Professional Growth Opportunity Blog Entry
On October 18-19, 2018, I was fortunate enough have attended the California Association of School Counselors (CASC) Conference in Riverside, California. This two-day conference was attended by over 1,300 passionate school counselors and educators from all across the state. This conference consisted of two phenomenal key-note speakers, and over 50 breakout sessions centered in seven core topics, which included Safe and Supportive Schools, Mental Health in Schools, Social Justice and Equity, and Advocacy and Accountability, just to name a few. I decided to attend this conference as a way to gain more knowledge in my future career, network with current school counselors, and gain more resources and skills to add to my toolbelt to become a better-prepared school counselor. For the purposes of this blog entry, I will be focusing on a breakout session that I attended on the second day titled, Professional School Counselors ARE Restorative; presented by Hayleigh Herrera, Heather Lampron, and Brittney Pacini. All three presenters are school counselors, with experience in elementary, middle, and high school counseling in southern California. As I prepare to embark on my career path, I have been thinking practices that are becoming popular and successful in the education system, one of them being restorative practices. I thought this would be an excellent way to gain more knowledge on this topic, which was a very popular one that consisted of over 100 attendees.
The presenters began by giving the audience background information on restorative justice, and some of its’ benefits, which include: developing a sense of community, building relationships, managing conflict & tension, and repairing harm. Restorative justice was implemented in our society as a way to address the high incarceration and recidivism rates and soon enough, restorative practices began to be implemented in schools as a way to address the disproportionality of suspensions/expulsions among certain student subgroups (E.g. race/ ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status) and to address the school-to-prison pipeline. Restorative practices in schools do this by way of having restorative conversations, restorative circles, and restorative conferences. Before, practices in schools were focused on being punitive and punishing the wrongdoer, now with restorative practices the focus is on “who was harmed and what are their needs?” along with collaborating with the offender to discuss “how things can be made as right as possible now and changed for the future.” These restorative practices can be implemented in all three tiers and can range from being informal, to more structured and formal.
I can see myself implementing these practices when addressing conflict among students by way of restorative circles. As we all know, school counselors are not to be disciplinarians but by approaching it from this angle, it allows school counselors to have the offender really think about what they did wrong, who they affected, and how they can make things right. This can also be applied with students who have a behavior violation.
Additional resources
No comments:
Post a Comment