On October 17th, the Restorative Approaches Collaborative (RAC) held the first training for the seven school teams and three SU/SDs teams that were selected to be a part of the RA Professional Learning opportunity. Both cohorts met together in the morning to hear an overview of the work, learn a little about the importance of partnering with students to do this work, and hear about the evaluation aspect of this project. Following this, the participants broke off into two cohorts: one for individual school teams and one for SU/SD teams.
Each group participated in a variety of activities to help them build a foundational knowledge of restorative approaches in schools. After a quick (but yummy) lunch, teams dove into some team time in order to begin building a community amongst team members, along with an action plan for their work throughout the year.
It was an exciting day with lots of learning, networking, and productive work. The RAC Coordination Team is reviewing feedback from the day in order to make our December training even stronger! Here are a few quotes from the feedback:
“Team time was most helpful. The ability to plan and process with our group, outside of the school building, was impactful and allowed us to focus on crucial items.”
“I think the most important takeaway for me was that RA is so much bigger than circles… It makes the challenge of becoming a truly restorative-practice based school both more daunting and more manageable.”
“I enjoyed hearing from other classroom teachers how their restorative practice in their classroom has grown and shifted as they’ve become more immersed in restorative practices.”
Participants in Day 1 of Professional Learning
If you’d like to explore the resources from the training, they are available at https://vtrac.org/rac/.
