Week 3

Restorative Justice is a theory that students can  mend the wounds that occur in their schools themselves. This is meant to bring the students together in the form of a peer group or mediation group to talk about anything about the school that bugs them. This has shown success in a number of different realms. It has lowered bullying, suspension and expulsion rates, as well as, increasing the quality to the school environment. These groups can be broken down into two groups, large and small. Large groups may need to meet to talk about big issues at hand, where small groups may met to resolve conflict between small groups of students. These small mediation groups form other even small groups which sit with individual students who may have individual needs which need to be addressed. These groups hope to limit peer to peer conflicts through working through them themselves.
Sources:
Davis, Matt. (2013) Restorative Justice: Resources for Schools. Edutopia
< http://www.edutopia.org/blog/restorative-justice-resources-matt-davis > 

This will certainly have its advantages in the classroom as well as in the entire school community. It seems by allowing the students to work things out for themselves has positive affect on their school climate. By allow students to work things out, with the help of an adult, decreases the number of referrals to the principals office. It may be difficult to form these groups within one small classroom, but could work if you are given the right group of kids. Kids these days do not know how to be visually social. They live on their phone and computers that they are lacking the social skills to settle a dispute, which mind you, is a good professional characteristic.
Our school has a student leadership group who meets once a month to talk about things that are going on in the school, but I do not see them solving any peer to peer conflicts. So in a way, we have this mentality, but not totally. I think this would be a great club to start to go hand in hand with the leadership group. Our school also has a senate group which goes over all the rules and procedures our school has and debates them. They see which ones are useful and useless. Their voices are not always heard though. Adults still have the final say in all of the decisions. These adults are the building administration of course!