Tips & Ideas

Guidance and inspiration to help you build skills and community in your classroom and school

Morningside Center's Daniel Coles shares the poem "Shoulders" by Naomi Shihab Nye, and suggests ways to use the poem in your classroom.
 

In communicating with students, focus on the behavior you want to see and encourage, not the off-task or disruptive behavior you want to stop.

In this video the school to prison pipeline is explained and connected to how punitive discipline in schools disproportionately targets African American students, pushing them out of school at much higher rates than their White peers for the same behaviors

This video looks at taking the implementation of Restorative Practices in Chicago Public Schools to “the next level, the community level, to the parent level to expand best practices that we’re seeing taking place in our school so that we truly have a restorative community wrapped around our...

This video shows the various stages of a restorative conference between two young men, their families, friends, and other community members to address a situation of harm doing—Part 1: Dialogue:  opening introductions, establishing guidelines, responsible youth incident summary, person harmed shares...

This video shows a restorative conversation between a student and her ELA teacher to address an incident a few weeks earlier that escalated to the point of the student leaving the classroom. 

This video discusses and shows the steps of a Restorative Pre-Conference (separately) with participants on different sides of an incident in which harm was done.  The pre-conference aims to get participants comfortable and familiar (enough) with the conference to be willing and able to participate...

RP Video Library:  This video shows a powerful Welcome and Reentry Circle that welcomes a student back to school after an absence.  The circle is implemented with fidelity, according to the key restorative circle components found at our Introduction to Circles.

We can help our students (and ourselves) calm down, focus, and respond constructively to stress by practicing deep, focused breathing.

RP Video Library: This video shows a peer facilitated restorative circle to problem solve around lateness in school. The Circle is implemented with fidelity, according to the key restorative circle components found at our introduction to circles.