Restorative justice (RJ) is an idea whose time may have finally arrived. Although the concept has ancient roots and the term has existed in Western societies since the 1970s, only recently has it gained general public recognition. In schools, RJ’s popularity is rising world-wide. In fact, education is the fastest growing area for the practice of RJ. Despite an increasing number of schools embracing the approach, it is not clear what educational RJ practitioners are trying to achieve. Adult Intentions, Student Perceptions: How Restorative Justice is Used in Schools to Control and to Engage focuses on the use of RJ in one school in Scotland and one in Canada. While important to understand the intentions of educators in using RJ in schools, those aims must be examined alongside the actual impact that such practices have on students. RJ can be understood and experienced in dramatically different ways by those implementing it. For some, RJ is about creating an environment of and for student engagement that challenges traditional systems of discipline and facilitates learning. For others, RJ is simply another tool for solidifying compliance and meting out punishment, albeit in a kinder, gentler way. Adult Intentions, Student Perceptions provides the opportunity to delve deeply into the stories of two schools and the adults and young people who inhabit them, and consider the broad impact that differing educator understandings of RJ have on students. Adult Intentions, Student Perceptions is a timely book for RJ advocates and critics alike. It challenges a common assumption of some RJ advocates that implementing RJ necessarily creates a classroom environment of social engagement (where students are empowered to engage with one another and think critically, and school relationships and hierarchies are transformed). The student experience relayed in this book shows that RJ can as readily be mobilized to create classroom environments of social control (where students are taught obedience and compliance, and authority and hierarchy are reinforced). Reimer argues that RJ, by itself, does not guarantee certain qualities of relationship, but RJ does allow us to examine relational qualities and ask questions of how school relationships are used to engage and/or control students.

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know offers theoretical grounding and practical approaches for leaders and teachers interested in effectively addressing racism and other oppressive constructs. The book draws both on the author’s extensive experience teaching about race and racism in classroom and community settings and from the theory and practice of a wide range of educators, activists, and researchers committed to social justice. The first chapter looks at the toxic consequences of our western cultural insistence on profit, binary thinking, and individualism to establish the theoretical framework for teaching about race and racism. Chapter two investigates privileged resistance, offering a psycho/social history of denial, particularly as a product of racist culture. Chapter three reviews the research on the construction and reconstruction of dominant culture both historically and now in order to establish sound strategic approaches that educators, teachers, facilitators, and activists can take as we work together to move from a culture of profit and fear to one of shared hope and love. Chapter four lays out the stages of a process that supports teaching about racist, white supremacy culture, explaining how students can be taken through an iterative process of relationshipbuilding, analysis, planning, action, and reflection. The final chapter borrows from the brilliant, brave, and incisive writer Dorothy Allison to discuss the things the author knows for sure about how to teach people to see that which we have been conditioned to fear knowing. The chapter concludes with how to encourage and support collective and collaborative action as a critical goal of the process.

This practice-based text offers a roadmap to optimal collaboration for all school leaders – including counselors, superintendents, principals, and university faculty – to provide the best mental health outcomes for students. Administrative Leaders and School Counselors is a timely publication that creatively and cohesively authenticates the relationship between administrative leaders and school counselors. In order to systemically promote mental health consciousness and considerations for school counselors as practitioners and in training, collaboration among school leaders is essential for comprehensive school counseling programs, practices, funding, partnerships, and services designed for students. The first to feature perspectives from a diverse set of leadership positions in schools, the book provides individuals with exposure to educational leadership models and decisions that impact the roles of school counselors. The book will appeal to faculty who are teaching and training those who are or will ultimately be working as professional school counselors, counseling psychologists, or educational leaders such as principals, directors, department chairs, and superintendents.

This book focuses on how teachers can transmit and practice values through classroom circles that attend to and empower all students’ voices. A growing number of teachers are using relational pedagogy, drawing on Indigenous circle practice, as a pedagogical tool. Done well, circles can build and sustain dialogue and peaceful relations. Done poorly, circles reflect and reinforce relations of power, which, if disregarded, can be damaging for participants whose voices are silenced or not sufficiently heard. Parker-Shandal’s consideration of teachers’ professional learning and training in restorative justice in education focuses on ethnographic, classroom-based research in diverse urban elementary schools. Her data include observations of classrooms, teacher surveys, and interviews with students, teachers, and principals. The book provides a detailed account of the lived experience of students and teachers as they engage with and experience the transformative power of constructive dialogue about conflicts embedded in curriculum subject matter through restorative justice pedagogies.

Setting Relations Right in Restorative Practice is a practical guide to using restorative processes, both in justice systems, to provide a healing response to harm, and in broader community contexts, to help people co-exist peacefully. Restorative processes can help to establish, maintain, deepen, and repair relationships, and to neutralise the conflict associated with negative relationships. The result is less conflict within people, between people, and between groups, and increasing individual and community wellbeing. These complex goals can be distilled to the single principle of setting relations right. The authors distil lessons from their decades of work at the frontline of restorative innovation. They outline an accurate, accessible theory that informs a restorative mindset, and describe in detail the corresponding skill set. Succinct, engaging case studies include refinements to existing programs in justice systems. Other case studies include the innovations of restorative responses to institutional abuse and to family violence and sexual harm, initiatives to increase psychological safety in schools and workplaces, and programs that support restorative ways-of-working across whole cities or regions. By applying elements from successful programs, practitioners can realise the broader reforming potential of restorative practice. This book is essential reading for restorative practitioners, administrators, and policymakers, for students and researchers – indeed, for anyone interested in the power and potential of restorative practice and other forms of deliberative decision-making.

"This book represents an evidence-based plea to radically revise the entire conceptualization and approach to school safety, ushering in a new world of safe and healthy schools"--

With the increasing amount of diversity taking place in the United States and in our K-12 schools, this book will help school leaders become prepared. It is the school principal who sets the tone for the school culture and provides the vision as to the direction of the organization. Therefore, school principals will ultimately have a great impact in promoting cultural and social diversity. School Leadership in a Diverse Society: Helping Schools Prepare all Students for Success (2nd Edition) will help scholars and practitioners have a better understanding of the increasing amount of diversity that is occurring in American society. This book will give them the tools needed to lead schools to ensure that all students, regardless of their life circumstances and status, are provided a school experience that promotes high academic achievement and a sense of belonging. Today, multiculturalism and diversity preparation are needed in our society, seemingly more so than when schools first made an earnest effort to integrate twenty years after Brown V. Board of Education. Just as it seemed the United States was making significant progress dealing with issues that have plagued this country for hundreds of years, recently, there has been a surge in diversity-related issues (the killing of unarmed African Americans, the unwarranted attacks on Asians, immigration debates, the recent rise of groups that support white supremacy, blackface incidents, increasing wealth divide between the ultra rich and the poor, religious backlash, etc.). These issues should remind us that the struggle for social equity continues into the present moment. Communities must work together to help fight rising intolerance and prejudice within our country and schools.