So far, we have been promoting the benefits of Restorative Practice in schools, but educational professionals are divided on whether or not Restorative Practice ‘works’. In this blog by ‘Phycology Today’, Restorative Justice expert Mikhail Ltubansky explores the 9 most common criticisms.
Disempowered teachers
One of the most common criticisms we hear at Trackit Lights, is that teachers feel disempowered to manage behaviour effectively when restricted to only using Restorative approaches. If the only way teachers can manage low-level behaviour is by having a 15-minute Restorative conference with a pupil, it’s not always possible to do that in the middle of a lesson when they are trying to teach and manage a million other needs in the classroom! This is where Trackit Lights can help…
How can Trackit Lights help?
Increasingly, more and more schools use a hybrid of low-level behaviour management strategies, rewards, praising Learning Behaviours and escalated warnings along-side Restorative Practice. Restorative Practice is a great way to develop strong relations and values that prevent conflict and challenging behaviour from occurring, and it’s also a fantastic method of helping students learn from the consequences of their behaviour and find strategies to resolve the underlying unmet needs that were driving the behaviour. In addition to this though, many schools use other strategies that also have benefits – such as recognition, consistent boundaries and structure. These other strategies don’t have to contradict Restorative Practice but can complement it.
Trackit Lights has transformed countless schools to equip teachers with a powerful classroom management tool that focuses predominantly on praise. Many schools have seen a 50% reduction in challenging behaviour incidents since using it. Also, our integrations with CPOMS, MyConcern, SIMS and all other popular Management Information Systems, reduce your teacher’s behaviour admin workload by 95% because all the behaviour teachers log on the board in class can be instantly uploaded into the other systems you are using. No more behaviour logging at 3:30pm!