Types of Restorative Practices Training
Introduction to Restorative Practices Training
We all know that relationships are the answer—whether we’re trying to build a workplace people want to stay in, a classroom where students are engaged and feel like they belong, or a bridge to connect with the hardest-to-reach students, families, or colleagues. But too often, schools don’t have explicit, consistent structures for building and restoring relationships, let alone a shared framework that makes these practices more impactful across the entire school community. Restorative Practices (RP) Training is a foundational step for any school or district aiming to build a stronger, more connected school culture. At its core, RP training equips educators, staff, and administrators with the tools to build relationships, foster community, and address harm in a way that promotes learning and accountability, not just compliance. Rather than relying solely on traditional discipline, schools trained in Restorative Practices emphasize proactive connection, shared norms, and inclusive dialogue.
At Collaborative School Culture (CSC), we offer a range of Restorative Practices trainings that help schools embed these principles into their everyday work. From whole-staff professional development to specialized workshops for leadership teams, behavior support staff, or family engagement, our trainings are customized to your school’s unique needs and readiness. When schools move beyond one-off sessions and invest in strategic, phased training, they begin to see lasting shifts in culture, climate, and relationships.
Definition and Purpose of Restorative Practices Training
Restorative Practices training builds staff capacity to create environments where students and adults feel seen, heard, and supported. This training teaches educators how to hold proactive community-building circles, lead effective restorative conversations, and communicate with clarity, compassion, and consistency.
The purpose of Restorative Practices training isn’t just about responding to conflict. It’s about transforming the culture of the school so that connection comes first—because when people feel connected, they’re more likely to stay regulated, take responsibility, and repair harm when it happens. RP training focuses on systematizing this approach through common language, clear strategies, and aligned staff practices.
The Importance of Restorative Practices Training in Educational Settings
Restorative Practices training gives educators what so many crave—but rarely receive: practical tools for building a culture grounded in connection, accountability, and support. While schools have long known that relationships matter, few provide staff with a consistent framework, shared language, or scheduled opportunities to proactively build community and repair harm.
Without intentional training, even the most well-meaning staff may fall into reactive patterns—addressing behaviors with control rather than connection, or avoiding hard conversations entirely. Restorative Practices training interrupts these patterns. It equips educators with the mindset, strategies, and routines to strengthen relationships, respond to conflict constructively, and create emotionally safe classrooms.
From reducing discipline issues to improving student engagement and staff collaboration, the ripple effects of high-quality Restorative Practices training are well-documented. But more importantly, it gives schools a way to turn values like trust, belonging, and accountability into visible, daily action.
Overview of the Benefits for Educators and Schools
Restorative Practices training doesn’t just improve outcomes—it transforms how schools function. For educators, it offers a structured, repeatable approach to building relationships, managing conflict, and holding students accountable while remaining grounded in compassion. With training, staff gain practical strategies they can use right away: community-building circles, affective language, restorative conversations, and ways to navigate challenging interactions with students and colleagues alike.
For schools, the benefits go far beyond behavior management. When Restorative Practices are embedded into daily life, not just reserved for discipline, the entire school culture improves. Students feel seen and heard, staff feel supported and aligned, and families become more engaged. Over time, schools report reductions in exclusionary discipline, stronger classroom communities, improved staff morale, and higher student engagement.
Research supports these outcomes. A study by the University of Chicago Education Lab found that implementing restorative practices in CPS high schools led to an 18% reduction in out-of-school suspensions, a 35% decrease in in-school arrests, and a 15% drop in out-of-school arrests. Additionally, students reported improved perceptions of school climate, including increased feelings of safety and belonging (University of Chicago Education Lab, 2021). In Pittsburgh, schools that implemented RP with fidelity experienced fewer suspensions and improvements in school climate, particularly for younger students (RAND Corporation, 2018). These aren’t just isolated results—they point to a consistent pattern: when relationships are prioritized, outcomes improve.
At Collaborative School Culture, we support schools in making that shift. Our trainings aren’t one-size-fits-all. We offer different formats for different audiences, with implementation strategies that fit your context, whether you’re just starting or ready to go deeper.
What Are the 5 R's of Restorative Practices?
The “5 R’s” are often referenced as a foundation for Restorative Practices in schools—Respect, Responsibility, Relationship, Repair, and Reintegration. At first glance, they seem straightforward. But like many value-based frameworks, they only become powerful when translated into explicit behaviors and daily systems.
At Collaborative School Culture, we believe the 5 R’s can serve as starting points—but not the full picture. Too often, educators are introduced to these terms without support in how to live them out in real moments of classroom tension or staff disagreement. We’ve seen that impact happens not through naming the values, but through equipping staff and students with tools to embody them.
For example:
Respect isn’t just a stated expectation—it’s reflected in the way staff and students speak to each other, the way meetings are facilitated, and the degree to which all voices are heard.
Responsibility includes taking ownership for one’s actions, but also co-owning the well-being of the larger community.
Repair requires a process—one that includes affective statements, restorative questions, and time to reflect, not just an apology.
Relationships are built proactively, not reactively, through consistent structures like community-building circles and informal check-ins.
Reintegration means creating systems that allow students or staff to return to the community with dignity after harm, not just sending them back into the classroom with unresolved tension.
The truth is: these values require systematization. That’s why our work at CSC focuses on building structures—training, coaching, checklists, routines, and leadership support—that help schools move beyond inspiration into implementation.
Possible Additional Elements or Perspectives
While the 5 R’s provide a helpful starting point, schools that are serious about improving culture and reducing conflict benefit from going deeper. At Collaborative School Culture, we emphasize the importance of expanding the framework to include actionable tools and brain-aligned strategies that support both prevention and repair.
Two essential elements we often add are Reflection and Empathy—not as abstract values, but as skills that can be practiced and developed over time. Reflection helps students and staff understand the “why” behind their behavior and connect it to impact. Empathy fosters the ability to recognize how others are affected, creating the conditions for accountability without blame.
We also draw on neuroscience and affect psychology to integrate calming and regulating strategies before any meaningful reflection can occur. Without calming the nervous system first, people, especially young people, often remain stuck in defensiveness or shame. That’s why we help schools adopt bottom-up brain strategies, like movement, rhythm, breathwork, and grounding tools, into their daily routines.
Finally, we believe in the power of explicit practices. Schools need a common language and simple, visible tools to guide their restorative efforts, such as affective statements, restorative questions, curbside conversations, and relational circle prompts. These tools turn theory into habit and make the work feel doable rather than abstract.
Restorative Practices are most powerful when they move from a values-based vision to an operationalized framework. When everyone in the building is using the same tools, aligned with the same goals, relationships become easier to build—and to repair.
The Core Pillars and Principles of Restorative Practices
At Collaborative School Culture, we move beyond generic values like “respect” or “responsibility” and instead focus on actionable pillars that help schools implement Restorative Practices with clarity and consistency. These core pillars are the backbone of a restorative school culture and reflect what it means to do this work, not just believe in it.
What are the 4 pillars of restorative practice?
High Support and High Accountability (The Engagement Window)
Restorative Practices thrive when staff operate in the "With Box"—the sweet spot where support and accountability are both high. This balance is critical in adult conversations, student interactions, and schoolwide systems. The Engagement Window provides a lens for leaders and educators to reflect on how they show up, recalibrate when needed, and model relational leadership.Fair Process Decision-Making
Restorative schools engage staff, students, and families in meaningful ways, especially when decisions impact them. Using Fair Process means offering voice, clearly explaining the rationale behind decisions, and following up with clarity. This doesn’t mean consensus on everything, but it does build trust, transparency, and shared responsibility.Strategies to Express, Share, and Reflect
Tools like affective statements, restorative questions, and the Compass of Shame help staff and students express how they’re feeling, reflect on impact, and take ownership. These strategies offer a common language for navigating hard moments, and they build emotional fluency across the school community.Explicit Practices to Build and Repair Relationships
Circles, Curbside Conversations, and restorative conferencing aren’t just add-ons—they are structured, intentional ways to proactively build connection and to address harm when it happens. When these practices are embedded in routines and systems, they shift school culture toward one of inclusion, clarity, and restoration.
Together, these pillars support a relational approach to teaching, leading, and learning. They ensure that Restorative Practices aren’t just talked about—but actually lived in every hallway, classroom, and leadership decision.
Different Types of Restorative Justice Strategies
In a truly Restorative school, about 80% of the work focuses on proactive practices—building trust, creating shared norms, and investing in relationships before conflict ever occurs. But the other 20% still matters deeply. That’s where Restorative Justice comes in.
Restorative Justice is the responsive side of Restorative Practices. It’s what we do after harm, disconnection, or conflict has occurred. Rather than defaulting to exclusion or punishment, restorative responses aim to understand what happened, acknowledge impact, and support meaningful repair. When schools only focus on discipline-related responses, they miss the full power of Restorative Practices. But when restorative responses are designed well and embedded into school systems, they provide a critical path for accountability, healing, and re-entry.
Here are some of the common types of responsive Restorative Justice strategies used in schools:
What are the five types of restorative justice strategies??
Restorative Conversations
These are timely discussions that can take place between students, between staff and students, or among staff members. Using restorative questions as a guide, these conversations focus on understanding what happened, who was impacted, and what’s needed to move forward. Restorative conversations can prevent escalation, clarify misunderstandings, and repair relationships early, before formal interventions are needed.Peer Mediation
Trained student mediators can help their peers resolve conflict in a structured, neutral setting. Peer mediation builds leadership and social-emotional skills among students and provides a helpful alternative to adult-led intervention. It works best in school communities that have already invested in proactive community-building practices and a shared restorative mindset.Restorative Re-Entry Meetings
When a student returns to school or the classroom after a suspension or extended absence, a re-entry meeting can provide critical support. These meetings allow staff and students to reconnect, name what’s needed for success moving forward, and identify supports. Too often, teachers are left out of re-entry processes. Restorative Re-Entry Meetings ensure they’re part of the dialogue, making reintegration more successful and relational.Restorative Conferences
These facilitated conversations bring together those who caused harm, those impacted, and key supporters to walk through what happened, the impact, and what needs to happen next. Conferences are appropriate after more serious incidents and require emotional readiness from all participants. A skilled, trained facilitator ensures the process is safe, voluntary, and productive.Responsive Circles
When an incident has affected a group of students or staff, a Responsive Circle can be used to process what happened and restore a sense of safety and connection. These circles allow for multiple perspectives to be heard, build shared understanding, and generate ideas for moving forward. They’re especially helpful when harm has disrupted the wider classroom or team dynamic.
At Collaborative School Culture, we help schools design restorative response systems that meet the real challenges of day-to-day school life. Our goal isn’t to prescribe a single model—it’s to build staff confidence and capacity to respond relationally, consistently, and with care when things go wrong.
Restorative Practices Training: Formats and Modalities
Restorative Practices training equips educators and school leaders with practical tools to build community, address conflict, and restore relationships in real-time. But not all training formats offer the same depth or impact.
In-person vs Online Training Modalities
At Collaborative School Culture, we prioritize in-person training because the work of building restorative muscle memory, especially for hard conversations and responsive practices, requires modeling, practice, and feedback. While online learning can support understanding of core concepts, implementation lives and dies in the details: how something is said, how it lands, what adjustments are needed in the moment. That kind of nuance is hard to replicate on a screen.
In-person training allows for:
Live demonstration of circles, affective language, and restorative responses
Real-time coaching and feedback during role-plays
Connection and vulnerability that builds buy-in and collective commitment
We also offer hybrid models and follow-up coaching to support sustainability and deepen implementation. But we always tell our partners: if you want staff to feel it, buy into it, and use it, we need to be in the room with them.
Focus on In-Person Training for Effective Outcomes
While online trainings can offer convenience and reinforce foundational knowledge, the heart of Restorative Practices is relational, and that means the most powerful training happens in person.
At Collaborative School Culture, we focus on in-person professional development because it mirrors the work we’re asking educators to do: build trust, engage in reflection, and practice new ways of being in community. In-person sessions allow participants to:
Watch live modeling of restorative strategies like circles, affective statements, and Curbside Conversations
Practice these tools in real scenarios with coaching and feedback
Feel the impact of tone, body language, and relational presence—things that can’t be fully captured in a virtual space
When training is experiential, educators don’t just understand Restorative Practices intellectually—they feel them. And that emotional imprint is what makes the work stick.
Our in-person sessions are dynamic, engaging, and grounded in real school experience. Educators leave with strategies they’ve practiced, language they’ve heard modeled, and the confidence to bring restorative tools into their classrooms and staff culture the very next day.
The Importance of Expert-Led Training Sessions
Restorative Practices aren’t just ideas. They’re embodied practices. They rely on tone, presence, and emotional regulation just as much as strategy. That’s why expert-led, interactive sessions matter—and why our CSC facilitators bring both deep experience in schools and the ability to model what relational leadership looks like in real time.
Understanding Tier 1 Restorative Practices
Tier 1 Restorative Practices are the proactive foundation of a thriving school culture. They’re not a program or script—but a set of daily relational habits that build connection, create psychological safety, and prevent conflict from escalating in the first place.
This is the 80% of Restorative Practices: what we do every day to strengthen relationships before harm occurs.
Examples of Tier 1 strategies include:
Community-building circles that give students and staff space to share, listen, and be seen
Affective statements that express feelings and needs in the moment, without blame
Curbside Conversations that allow staff to clear tension informally and relationally
Relational routines like daily check-ins, peer shout-outs, or classroom agreements built together
When schools implement Tier 1 practices with consistency, they see measurable gains. Research has shown improvements in classroom climate, stronger student-staff relationships, and a sense of belonging that translates to academic engagement and decreased behavior referrals.
Collaborative School Culture supports schools in operationalizing these Tier 1 strategies through hands-on training, modeled practice, and implementation tools that make the work stick. When proactive practices are embedded into the fabric of the school day, we shift from reacting to behaviors to creating environments that support thriving.
Implementation Strategies for Educators
Embedding Tier 1 Restorative Practices into daily routines doesn’t require the kind of extra time that many anticipate, but it requires a mindset shift and intentional habits. The most successful educators don’t wait for conflict to happen; they create a classroom culture where trust, voice, and connection are built in.
Here’s how to start:
Begin with circles: Whether weekly or daily, short circles give students space to share, listen, and reflect. CSC provides circle prompts that align with SEL themes, school values, or academic topics, helping teachers integrate circles into what they’re already doing.
Use affective language: Practice using affective statements like “I felt frustrated when I wasn’t informed about the change” instead of reactive or vague language. These statements model emotional expression and help others hear feedback without defensiveness.
Model repair: When a misstep happens, name it, take ownership, and invite repair. Students learn more from how we recover than how we react.
Normalize relational check-ins: Start meetings with a quick check-in question, invite student input in classroom decisions, or pause to acknowledge effort. These micro-practices build relational capital that buffers stress and conflict.
Align with schoolwide systems: Work with your team to align Tier 1 Restorative Practices with existing SEL, PBIS, or behavior systems. When shared practices are reinforced across classrooms and grade levels, the culture becomes self-sustaining.
CSC’s training equips educators with practical strategies, language models, and coaching supports to make Tier 1 practices feel natural and doable—not another initiative, but a better way of being together.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Restorative Practices
Restorative Practices have been lauded for their transformative impact on school cultures and communities, but the question remains: Do Restorative Practices Work? The answer is a resounding yes. Numerous studies and anecdotal evidence illustrate their effectiveness in building better school environments and promoting community wellness.
Evidence and Studies Supporting Restorative Practices
The positive outcomes of schools that implement Restorative Practices are well-documented. For example, a study by The University of Chicago's Education Lab on Chicago Public Schools showcased an 18% decrease in out-of-school suspensions and a reduction in student arrests both in and out of school. Such statistics highlight the effectiveness of these practices in minimizing disciplinary actions and enhancing school safety.
The RAND Corporation's research on Restorative Practices in 44 Pittsburgh schools further confirmed their efficacy, reporting reductions in suspension rates overall, especially for younger students. The findings reflect how proactively implemented restorative methodologies can reshape school cultures, creating more community-focused and understanding environments.
Impact on School Environments and Community Culture
The shift from compliance-based systems to relationship-centered environments has powerful ripple effects. Schools that use Restorative Practices see more consistent classroom expectations, improved communication across teams, and reduced reliance on exclusionary discipline. Adults report stronger collaboration, while students express greater trust in staff.
CSC’s model emphasizes embedding RP into schoolwide systems and routines so that it's not dependent on a single champion. With shared language and expectations, schools become more cohesive, inclusive (without using that word), and resilient communities.
Considering Your Next Steps in Restorative Practices Training and Implementation
Bringing Restorative Practices to life in schools isn’t about a single training—it’s about building capacity, aligning systems, and supporting people. Training is a launch point, but meaningful implementation takes ongoing support, modeling, and a commitment to culture-building over time.
Summary of Key Insights
Throughout this blog, we’ve explored how Restorative Practices training helps educators create schools where students and staff thrive. From proactive Tier 1 strategies like affective statements and community-building circles to responsive tools like restorative conversations and re-entry meetings, these practices support a relational, accountable culture. When staff feel equipped to build and repair relationships, schools see improved student outcomes, stronger adult collaboration, and more sustainable systems for handling conflict.
Steps to Continue Training and Certification
For schools ready to deepen their practice, Collaborative School Culture offers training pathways tailored to each stage of implementation. These include:
Restorative Practices for Educators: A 2-day interactive training for all staff that introduces core mindsets, models proactive and responsive tools, and prepares educators to bring RP into their daily work.
Restorative Leadership: Session(s) for administrators and building leaders on aligning systems and sustaining change through coaching, feedback, and supportive accountability.
Restorative Conferencing: Advanced training for staff facilitating structured responses to harm, including preparation, facilitation, and follow-up.
Training of Trainers (TOT): A three-day experience for internal trainers ready to lead CSC’s core educator training in-house.
Consider Expert Consultation
Schools are most successful when they don’t go it alone. Whether you're just beginning your RP journey or seeking to deepen and scale what you’ve started, working with experienced consultants helps ensure the work is practical, aligned, and embedded. CSC’s team brings decades of real-school experience and implementation expertise to each training, coaching session, and strategic plan.
Contact Collaborative School Culture and let us help you build a school culture where relationships come first—and where everyone has the tools to build, maintain, and repair them.