Regardless of how hard teachers work to create safe, welcoming environments in which our students can thrive, we cannot escape classroom disruptions that threaten to jeopardize not only our lessons but also the well-being of our students and, in fact, ourselves.

Community or essential agreements — grounded in the practice of restorative justice — use responsive pedagogy to establish rules for appropriate conduct and consequences for rule breaking, thereby encouraging students' acceptable behavior and holding students accountable for their actions.

The Center for Restorative Process, the Human Rights Resource Center at the University of Minnesota, Peace First, the Center for Responsive Schools, and educator and author Patricia Lee Sequeira Belvel have researched the efficacy of creating and implementing community agreements and offer educators a variety of approaches to incorporate those agreements into their classrooms. Because community agreements have proven successful, they are increasingly growing in popularity in schools and programs throughout the world.

Creating and implementing essential agreements requires far more than making and hanging a poster based on those rules and consequences to which students agree. In fact, there are entire curricula based in restorative justice and essential agreements.

Belvel asserts that, before trying to create and implement community agreements, teachers must reflect upon the role they assume and rethink that role, moving away from the role of manager and toward the role of leader. Making the move from manager to leader is enormously challenging, Belvel notes, because while teachers typically come to teaching inspired and excited, they quickly find themselves drowning in a morass of issues students bring to class.

"Observations in over 2,000 classrooms have prompted a real concern about the students' lack of social skill and internal control in school settings," Belvel writes. These students "exhibit aggressive, resistant, distractible, withdrawn and dependent behavior styles," thereby negatively influencing the class and stealing time and energy from appropriately-behaved students eager to learn and teachers eager to nurture students' success.

Just as teachers must reflect upon and rethink their roles, so must students. Community agreements require students' active participation based in their own reflection and rethinking.

In one of many documents available from The University of Minnesota Human Rights Resource Center, teachers can find a step-by-step guide, "Establishing Classroom Rules, Rights, and Responsibilities." It begins with a brief presentation, "Introducing the Need for Classroom Rules," and is followed by asking students, "What makes a good discussion; what kind of class environment makes for a good discussion; and what kind of classroom helps you to learn?"

Teachers and students are not the only ones who must be willing to consider a curricular or systemic change. As Margaret Thorsborne and Peta Blood acknowledge, making such a change can be a mammoth task: "Moving from a punitive, rule-based discipline system to a system underpinned by relational values requires a change in the hearts and minds of practitioners, students, their parents and the wider community. Without understanding the enormity of this task a few good people in each school will be working very hard to make a difference, with limited impact."

In their papers, "Overcoming Resistance to Whole-School Uptake of Restorative Practices" and "The Challenge of Culture of Change" and in their book, "Implementing Restorative Practices in Schools," Thorsborne and Blood examine the resistance to adopting restorative practices and offer blueprints for how to address the resistance as well as a wealth of guidance for how to implement restorative practices and community agreements.

In "Teaching Restorative Practices with Classroom Circles," Amos Clifford, founder and director of the Center for Restorative Process, delineates 10 student goals, eight teacher goals and seven classroom community goals.

  • The top goal for students is that they "will learn to value and regularly use proactive, positive ways to build and maintain a peaceful classroom community."
  • The number one goal for teachers is that they "will understand the core principles of restorative justice and restorative practices and how they differ from traditional or punitive approaches."
  • The number one goal for the classroom community is that the community "will have established agreements about how to participate in circle."

Although Clifford's approach uses classroom circles, there are other approaches to implementing restorative practices and community agreements.

"Restorative justice is an alternative to using punishment to manage behavior," Clifford observes. Traditionally, Clifford notes, schools have borrowed their classroom management and student accountability approaches from the criminal justice system, which, he asserts, is destructive because there is "little opportunity for social and emotional learning."

By using traditional punishment, the pain and damage suffered by those who have been victimized is not addressed, and the victimizers do not have the opportunity to learn what is socially acceptable, to grow emotionally and to make amends.

Restorative justice is not retributive justice, Thorsborne and Blood point out. Instead, restorative practices are grounded in justice, not in punishment. Restorative justice "aim[s] first to build classroom communities that are supported by clear agreements, authentic communication, and specific tools to bring issues and conflicts forward in a helpful way," Clifford writes.

Peace First, a national nonprofit organization, considers children "natural problem solvers and creative thinkers" and believes that focusing on peacemaking gives those involved "the essential social and emotional skills of empathy, personal awareness, relationship building, and promoting inclusion — and goes beyond that to engage young people in seeing themselves as effective communicators and leaders."

If you are interested in exploring the role restorative justice and essential agreements can play and the impact they can have in your curriculum, your school, your school district, or your organization, examine the resources that follow.