"In “A Transformative Justice Approach to Literacy Education,” Dr. Masiha T. Winn describes how teachers can use “restorative justice as a lens through which to view their roles and responsibilities to students.” She identifies key questions to guide instruction through a restorative justice lens and outlines multiple levels of inquiry for students to examine the intersections of history, justice, race, and language in their lives. This approach to education creates a space for youth to develop and express literate identities while critiquing and speaking back to social, institutional, and political forces affecting their communities."

How are you providing students with opportunties to build community?

How are we intentionally being culturally responsive?

How are we understanding the values each student brings to the space and co-constructing what it looks like to uphold those values?

What changes could your school community make to meet everyone’s needs to engage in the learning process in respectful, positive ways?

What is your role in this?

What support do you need?

What Can Community Circles Do:

• provide an opportunity for everyone's voice to be heard and honoured

• build an understanding of the process of active listening and respecting the opinions of others

• provide an opportunity to build understanding of each other's intersecting identities, boundaries, values and interests

• build a classroom culture that centres on dignity and humanity

Strategies for Building Community.....

1. Have a morning meeting.....every morning

2. Create a micro-environment for calm

3. Meet academic needs with UDL, EML and Differentiated Instruction

4. Make student agency a priority

5. Co-construct what classroom expectations and accountability look like

6. Always look for the brilliance

7. Representation matters

8. Co-construct the flow of the day and class routines

9. Celebrate and find the joy

10. Model positive communication

How are we building in the practices we need to support our own healing and well-being?

How are we buildng loving, courageous relationships with ourselves and others?

How are we sharing our stories in an honest and authentic way?

How are we promoting student agency when reimagining the schooling system?

“I am more than what happened to me, I’m not just my trauma”

• Healing centered engagement is explicitly political, rather than clinical

• Healing centered engagement is culturally grounded and views healing as the restoration of identity

• Healing centered engagement is asset driven and focuses on the well-being we want, rather than symptoms we want to suppress

• Healing centered engagement supports adult providers with their own healing

• How are we partnering with families to authentically listen to concerns and provide support for student need?

• How are we understanding the right supports needed for each child to foster postive growth?

• How are we recognizng our own assumptions we make about families?

• How might we partner with families and provide opportunties to share concerns and questions in ways that are convenient for them? At a time when it is convenient for them?

• connecting outside the school walls

• establish back and forth communication on a regular basis

• connect with families beyond bad news

• make curriculum and learning transparent

• redefine parent engagement