Developed by Amos Clifford from the Center for Restorative Process for San Francisco Unified School District, this guide presents extensive background and preparation materials, as well as 7 classroom Circle lessons for teaching Restorative Practices.

Elaine Shpungin, PhD of Conflict180.com created these Circle prompts, as she says, "to get to know each other, build trust and community, or save a terrible day from the jaws of darkness - break out these questions and connect."

This resource guide, created by The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, contains tools for Restorative Practices, Circle and cooperative activities for students and adults.

Published in 2005 by Jean Greenwood from the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota, this paper is an overview of the Circle Process and a technical guide to Circle implementation

A guide for curating a successful, safe circle.

A guide, created by Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) for supporting critical conversations among students.

Produced by the Advancement Project in 2010, this is an in-depth study of the policies, procuedres and factors that lead to youth, and particularly youth of color, being pushed out of school and into the school-to-prison pipeline

This paper, written by Mara Schiff, PhD from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlanta University, reviews current research on zero tolerance, evidence for the effectiveness of restorative justice in schools as an alternative to punitive disciplinary policies, and local and national policy efforts to increase use of restorative practices in schools.

written by Thalia Gonzalez, PhD in 2012 for the Journal of Law and Education, this paper explores the possibilities of Restorative Practices as a mechanism to help reverse the trends of Zero Toperance Discipline Policies.

Published in 2013 by Daniel J. Losen and Tia Elena Martinez and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, this paper explores the devastating impact of a reliance on suspensions, particularly for students of color.

This report from the RAND Corporation is based on interview data on how the National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC) serves as an intermediary addressing the school-to-prison pipeline throughout San Diego County. We examine two strategies NCRC has implemented to address this pipeline: Training educators to use restorative practices and running a program to divert youth from the justice system before charges are filed (i.e., a pre-file youth diversion program).

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Published in September, 2023, This study examines Chicago Public Schools' adoption of RP. We identify decreased suspensions, improved school climate, and find no evidence of increased classroom disruption. We estimate a 19% decrease in arrests, including for violent offenses, with reduced arrests outside of school, providing evidence that RP substantively changed behavior.

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Published in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation in 2013, this article focuses on student experience with restorative practices in schools and classrooms.

Daniel Malec, GCC Executive Director, highlights evidence related to the effectiveness of Restorative Practices for addressing the Racial Discipline Gap

Published in 2014 after nearly a decade of implementation in Oakland schools, this is a comprehensive report about Restorative Justice implementation and impacts in the Oakland Unified School District to date.

Published in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation in 2016, this article describes the first randomized control trial of restorative practices to date, the Study of Restorative Practices. It is a 5-year, cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) of theRestorative Practices Intervention (RPI) in 14 middle schools in Maine to assess whether RPI affects both positive developmental outcomes and problem behaviors and whether the effects persist during the transition from middle to high school.

Martha Brown, PhD, author of Creating Restorative Schools, published this artile in the journal Laws in 2021, as she states "Given the collective trauma caused by COVID-19 global pandemic, it is more important than ever that schools look for ways to create safe, trauma sensitive, and restorative learning environments.

Published by Rand Corporation in 2018, this study This study of the implementation of restorative practices in the Pittsburgh Public Schools district (PPS) in school years 2015–16 and 2016–17 represents one of the first randomized controlled trials of the effects of restorative practices on classroom and school climates and suspension rates. The authors examined a specific restorative practices program — the International Institute for Restorative Practices' SaferSanerSchools™ Whole-School Change program — implemented in a selected group of PPS schools under a program called Pursuing Equitable and Restorative Communities, or PERC. The researchers found that PERC achieved several positive effects, including an improvement in overall school climates (as rated by teachers), a reduction in overall suspension rates, and a reduction in the disparities in suspension rates between African American and white students and between low- and higher-income students.

Published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence in 2019, this study fills a gap in research on multi-level school-based approaches to promoting positive youth development and reducing bullying, in particular cyberbullying, among middle school youth. The study evaluates the Restorative Practices Intervention, a novel whole-school intervention designed to build a supportive environment through the use of 11 restorative practices (e.g., communication approaches that aim to build stronger bonds among leadership, staff, and students such as using “I” statements, encouraging students to express their feelings) that had only quasi-experimental evidence prior to this study.

This research review was published in 2019 and is part of a larger effort of the WestEd Justice & Prevention Research Center (JPRC) focusing on restorative justice (RJ) as an alternative to traditional responses to student misbehavior in schools across the United States. This project was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to document the current breadth of evidence on the subject, provide a more comprehensive picture of how RJ practices are implemented in schools, and lay the groundwork for future research, implementation, and policy.

Published in 2015, Futures Without Violence (FUTURES), with the support of the California Endowment, Blue Shield of California Foundation, and the Lisa and John Pritzker Family Fund, wiorked with leaders throughout the health, education, justice, and child development fields to develop the most advanced public policy solutions to the challenge of childhood exposure to violence and the effects of trauma. This report serves as an important component of a larger national campaign to address childhood exposure to violence and trauma and to invest in the safety, health, and educational success of all children.

Published in 2015 by the American Orthopsychiatric Association, this article explores strengths-based approached for building a trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive teaching and learning environment.