Restorative Practices

Restorative Practices

Prairie River Junior High is committed to using a restorative approach to support and fulfill our school values. The aim of this approach is to strengthen our school community and manage conflict and tension by repairing harm and building relationships. Through Restorative Practices, we foster a safe, respectful, and supportive learning environment where students and staff can learn, grow, and thrive together.

This is shown in our school values, which are:

• Respect
• Responsibility
• Reliability

For effective teaching and learning to take place, we believe that there should be good relationships within the school. The restorative approach puts repairing harm done to relationships as a priority of the entire school community. This allows us to build, foster and repair relationships.

Restorative Practices gives us two opportunities:

1. It primarily provides those who have been harmed with a forum to be heard, which is an essential part of healing.
2. It provides an opportunity for the person harming another to accept responsibility for their actions, and an opportunity to make things right.

The main tools in the restorative practices approach are daily circles and restorative circles. Daily circles build trust and community with our school classrooms. Restorative circles are the place where the two parties are able to discuss the situation with the intent of restoring relationships to support a good learning environment. 

In restorative circles, these five questions give everyone a chance to be heard.

1. What happened?
2. What were you thinking about at the time?
3. What were you feeling? What are you feeling now?
4. Who has been affected?
5. What needs to happen to make things fair and better?

The circles show that actions have consequences for how people are feeling, which influences how they are able to learn. Discussing these will encourage people to accept responsibility and repair relationships.