In a previous post, we’ve introduced in-school restorative practices as tools to address discipline in a way that keeps students engaged in learning.
We’ve situated restorative practices as components of developing person power, and components of a constructive program that envisions alternatives to punitive responses to behaviors. We’ve also addressed two common misconceptions about restorative practices in schools that both educators and policy makers have voiced during consultation. And throughout, we’ve consistently claimed that restorative practices can help folks develop fundamental skills to address challenges and concerns in their lives.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is one of the core practices often used in school-based restorative practices to address challenges and concerns. Fundamentally, NVC includes three parts: honest and compassionate personal reflection, honest expression to others, and empathetic listening of others. NVC can lead to success because it aligns with common human experiences, it is similar to well-researched and validated conceptions of human beings, and is structured in ways that are accessible to many.
The set of assumptions made in Nonviolent Communication are similar to ones made and often observed by humanistic and community psychologists. They assume that, to some degree, humans share a basic set of needs and that when these needs are met, people are better able to become happier and healthier. That is, addressing challenges and concerns usually relate to addressing unmet needs. They assume that when given the opportunity to address these needs, humans are innately growth-oriented and will strive to meet these needs unless they’ve been systematically and persistently denied these opportunities many times. Moreover, given that most human experiences are nested within social contexts, people must effectively relate with others to meet many of these needs. And taken together, humans may be motivated to effectively connect and cooperate when communication includes a shared understanding and acknowledgement of these basic needs.
Nonviolent Communication is a promising practice for school settings because it makes a complex set of tasks accessible through a 4-step structure:
1. Observations
Ex. “I (teacher) notice that you (student) are talking with your neighbor during this lesson.”2. Feelings
Ex. “I (teacher) feel worried…”3. Needs
Ex. “because I (teacher) value your (student) opportunity to learn.”4. Requests
Ex. “Would you (student) be willing to tell me (teacher) why you were talking with your neighbor?”
The rest of this example communication could happen as follows:
Student: “I don’t want to tell you now.”
Teacher: “Are you feeling self-concious in front of others and want to talk later?”
Student: “Maybe.”
Teacher: “I want to trust that we’ll work this out soon so that you can continue to learn… would you be willing to talk about this after lunch?
Student: “Ok.”
Teacher: “Okay, I’ll check in with you after lunch.” The lesson resumes.
There isn’t much available online about elementary, middle, and high school teachers’ experiences for others to learn from. If you are an educator who has used NVC in a classroom, please share your experiences in the comment section below. And if you know of any resources for adapting NVC for young folks in schools, please include those in the comments below too.
For more information about Nonviolent Communication please see:
The Metta Center archives
The Center for Nonviolent Communication
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By: Joseph Gardella
A member of Metta Center’s strategic advisory council, Joseph was born in Japan. He works to support healthy grassroots community development and build alternatives to structural and social psychological violence, particularly in schools. Joseph is a graduate student, researcher and teacher at the Community Research and Action PhD program at Vanderbilt University.
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Meditation in Schools: Part 3
Meditation in Schools: Part 2
Meditation in Schools: Part 1
Administrator Concerns About NVC in Schools
The Gap Between Nonviolence & Social Sciences
I have used NVC and peer-based restorative justice practices at our independent Pre-K-12 school in Atlanta for the past two years. It has been tremendously effective in building a close community where students feel valued as people and their feelings and needs are valued as well. The interpersonal skills, communication skills, empathy, active listening and more are invaluable to the development of young people. Thankfully, our school has the flexibility to use NVC and restorative justice practices. We even see students use them with each other on the playground.
I think the greatest challenge that any school will face in implementing NVC is that it will move your school from being content/academic focused to being person-focused and community-focused. While this seems like a great thing for our learning communities, the reality is that valuing students as people and their needs and feelings takes time… a lot of time. For our learning community, this is time very well-spent and we see the benefits in students who can communicate quite effectively, express empathy to others and listen from the heart. Our community is very close because of it. However, these are skills, not content. For a school trying to deliver Common Core, traditional practices tell us to send students in need “to the principal’s office.” We send the message to students that feelings and needs are disruptive. They are punished more than they are acknowledged. They get in the way of content delivery. We simply don’t have time. Students in need are pushed out of the community rather than being brought in closer.
These will be tremendous challenges for teachers in traditional settings wanting to implement NVC practices. Traditional classroom and school structures do not support the valuing of feelings, needs, community building and cooperation. Teachers should definitely make progress any way they can, but they should be aware that traditional structures discourage these practices, whether by intention or by accident.
I can’t say enough about the benefits of using NVC in the classroom. Not only do the students learn invaluable life skills, the teachers will become more connected, more compassionate and more effective as teachers, mentors and guides for the young people they work with.
Thank you, David. – I neglected to respond to your insightful post. Do you have any recommendations for readers who might navigate using NVC midst the demands of CC?
My experience in the classroom has been in an in-school suspension classroom and so I haven’t had much experience balancing teaching CC content with addressing students needs and building healthy relationships.
I applaud everyone involved in this work. Restorative practices teach problem solving, communication skills, including the ability to express one’s self and to empathize, and social relationships and these are essential skills for success in life that are just as important as the ABC’s.
I am so interested in helping students in groups in schools with connecting. The comment from the teacher in Atlanta was very helpful, insightful and sad that schools do not have time needed to create a person-centered system when content is more important than feelings and needs in pressured underfunded classrooms… where needs and feelings are seen as disturbances. That is a terrible lesson to learn in school
Dave and Kathleen, I’m responding to your posts roughly five years after Dave’s initial post. In these past five years, I’ve continued to work with multiple districts and dozens of schools iteratively improving the design and implementation of restorative practices. In some cases we have made massive improvements, effectively dropping suspensions to zero, enabling all students to maintain peaceful solutions to conflicts (including intense gang or parent-involved conflicts), and giving teachers the space to get students back up closer to grade-level academic expectations. In other schools, we’ve had less success. Implementation is an issue we’ve been getting better at. But, I think we’ve improved how we’ve designed restorative practices such that it does permit teachers sufficient time to address the learning needs, skills, content and other factors that are necessary for academic proficiency.
The crux of this has to do with better distribution of the “work” associated with restorative practices. That is, we’ve started working at the district level so that kids’ entire school experiences from K-12 are in restorative schools. They become the leaders who take on responsibility for running restorative activities, volunteer to go to an AP (assistant principal) to use a restorative practice to solve a conflict, and teach new students how to be a part of this culture. We’ve created restorative practices for teachers to use in faculty and staff circles (for example, in data-based decision-making meetings) so that they can continue to practice these skills and shape school culture. There are a lot of other innovations we’ve worked on to bound this practice so that it’s smaller, sharper, and more embedded in every-day life.
The crux of these changes, again, are thinking system-wide. How can we leverage all of the talent, energy, capacity, and initiative in schools (including students! and parents!) to come together in an organized way to facilitate effective delivery for both academic and behavioral interventions. Not to mention, we’ve also really tried to integrate restorative practices with other learning and behavioral programming (for example, PBIS+SEL+Restorative programming, Restorative+reading learning circles, Restorative+math practice activities, etc.). There is still a tremendous amount of work to do to refine these practices so that they are useful for many more folks. We are currently applying for federal and foundation funding to help aid this work.
I think it’s important to recognize that restorative practices still has a long way to go to innovate and improve. Any conclusions about restorative practice effectiveness or efficacy are too early.