: every step towards a more restorative, relationship-centered culture counts. If you’re considering next steps for your school, Collaborative School Culture is here to walk beside you. Our hands-on, in-person training draws on years of school-based expertise to help you build a thriving, connected community. We listen to your unique goals, create practical, customized roadmaps, and offer steady support from your first workshop through your ongoing implementation.
If you’re ready to move past theory and toward lasting, meaningful cultural change in your school, reach out to CSC. We’ll help you discover the perfect Restorative Practices training to inspire, engage, and empower your school community—one relationship at a time.