"Living the Vision": Surfacing Dilemmas of Restorative Leadership

• In Event: 72.021 - Learning From Ethnography: How We Make Change in Urban School Discipline

Abstract

In recent years, in response to data demonstrating that youth of color tend to experience disproportionate rates of detention and suspension, a growing number of urban schools have chosen to replace “zero tolerance” discipline policies with the re-integrative framework associated with restorative justice (Wadhwa, 2015). While some such schools have focused only on implementing restorative discipline as a way to minimize exclusions, others have embraced the idea that the restorative approach specifies a comprehensive way of (re)building school culture—an approach which emphasizes the building and repairing of relationships through the use of deliberative processes (Wachtel, n.d.), and which, as such, requires profound shifts in practice on the part of those who have relied on authoritarian frameworks (Thorsborne, 2013).

In this paper, I employ the methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to explore and narratively interpret the work of a group of twenty instructional leaders who are engaged in an effort to transform the culture of their K-12 charter school through the adoption of this approach. Taking a phenomenological lens, I focus on the sense-making of these leaders as they deliberately attempt to “live restoratively” while working together to redesign the school’s teacher evaluation framework. I ask: What dilemmas arise when school leaders deliberately strive to function together in ways that reflect the restorative approach? What do these dilemmas suggest about the broader change processes involved in (re)organizing school culture around the restorative approach? Data sources include ethnographic fieldnotes taken over a six-month period, semi-structured interviews with the thirteen core members of the leadership group, and group-generated documents. In the tradition of grounded theory, data were analyzed according to both hypothesized and emergent themes; preliminary findings were presented to the group as a “member check” (Maxwell, 2012).

The findings of the paper are organized around four central dilemmas that the group encountered in their work: the tension between the need to be systematic and the desire to personalize, the puzzle of how to acknowledge and include minority opinions without sacrificing the ability to be decisive, the question of “fit” between group tasks and desired group processes, and the broader dilemma of how to navigate previously unaddressed issues of race, power, and privilege. A second strand of findings focuses on the group’s growing recognition of the need to arrive at common understanding of what the restorative approach implies in terms of curriculum and instruction.

These findings shed light on the affordances and drawbacks associated with applying the restorative approach to situations of school and instructional leadership. More broadly, they add to the knowledge-base about the nature of individual and organizational learning in the context of organizational change, demonstrating that shifting from an authoritarian to a restorative framework requires a great deal of unlearning—and thus suggesting that successful adoption of the restorative approach requires more significant investments than schools and/or districts might anticipate.

Author

• Sarah Melanie Fine, Harvard University