Restorative Conferencing In Education

Saturday, January 15th:  9am-3pm with lunch break

As an outgrowth of Restorative Justice, a model of addressing harm in communities practiced by indigenous communities around the world for centuries, Restorative Practices are gaining traction in educational settings as a means of fairly and equitably engaging students in repairing harms that happen at school.  The Center for Dialogue and Resolution’s Restorative Justice in Schools program offers a sequence of workshops for educational professionals to deepen our shared understanding of how to contribute to healthy communities.  

Restorative Conferencing, Module 3 of this sequence explores strategies for addressing higher levels of harms that occur in school settings.  Many violations of safety, such as fighting, bullying or other emotional harms, result in automatic suspension or expulsion, left over from wide-spread Zero Tolerance policies.  The research is clear that these policies don’t work to change the problematic behaviors and ultimately don’t make schools safer.  Restorative Justice approaches seek to hold harm-doers accountable for repairing damage and relationships where possible, while also seeking to understand what led to the harm in the first place. 

That all sounds fine, but how? How do we balance the need to maintain safety with the need to continue to educate students who have caused harm?  How do we talk through complex and emotionally charged conflicts to find constructive solutions?  Who comes to the circle and who has a say in what solutions look like?

CDR’s Restorative Conferencing workshop will address these questions and more, by providing:

• Theoretical background in Restorative Philosophy to inform the process,
• Setting the stage, intakes and pre-circle meetings,
• Concrete skills in Circle Facilitation,
• How to set up the environment, establish meaningful agreements, redirect when sharing gets charged,
• Balancing participant make-up, who is invited and when,
• And specific applications of Restorative Conferencing in the context of breaches of Oregon’s new Every Student Belongs administrative rule.

Format:  Remote delivery via Zoom

Cost:  $200 **Sliding scale and group discounts available upon request-- please contact us if you need assistance to attend.

Meet Your Trainers

Darren Reiley is a dad, a writer, and an educator with two decades of experience teaching English, Social Sciences and Conflict Resolution at every level from elementary to university. He wrote and published Peace Out: a Peace and Conflict Studies Curriculum for High School, based on ten years of developing peace and social justice curriculum. He currently serves as Program Manager for the Restorative Justice in Schools program at CDR.

Scott Smith is the Restorative Justice Program Manager at the Center for Dialogue and Resolution (CDR) in Eugene, OR.  In this capacity, he oversees the restorative diversion program for the Lane County Circuit Court, as well as providing training and coaching for educators seeking to integrate restorative justice principles into their schools.  He is currently on the coordinating committees of the Northwest Justice Forum and the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon.

Scott has worked in the U.S. and abroad in education and in conflict transformation, and tends to approach these two arenas as different aspects of the same overall project. He has lived in several parts of Oregon at different times, and has been based in Corvallis the last 10 years, where he and his wife are raising three school-aged kids.