Restorative practice

Restorative practice is a relational approach to school life grounded in beliefs about equality, dignity, mana and the potential of all people.

As outlined on the Ministry of Education PB4L site:

The Positive Behaviour for Learning (PB4L) Restorative Practice model focuses on building and maintaining positive, respectful relationships across the school community and offers school staff best-practice tools and techniques to restore relationships when things go wrong. By building and maintaining positive, respectful relationships within a school, staff to staff, staff to student and student to student, issues are more easily managed. Click here for further information.

Why restorative? At Rolleston College the learner is at the centre and is at the heart of all that we do. Restorative practices are about teaching learners the next step rather than punishing them without looking at how the behaviour occurred. Young people need help to learn social skills just as they need help with maths and English. Restorative practice is relationship-based and removes barriers to learning. Ready to Learn, Ready to Flourish.

Kaiako/teachers and staff at Rolleston College will have restorative chats with learners when they have not been R2L (Ready to Learn) or R2A (Ready to Achieve). For example, this could include using their phone in class, arriving to class late or not engaging in their learning.

The intent of the chat is to deal with these situations when they first occur, rather than letting them build and become bigger issues.

In the restorative chat, the teacher will ask the following questions of the learner:

  1. What happened? (Getting the learner to tell their story)

  2. What were you thinking at the time? (To help the teacher better understand why the situation may have happened)

  3. Who do you think has been affected? (To help the learner appreciate how their actions impact themselves and others)

  4. What do you think needs to happen to put things right? (This allows the learner and teacher to restore the relationship)