Abstract
Recent news on school safety and efforts to improve school climate underscores the importance of building positive student relationships and resolving conflict in our nation’s classrooms. Restorative practices are currently gaining credibility and popularity as a means to build classroom and peer relationships. Through a descriptive study, we explored how to model the restorative practice of community circles with teacher candidates to prepare them to use the approach with their future middle school students. We describe how a teacher educator engaged middle-level teacher candidates with community circles in an internship seminar for this purpose. This article illustrates the powerful effects restorative practices had on the teacher candidates’ peer relationships and the connections they made about teaching young adolescent students. We also provide a step-by-step guide for implementing this practice in middle level teacher education programs.
Highlights
Recent news and climate changes in our schools underscore the importance of building positive relationships in our classrooms and working to more constructively resolve conflict
Young adolescents bring an array of emotions to the classroom every day, and community circles can provide an outlet for students to feel safe, expressing their emotions
Students in our program take pedagogy courses over a four-semester sequence. It is within this sequence where we intentionally introduce RP and community circles to the interns
Summary
Recent news and climate changes in our schools underscore the importance of building positive relationships in our classrooms and working to more constructively resolve conflict. If interns engage in community circles with their peers to build their own community, they would be able to transfer that experience and integrate RP with their future middle school students. While this was not a data-based study, the instructor did learn what the interns began to value about restorative practices as a result of participating in community circles during the internship experience and began exploring with the interns the ways they foresee themselves using community circles to address the social emotional needs of middle schoolers in their future classrooms
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