Poster #87 - School Staff Perspectives on First Year Restorative Practices Implementation at a Diverse Urban Elementary School

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Restorative Practices (RP) is emerging nationwide as an alternative framework to exclusionary and punitive discipline (Fronius, Persson, Guckenburg, Hurley, & Petrosino, 2016). RP can perhaps be best described as an umbrella of tools that school staff can use preventatively to establish positive relationships with all school stakeholders, and to repair relations that have been damaged by conflict and harm (Kline, 2016). However, the pace and excitement surrounding RP implementation in schools to address documented discipline disparities has surpassed the established research literature on RP implementation and effectiveness (Song & Swearer, 2016). More research is needed to understand the essential structures and strategies that foster commitment and buy-in among classroom teachers in the early stages of RP implementation. Finally, most of the research on RP has focused on implementation at secondary levels, therefore less is known about the ways in which elementary schools can utilize RP to build community, improve school climate and reduce exclusionary discipline given the unique developmental differences of elementary students.

Inn the spring of 2018, a bounded mixed methods case study (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018; Onghena et al., 2018) was conducted in a diverse urban elementary school located in the northeast to examine structural and procedural facets of early RP implementation. This paper presentation will focus on themes drawn from the 17 in-depth semi-structured individual interviews conducted with teachers (N=13), school support staff (N=3) as well as the school principal (N=1). Three trained qualitative researchers iteratively developed a codebook with a priori codes from initial field memos and in vivo codes generated from the transcripts.
First cycle and second cycle coding schema was employed to identify emergent themes that saturated interviews (Saldaña, 2016). Four major themes emerged: 1) RP alignment with current school behavioral supports systems, 2) RP strategies implemented, 3) RP implementation lessons learned and 4) RP vision and goals. Within these broader themes, heavily saturated codes identified across the majority of interviews were related to (see Figure 1): 1) alignment and tensions of RP with school discipline procedures, 2) importance of school leadership providing professional development opportunities and modeling RP and 3) specific strategies classroom teachers employed to modify RP procedures to meet the developmental, language and social emotional needs of their elementary school students. Please see table 1 for poignant quotes related to these emergent sub-themes.

Preliminary results point to both the alignment and explicit and implicit tensions of RP with existing school behavioral support systems. Additionally, educators spoke to the school wide cultural shift needed to avoid the distillation of RP as a passive and avoidant school wide discipline and behavioral support system. Elementary school teachers are utilizing innovative curricular modifications to ensure that RP classroom processes are accessible and developmentally appropriate; however more research and professional development needs to be targeted to ensure that elementary level implementation of RP does not further reify school systems that marginalize students with language, disability or emotional needs.

Authors

• Bernice Garnett, University of Vermont
  Presenting Author

• Colby T Kervick, University of Vermont
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mika Moore, University of Vermont
  Non-Presenting Author