Cognitive load theory meets trauma-informed practice

 

Image source: ChatGPT

One of the defining aspects of education is the number of narratives running at any one time. It can be quite noisy. Sometimes these narratives are obviously connected (like explicit teaching and accountability for student outcomes) and at other times they seem to sit in parallel universes. In this blogpost, I want to consider an example of the latter scenario: two education topics that are both highly current but, as far as I can tell, are not usually given a shared platform: cognitive load theory (CLT) and trauma informed classroom practice.

Readers of this blog are likely to be familiar with Professor John Sweller’s CLT. It is a testable (and tested) model that represents the challenging passage of biologically secondary knowledge from fleeting exposure in-the-moment to consolidation in long-term memory.  

To back up for a moment, biologically secondary knowledge is essentially that which children attend school to acquire. It is a term that stems from the work of Professor David Geary at the University of Missouri. Geary and his co-worker Daniel Berch have written extensively about the idea that children learn some things as a result of evolutionary pre-wiring and early immersive experience. Learning to walk is a good example. Acquiring oral language is often cited as another biologically primary skill, which it is, with some caveats, that I’ve written about previously.

Notwithstanding my oral language caveats, the biologically primary vs secondary distinction is a helpful way of thinking about children’s learning, especially at school. Human executive functions (higher-order skills such as paying attention, planning, organising, self-monitoring and thinking consequentially) are very much under construction throughout childhood and adolescence, not fully maturing until the early-to-mid-twenties, when final myelination occurs in the prefrontal regions of the brain.

Biologically secondary skills include, but are not limited to, reading, writing and spelling; learning and applying increasingly complex mathematical concepts and processes; learning to play a musical instrument; and attaining prowess in golf or tennis. These are all things that the majority of humans can learn, at least to some extent, but need instruction and practice in order to do so.  

So schools have a challenge and an opportunity:

A large part of the raison d’être of schools is teaching biologically secondary skills to humans whose learning software is a work in progress.  

Children and adolescents are not especially good at paying attention, planning, organising, self-monitoring and thinking consequentially. We could think of these as the “Big Executive Five” (BEF) in child development more broadly and in education specifically. Of course, these skills fluctuate according to motivation and other factors, but parents and teachers know that children cannot be left to their own devices to do things they have been asked to do (tidy their room, complete a page of writing etc) because their brains cannot harness the BEF without reminders, scaffolding, and buffering from adults.

As the image below (created by me via ChatGPT) shows, during childhood and adolescence, the BEF are:

• Under construction 
• Fragile 
• Inconsistent within and between students 
• Difficult to harness in distracting learning environments
• Frustrating for adults, for all of the reasons listed above

 

Let’s take attention and look at it separately. We commonly ask students to pay attention. We are asking them to put some attentional dollars on the table – to focus and somehow screen out irrelevant internal and external stimuli. Internal stimuli might include hunger, thirst, a full bladder, and thoughts about something upsetting that happened at home that morning, on the way to school, or in the playground.  This is difficult for children to do (it remains challenging for many adults and is not helped by the constant interruptions associated with device use). In human brains we have a great paradox – an incomprehensibly complex organ that can only do one thing at a time (see the work of Professor Dan Willingham on this. So, paying attention is difficult, yet attention is the gateway to new learning. We’ve all had experience of not taking something in, simply because we were hearing words but not listening to them – we were not putting attentional dollars on the table.

In order for students to acquire new knowledge and skills in the classroom, they must harness their fragile attention and other executive skills (or more precisely, have them harnessed for them, by an adult). To this end, their educators are helped by understanding the Information Processing Model (below) which I adapted for this 2026 text from the 1968 work (yes, we have known about this for nearly 60 years) of Atkinson and Shiffrin. The version below is a further adaption again.

As you can see in this model, children experience a great deal of sensory input in the average classroom. This is mainly through the visual and auditory systems, but children who are restless are also creating their own kinaesthetic stimulation, e.g., by tapping fingers on the desk, rocking their chair back and forth, and in some cases, playing with so-called “fidget toys”. Visual stimulation comes from colourful posters and decorations on walls and hanging from the ceiling. Auditory stimulation comes from peoples’ voices (the teacher’s and those of other children). In some cases, there will be music in the background or audible from another classroom and there may be traffic, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, school bells, and announcements over the public address system. The signal-to-noise ratio can be both unfavourable and unpredictable in classrooms. 

This is all extremely challenging for fragile attentional systems. A reminder that the Information Processing Model was published in 1968. The fact that policy makers and education architects continue to design open-plan learning spaces makes a mockery of any argument that contemporary education is evidence-based.

As you can see via the orange arrow in my adaptation of the Information Processing Model, adults’ frontal lobes need to do much of the heavy lifting in classrooms, to compensate for the fact that children’s immature executive skills will naturally conspire to make it difficult for them to focus and sustain attention. I say “naturally” because this is developmentally completely typical and expected. It is not a sign of disorder or neurodiversity, though conditions such as ADHD will make these skills even more fragile. Although focusing attention is difficult for trauma-affected children it must be remembered that it is first and foremost, difficult for all children. Trauma makes it worse.

We do not learn biologically secondary knowledge and skills that we cannot focus attention on. Teacher-led practice and rehearsal is the “fix” for the fact that children’s brains cannot do this complex work on their own.

I have blogged previously about the fact that some instructional approaches (project-based/discovery learning in noisy classrooms with students seated around tables, facing and distracting each other, promote busy-work and “engagement”. Such classrooms privilege engagement over the vital but more challenging work of focusing children’s brains on acquiring complex new knowledge and shifting it to long-term memory where it can be stored, retrieved for usage and added to over time.  

What does all of this have to do with children who have been impacted by trauma?

First, we need to look at this word “trauma”. In the child maltreatment literature, trauma is sometimes used as an umbrella-term to refer to the experience of various forms of neglect and/or abuse. Neglect is the most common form of maltreatment, and it not infrequently co-occurs with abuse of various forms. You can read more about the different types of maltreatment here. But trauma can also refer to specific experiences, ranging from the sudden loss of a key attachment figure to displacement because of war. Some children experience vicarious trauma, e.g., when they witness domestic violence that is directed to a parent. Unfortunately, the term trauma is overused by some, to refer to situations that are difficult or challenging, but are part of everyday life and surmountable with appropriate support and encouragement. Notwithstanding this caveat, because the word “trauma” appears in the term trauma-informed teaching, I will use it here to refer to the wide-ranging forms of childhood adversity that go beyond everyday challenges and frequently (though not invariably) bring children into contact with government agencies and human services personnel.

Precise figures on rates of trauma-exposure are not available. We have proxy measures, such as the number of substantiations in a child protection system, but many children’s experiences of adversity fly under the radar, and we know that substantiations are an under-estimate of true prevalence-rates, both in terms of the number of children they represent and the types of childhood adversities they experience.

So, while teachers may know about specific children in their class who are the subject of child protection orders, such children are the tip of a bigger iceberg. There will always be more whose everyday home lives cause them to feel anxious, fearful, unsafe, and in some cases, hypervigilant. This may reflect a chronic set of circumstances, or it may be situational. Either way, there will be children arriving at every school, every day, with attentional systems that are in a baseline state of dysregulation, so they are not primed and ready for learning.

No-one learns well when anxiety, fear and mistrust hijack their brain. This applies to both children and adults. We also don’t learn well when we are tired or hungry, which trauma-affected children often are. It is pleasing that many schools address the hunger issue via breakfast clubs, but tiredness is much more challenging to manage in the school day. Allowing children to sleep in a beanbag while others learn might address their short-term physiological need, but it falls well short on their long-term learning needs. There is no easy fix on this one.

Much has been written about trauma-informed classroom teaching in the last two decades and it has been pleasing to see the translation of knowledge from child development and neurobiology research into classroom practice. In my view, some of this translation work has, however, over-emphasised the (incontrovertible) importance of ensuring that children feel safe in classrooms and the building of positive relationships while under-emphasising the fact that their learning needs must remain a central focus of the educator’s classroom practice. We must remember that educators are not social workers. Applying evidence-based Tier 1 instruction in a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS*) framework, however, should go a long way towards addressing both the academic and wellbeing needs of all students, regardless of what their teachers know about the adversities faced by them outside the school gate.

Let’s look at what published guidelines (e.g., see here and here) advise about what is important in classrooms for trauma-affected children and how teaching that is informed by cognitive science can assist:

What trauma-affected children need	How explicit teaching informed by learning science / cognitive load theory addresses this need
A reliable sense that the classroom is a safe, supportive environment in which they do not need to be hyper-vigilant to threat (perceived or real).	Learning spaces should be stand-alone classrooms, not open-plan environments with inadequate sound dampening and constant visual distraction from other classrooms. Children should be seated in rows, facing the teacher when they are being taught new knowledge and skills. Social seating is for social activities. It lends itself to distraction of all forms. Environmental visual distractions (colourful posters, banners, bunting etc) should be minimised and placed at the back of the room.
A sense of safety and trust that adults in the room are “in charge” of learning and behaviour.	Classrooms should be calm, orderly and predictable learning spaces, as a reflection of taught behaviour expectations and adult-led limit-setting with clear, consistent and fair consequences. Positive behaviours are noted and praised. Instruction should be educator-led. Educators take responsibility for the teaching of new content. This is not left to chance via discovery learning.
A sense that as far as possible, they are not going to be caught off-guard by shifts in tasks and activities.	Classoom routines should be predictable within and between teaching spaces. Educators use known attention signals, e.g., a “clap-back”, a bell, or a key phrase, such as “one two three, eyes on me” to gain students' attention.
A sense that the teacher expects them to learn.	High expectations of and for all learners regardless of starting point are a driving force for all instruction and support.
Optimal and ethical use of their learning time.	Device use is minimal to non-existent. Except in timetabled IT classes, technology has little to no intrinsic learning benefit in classrooms. Pseudoscientific tools and practices are not in use (e.g., Learning Styles / Multiple Intelligences Inventories; Brain Gym; Whole Language / Balanced Literacy approaches to reading instruction; discovery learning for maths). Well-meaning but potentially harmful whole-school mental health interventions are not used. Instructional time is valued, respected, and optimised. Learning objectives are known and checked against. Busy work is not accepted as a substitute for learning.
A sense of self-efficacy when encountering and consolidating new knowledge and skills.	New tasks are broken into manageable “chunks” so as not to overload the novice learner. Instruction is educator-led, via the gradual release of responsibility (I do; we do; you do). Spaced retrieval practice and daily review provide opportunities for students to consolidate new knowledge and skills into long-term memory.
A sense of safety in situations that involve transitions.	Transitions into and out of the classroom are quiet, predictable and calm. Children are taught how to collect their belongings, line up, and move in and out of teaching spaces. In some schools, this is done in silence, to reduce disruptions associated with noise and minimise surreptitious bullying.
A sense of self-efficacy for contributing to classroom activities and discourse.	Mini-whiteboards are used for formative assessment and to trigger re-teaching where indicated. Every child is expected and supported to participate, with or without accommodations and additional support. Turn-and-talk activities are routinely practiced and used, with careful thought given to seating arrangements and student pairing. Non-volunteers are called on (so-called “cold-calling” – better described as “warm calling”) to respond to carefully framed questions about material that has been taught. This ensures that all children participate in classroom learning, with adjustments and accommodations if needed, to support this.

Just like their classroom peers, trauma-affected children have naturally immature executive function skills. However, they bring the additional burdens of dysregulation, anxiety, and hypervigilance into the classroom, all of which may manifest as inattention, poor motivation to learn, and/or reluctance to attempt tasks. It is not always possible (or even necessary) for educators to know the basis of these presentations, but it is important that their classroom instruction is designed to by-pass both the inbuilt threats to learning and the additional mental cargo carried by trauma-affected children.

Self-regulation and the ability to form and maintain relationships are the essential platforms on which effective learning can occur. Platforms with nothing of substance on them fall short, however, in meeting the educational needs of trauma-affected children.

The principles articulated here apply to optimal learning for all children, including those who are neurodivergent. It should be remembered too that neurodivergence itself is a risk for maltreatment, so some children arrive at school with this double burden.

Applying optimal evidence-based classroom instruction for all is the most efficient and equitable way of tilting the learning playing field in favour of children who are starting from behind because of childhood trauma. Self-regulation, though inherently desirable, is not simply an end in itself. It is the means by which children can achieve academically and form and maintain relationships. In so doing, there’s a good chance they enable those around them to learn too. This in turn promotes everyone’s wellbeing – students’ and educators’. As they say over at The Reading League, a rising tide lifts all boats.   

In summary, it might look something like this, with or without known trauma in play:

 

References and additional resources

Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In I.K.W. Spence and J.T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: II, Academic Press (1968), 10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60422-3

Bowen, C. & Snow, P., with Brandon, P. (2026). Evidence-based support for children and young people with additional needs: The Roadmap.  J&R Publishing

Snow, P. (2020). Psychosocial adversity in early childhood and language and literacy skills in adolescence: The role of Speech Language Pathology in prevention, policy and practice. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 6(2), 253-261.   https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2020_PERSP-20-00120  OPEN ACCESS

Vander Kolk, B.A. (2003).The neurobiology of childhood trauma and abuse. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12, 293–317. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1056 4993(03)00003-8

 

*MTSS – See also Schumann, J. (2026). Beyond the Tiers: Reclaiming the Promise of MTSS OPEN ACCESS

© Pamela Snow (2026)

Restorative Conferencing: The good, the challenging and the not necessarily ugly.

 

Image source: MS PPT

Recently, while watering my very thirsty Bendigo garden during what has been a particularly harsh summer, I tuned into Ollie Lovell’s Education Research Reading Room (ERRR) podcast and was immediately intrigued to discover that Ollie was interviewing Bill Hansberry about restorative conferencing.

This was of great interest to me because of the two decades’ research I led on the oral language skills of young people in the youth justice, child protection and/or flexible-alternative education systems (see here for an open access overview of some of this work). Readers who are familiar with these sectors and the students they service will be aware of their high overlaps and often revolving doors. The Sentencing Council of Victoria published a report in 2019 on so-called “cross-over kids”, showing that nearly 38% of youth offenders had been the subject of at least one child protection report, and notable numbers had experienced out-of-home care orders. Most children who are known to both systems were initially involved with child protection before their first court contact, highlighting a strong pipeline between early vulnerability and later offending. The names of such children are no surprise to teachers and school leaders, as they have often acted out in classrooms and school yards, as well as struggling academically from an early age.

In a nutshell, restorative justice conferencing was of interest to me because:

·         Punitive approaches to youth offending do not have a strong evidence-base (see here for example) with respect to deterrence or reducing recidivism;

·         The evidence on restorative justice conferencing in the youth justice sector was surprisingly rigorous and positive (see here for example);

·         Although I was philosophically and empirically inclined towards restorative justice conferencing, I had reservations about the demands it places on young people’s verbal skills, given what we know about the extent of unidentified language disorders in vulnerable children and adolescents. I wrote about these concerns with a colleague, the late Dr Hennessey Hayes in this open access publication.

So, I was especially interested in Bill’s recent ERRR podcast interview and contacted him afterwards to ask some further questions. Bill was enthusiastic about taking the discussion down some of my pet rabbit holes (now there’s a mangled metaphor) and generously agreed to respond to my questions.

This post is the result. We hope you enjoy it.

***** 

Bill Hansberry is Director of Fullarton House, Hansberry Educational Consulting, and Playberry Laser. A former teacher with a Master’s in School Counselling, Bill has spent over 20 years supporting students with dyslexia and other learning difficulties. He co-developed the Playberry T3 Multisensory Literacy Program and its Tier 1–2 counterpart, Playberry Laser, now used in more than 100 schools across Australia. Internationally published in restorative practices, behaviour management, and parenting, Bill provides training to schools in both evidence-based literacy intervention and effective behaviour support.

Image source: Bill Hansberry

Bill, can you clarify the terminology space first – should we be differentiating between restorative justice, restorative practice and restorative conferencing?

Yes, we should be….(ish)

Restorative Justice is an umbrella term for a range of processes that aim to give victims of crime a greater voice in the justice system. It advocates that those involved in crime or conflict (victims and offenders) are best placed to find solutions or to restore things as much as possible to their pre-conflict or pre-offence state. The focus is on restoration rather than retribution, as retributive (punishment-based) justice does little to meet victims' emotional needs and has a poor track record in helping offenders change their ways.

Restorative Conferencing (RC) aka victim-offender conferencing is a process (rather ‘the’ process) that what is now called restorative practice grew out of. Conferencing is one form of practising restoratively.

Restorative Practice (RP), as a term, emerged (I think) because of schools’ adoption of processes such as restorative conferencing, along with a range of other approaches, to acknowledge that schools do many things in the wellbeing and discipline space that can fall under the banner of being restorative – not just restorative conferencing, the way it looks in criminal justice.

RP, as a term, has evolved to communicate a broader scope of restorative work in schools beyond just conferencing between offenders and victims, and to acknowledge other types of restorative work that fall along the restorative practices continuum.

There is a restorative practices continuum encompassing a range of interventions, from affective statements in which teachers express their displeasure with a student’s behaviour, through to community conferences (that mirror the criminal justice process in terms of approach. This continuum has been developed to organise an alternative set of practices (with a restorative flavour). These are all designed to build positive school culture and address conflict and wrongdoing, of increasing seriousness, in restorative ways, rather than offering a simple collection of increasingly serious sanctions for increasingly serious misdemeanours.

The two figures below from my book (Hansberry, 2016) are my adaptations of others’ versions of the RP continuum and hopefully help to make some sense of it. The first one argues that without a restorative approach, schools are stuck with fairly limited options. The second one is my take on the continuum of restorative responses. RC is on it, in varying forms, mirroring the criminal justice form of conferencing more closely the further to the right you go (except for the Leaving Well Conference), which is a positive way to send off a student who is required to leave a school that was developed by my late friend and colleague, Geoff Blair. 

In the literature, you’ll find many versions of the RP continuum, each with different practices on it. Some have social and emotional learning (SEL) on the far left, some have student jury processes, and some include peer mediation. What they all have in common is that RPs in schools go beyond just restorative conferences between wrongdoers and the harmed.

I’m still making up my mind as to whether this all represents a form of scope creep, where those enamoured by Restorative Justice (as I once was but now take a less evangelistic view) are trying to wrap up all the good work schools already do in the well-being / positive school culture space under the RPs banner! 

 

 Source: Hansberry, B. (2016). A practical introduction to restorative practices in schools: theory, skills and guidance. (pp. 118, 120). Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

 

It seems to me that RJ conferencing is something that is potentially valuable in schools but very easy to do poorly. What’s your take on that perhaps simplistic position?

Yes – when done poorly, it’s bad news for schools, and when done well, it can be transformative.

Chris Lilley’s 2007 Summer Heights High mockumentary has a famous scene where a very vulnerable year 8 lad is precariously seated among his bullies (Jonah and mates) in what can only be described as a near-perfect non-example of what a restorative conference should look like. I used it in my level 1 training for years, until time constraints led me to remove it from my teaching sequence. Chris Lilley’s use of blackface also makes it a non-starter nowadays. I’m also pretty sure that this scene is where the term ‘rangar’ found its genesis in mainstream. Lilley masterfully pointed out a series of lethal mutations in restorative conferencing that would revictimize a victim, which restorative conferencing must never do.

The conference facilitator in this scene, a well-meaning school counsellor, makes about every mistake possible in addressing a situation like this. It's sobering, and when I first saw it, I just knew this sort of lethal mutation of conferencing would be happening in schools all over the world because of a combination of poor training and poor ongoing quality control.

A lot of folk (often with non-teaching backgrounds and having never taught in schools) have delivered a significant amount of the training in Australian schools on using RC. They’ve brought valuable expertise from the criminal justice field, but I think to understand the nuances of schools, you really need to have taught in schools. As well as lacking an institutional understanding of schools and of managing student behaviour as classroom teachers, some of these RJ trainers, have, I think, approached the application of RJ in schools with a lack of nuance. I think there’s also been an oversimplified dichotomy of “restorative” vs “punitive” created that has seen what I would consider to be completely reasonable forms of disciplinary sanctions labelled as “unrestorative” and thus, taken off the menu of disciplinary responses, leaving teachers in a position that if a conversation with a student doesn’t change behaviour, then there’s really nowhere to go other than another form of conversation.

Perhaps suffering the curse of the expert, many of them (and I’ve fallen into this trap) have not insisted on the level of training needed to run successful conferencing programs. Heavens knows I’ve tried, but in many cases, failed along with my colleagues in this respect. I’ve introduced hundreds of schools to RP, but only about 5% have sent leadership to my two-day community conference training. This is a systemic issue that has many drivers and is hard to shift

I was fortunate to be conference-trained by Marg Thorsborne and the Centre for Restorative Justice (CRJ) in Adelaide. Both courses were intensive; the CRJ training pretty much equipped me to run conferences in the “real world”. I’m sure this is how I, along with a dedicated team of skilled colleagues, made RP successful in a disadvantaged southern Adelaide school all those years ago. I’m also Masters-level trained in school counselling, so I brought some additional skills and frameworks to restorative work.

Conferencing (in the high-end form) is risky. It takes people (children and adults) who are experiencing some difficult and heightened emotions towards each other and sits them in a small circle to process these emotions together. The risks of re-victimising people who already see themselves as harmed are very real unless careful preparation is done. I refer you back to the Johah scene! When it goes well, RC can change the way people feel about one another forever and bring great shifts in people’s awareness of themselves and their behaviour It brings the best out in people and, as Tomkins says, “allows people to be truly human together”. I’ve seen this work make schools safer for everyone.

When conferences are ill-prepared, they can be toxic experiences for participants and make already-problematic situations much worse. I’ve yet to see a well-prepared conference go really badly, but I have heard plenty of stories from students and parents over the years who’ve come out of a “restorative encounter” in a school quite disgusted by the process, and this obviously calls into question the quality of the preparation.

I’m convinced this is what happens when undertrained people with a business-card-sized summary of restorative conversations (the script cards) launch into a process under-prepared themselves and without adequately preparing participants or doing the necessary post-conference follow-up.

I reckon that as a community of trainers, we’ve perhaps lost sight of the seriousness and sanctity of the process in the endeavour to market training for schools in ways that make RP an attractive “package”.

After conducting a large number of restorative conferences / conversations, I’m guessing your “pattern recognition software” helps you see red flags that are invisible to others. Can you comment on this?

I guess so – the pattern recognition software comes from very intensive training, experience, and, in my case, great mentorship. Sitting on my bookshelf is The New Real Justice Conferencing Handbook, (Wachtel et al., 1999; 2010) as well as a very large training folder from the CRJ. Both  are used to train conference facilitators for “real-world” conferencing. They are both meticulous and lay out the procedural steps for deciding whether a conference has a strong chance of success, and then for planning, running and reviewing it.

Some red flags are:

·         Those who’ve caused harm cannot/will not take responsibility for actions. When preparing for a high-end RC, this is the first criterion for assessing a wrongdoer’s suitability. Similarly, when running an impromptu RC with kids, if there’s no responsibility-taking, just dodging and other-blaming, a Plan B is needed. I change tack in these instances and tell the youngster(s) that I’ll now gather evidence and decide on consequences.

·         Those who are harmed are too fearful to be in the same space as those they see as responsible for harming them

·         Adults who may be involved in a conference are not emotionally stable enough to constructively support their young person’s participation in a conference

·         There is a peer group stoking the flames of conflict that will need to be actively dealt with outside of the conference process

·         The young people have conditions/delays/deficits/disabilities that may impact their ability to communicate effectively in a conference

·        The facilitator him/herself feeling so fed up with certain ‘characters’ who will be in the conference that they are reluctant to facilitate it!

There are folk in education who are sceptical about restorative conferencing, arguing (amongst other things) that it lacks an evidence-base. These same folk may be surprised to know that there has been robust research on restorative conferencing, with favourable trends regarding school climate, fewer suspensions and exclusions, and reduced bullying. Given this, what are the barriers to its effective implementation in schools?

Yes, Tom Bennett is one, and he’s not wrong to be wary. The RP research (in schools) suffers from the same challenges faced by educational research more widely – randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education are difficult and resource-intensive to do well. Trying to isolate the impact of conferencing among the many things schools do to create safe and orderly environments is virtually impossible. Many will argue that reduced suspensions have been because leaders have declared, “Now we use RPs, we don’t suspend anymore” which has sent many a school into chaos, I'm sure. My experience is that RPs reduce schools’ reliance on approaches like suspensions, leading to a more peaceful school over time. But - and this is a big but - throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a very bad idea.

Despite the black and white thinking that “you’re either restorative or you’re punitive” (a very unhelpful dichotomy I once subscribed to in my more evangelistic days), schools need to find ways to make both restorative approaches and (reasonable) consequential sanctions work together, and they can.

The criticisms of RPs (done poorly) are well-founded. I like to tell myself that the critics just haven’t been in a school where RPs are done well and have robust systems surrounding them. Sadly, I suspect that there may be a shortage of these schools. The book I wrote that I discussed with Ollie in the podcast interview documents these systems, but it’s the stories that get everyone excited, and I suspect many have unfortunately put my book down before getting to the systems stuff!

In your recent interview with Ollie Lovell, you described a case example of a complex interpersonal scenario that was exacting a toll on many parties. After rigorous and painstaking preparation, a positive outcome was achieved (well done!). Without wanting to rain on that parade, I imagine you have stories too, of outcomes that have been underwhelming in some way. Can you share an example?

Happily, I don’t have stories of high-end conferences with that level of preparation that went pear-shaped. Again – the prep is everything! The high-end (community conferences) I have been involved with have overwhelmingly been successful (at least in my view).

I’ve had to pull the pin on many lower-level conferences (small group conferences where you don’t get the prep time, you just gather kids around and do a quick assessment of their readiness to discuss the issue respectfully, and remind them about the rules of engagement: 1. Be respectful, 2. Take turns to speak, and 3. tell the truth as you saw it. Then you take the kids through the restorative script, asking the key restorative questions, often beginning with “what’s happening?” (if you don’t know) and then going from there. When it becomes clear that the versions of the main event are too different to go ahead, or one or more kids are too heightened to be reasonable, then, to channel the late Kenny Rogers, you’ve got to know “when to fold ‘em”, and manage an incident differently, or work with the students who are being respectful and authentic, and sideline the others for a different style of management for that incident.

I do remember one particular conference I attended as a school counsellor, where an external (very experienced facilitator) prepared and ran a conference for a situation where two Year 6 boys had verbally harassed a younger female student. It came to the conference because the girl was quite affected, her father was understandably upset, and, as a school, we wanted the two older boys to understand that what they thought was “mucking around” was actually very harmful. Both boys had received sanctions in the form of limited play (yard detentions) and had agreed to also be part of a conference to address the harm they’d caused. Here’s how it unfolded:

Parents of both sides attended. The older boys both had their mum with them, and the girl had her dad and auntie. One of the boys had a very flat affect, so did his mum. This came across as not caring to the girl’s father. Knowing both well, I knew what was going on under the bonnet was different. Things went downhill when the girl’s father refused to take his seat along with the other people in the conference. He preferred to stand. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what this was about. It didn’t feel to me as if he was trying to physically intimidate anyone; the conference seating plan had him on the opposite side of the circle from the boys. The facilitator had seen this and suggested that the whole group stand, at least for the beginning. People indicated they were comfortable sitting while the father stood, so the facilitator stood as well (along with him) as everyone else sat.

As the conference went on, the dad became increasingly agitated. He didn’t interject, but his body language was awful. He just wasn’t in a place to notice what was happening. I think he was particularly stuck on one of the boys’ lack of expression (flat affect) and the boy’s mum also talked the same way. I’ll never forget that mum; she was gold underneath, but on the surface, she put a lot of people off. With the wisdom of hindsight, I suspect both of them may have been on the autism spectrum, which is not an automatic deal-breaker but does bring in additional preparation requirements. Anyway, at one point, the dad said he had to excuse himself from the conference because he couldn’t listen any longer. The facilitator called a short break (as you do in moments like this) and spoke with him outside, along with his sister, who had come as support for him and her niece. Her inclusion was strategic to even out the adults in the circle. The conference progressed without him, and the auntie stepped in. From then on, the conference progressed as expected. It ended successfully: the girl felt heard, and an agreement was reached, which was the most important thing.

One of my big interests in the restorative conferencing space has been the oral language and social cognition (“reading the room”) skills of children and adolescents who are more likely to (a) be involved in conflict and (b) be asked to take part in a restorative conversation. Can you comment on your experience with what might broadly be termed “neurodiversity” and the bearing this has on the restorative conferencing landscape?  

Yes, conferencing runs on emotional exchange, or affective resonance, as some call it. People have to be able to feel what others are feeling, and this emotional exchange of negative feelings (in the early stages of a conference) motivates everyone to take action to improve the situation, so everyone can feel better. People’s shared biological emotional wiring is employed to motivate movement forward. This is why, for example, a sociopath will not respond to conferencing. They know the sheet music but just can’t hum the tune.

In conferences, people have the same social expectations of one another as they do anywhere else. Does the person look remorseful? Can I hear it in their voice and see it in their demeanour? Can they explain their actions and what was wrong with what they did? Can they “see” how others feel?

Conferencing supercharges social expectations. You might be bringing people together with the same emotional wiring, but different cultural ways of expressing (or suppressing) affective display. Then there’s the divergences from the norm in emotional processing and reading the play (and playing the play) in social situations. In my experience, people are pretty good at spotting the basics: fear, anger, distress, interest, joy… regardless of individual quirks. If an individual isn’t good at expressing what’s in their head, their bodies can help provide a fuller picture, and it’s the emotions of others that people respond to in conferences more than anything else. That’s not to say that I haven’t explained to people in conference prep that “Adam has a quirk which means that he sometimes smiles when he’s nervous”, or that “Ahmed has a verbal tick and mutters under his breath when he feels bad about something”, or “Michelle has allowed me to tell you that she is on the autism spectrum, and can be quite direct in her responses”, so people aren’t thrown too much by these sorts of things. I find that if surprises are minimised, conferences go better.

Okay, now on language skills – your speciality! At the far end, I’ve had kids with selective mutism in conference who’ve communicated through a trusted adult. I’ve not conferenced with kids with severe expressive communication issues (that I know of), but as I explained, I think I may have worked with many kids with mild to moderate language difficulties. These kids do better when there’s an opportunity to prepare them well, and they get time to choose their words, even script them. I’ve seen kids read statements or have a support person (parent / trusted adult/peer) read for them. These factors are challenges but don’t need to be barriers. 

We know that punitive approaches to serious breaches of the social code are often ineffective and/or frankly make things worse, yet they seem to have “face validity” especially with tabloid media. It’s obviously unfair to hold restorative conferencing to a higher standard of proof than traditional crime-and-punishment approaches, but this is always the challenge faced by “disruptive” interventions. Considering this, what’s your advice to school leaders interested in exploring restorative practice in their school?

That’s a great observation Pam. I say to school leaders that RPs swim against popular discourse in terms of the ‘crime and punishment’ rhetoric. I encourage them not to ‘brand’ RPs to their school community and make it a “new shiny thing”, but rather to avoid branding it and to bring restorative processes into their behaviour management gradually and purposefully, letting these approaches settle in as ‘one thing we do here’. Bringing people affected by an incident together to work on ways forward is not revolutionary, and nor should it be treated as such. I think that, by marketing itself as an alternative to traditional school discipline, RPs has put itself in the crosshairs.

I also tell school leaders that implementing RPs will require supporting staff well – like any approach to student discipline needs to. Schools with untidy behaviour management systems that ask teachers and students to tolerate disruptive classroom behaviour, and that have teachers use ‘restoratives’ with students instead of letting them get on with teaching, get all the trouble they deserve, and RPs soon become the centre of staff revolt.

There’s also a danger in asking teachers to see poor student behaviour as a “relationship problem in need of repair”. Unfortunately, this type of nonsense has been commonplace. Of course, good student-teacher relationships are critical; however, all healthy relationships have boundaries that should not be crossed. Tom Bennett reminds us, as he should, that much student misbehaviour is lucid, deliberate, and just kids testing boundaries and trying on identities (as is developmentally appropriate). Student misbehaviour is often not the result of a relationship breakdown or a “condition” that a student lives with. Students and teachers sit on different power levels, and young people need teachers to lead kindly, clearly and respectfully.  

The staunchest critics of RPs have come from schools implementing RPs as a band-aid on top of an already fractured behaviour management system. Much reflection over the years has led me to believe that RPs will complement effective school-wide behaviour systems and deepen the cracks in schools with poor systems. I think RPs complement schools using positive behaviour intervention and supports (PBIS) well.  

Systems that remove disruptive students from classrooms will necessarily remain, and there are bottom lines for maintaining discipline in line with community expectations and, indeed, laws.  Such removals should always be followed by an attempt to help a young person understand the impact of their actions on others (peers and adults at school) and to give them the opportunity to make it right in some way. Additional behaviour supports, including closer behaviour tracking, behavioural re-teaching, behaviour rehearsal and tighter accountability systems, are also important in these circumstances. When behavioural expectations are raised, support to meet them must increase as well.

It’s common knowledge among educators that suspensions are very poor behaviour modifiers for the kids we worry most about. Educators are pretty clear-eyed about this, I believe. However, schools do have to signal to the school community what’s on and what’s not on. Suspensions have a deterrent effect on a large proportion of the student cohort.

For some students who are “burning the village to feel its warmth”, support can also involve efforts to find them a peer community. I’ve used processes over the years to lean on the humanity of young people to build a social group for disconnected young people, whose antisocial behaviour is often driven by a sense of disconnection from school. Baumeister et al. have conducted interesting research on the impact of social exclusion on self-regulation, which has inspired me and informed these sorts of interventions.

However, for me, the bottom line is that persistent disruptive behaviour cannot be allowed in classrooms, and I never want situations where “support” means teachers tolerating behaviour that impacts learning or creates disorderly and unsafe classrooms. Australia has some of the most disruptive classrooms in the OECD, which is a real problem for student learning and for teacher retention. Everyone loses. Tom Bennett names the elephant in the room here when he openly talks about the rights of a few superseding the rights of many. It’s an unpleasant and complex subject to confront, and we all know the impact of constant removal on some especially vulnerable young people, in the form of the school-to-prison pipeline*.

RPs must sit alongside other discipline approaches. There is an inherent tension about what to use when every school grapples with it. I think in many cases the answer can be both.

So, the message to the community is:

1.      We have high expectations of behaviour that protect people’s rights and safeguard relationships.

2.      These expectations (rules) are thoroughly explained, taught, and retaught. Many of these expectations are upheld through consistent routines.

3.      When rules are broken, sanctions are delivered respectfully. We understand that breaches of behavioural expectations affect people and relationships, so we address them through restorative means when appropriate.

*The school-to-prison pipeline is a concept that emerged from US commentary on the huge over-representation of young people from black, Hispanic and/or disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the youth justice system in that nation, and the equally remarkable high rates of school exclusion in their histories.

 

References

Hansberry, B. (2016). A practical introduction to restorative practice in schools. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Wachtel, T. (1999).  The new real justice training manual - conferencing handbook. Piper’s Press.

Wachtel, T., O’Connell, T., & Wachtel, B. (2010). Real justice & the conferencing handbook: Restorative justice conferencing. Real Justice.

Further reading on oral language skills and restorative conferencing:

Hayes, H. & Snow, P.  (2013). Oral language competence and restorative justice processes: Refining preparation and the measurement of conference outcomes. Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 463, 1-7. https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi463

Snow, P.C. (2013). Restorative Justice Conferencing, language competence, and young offenders: Are these high-risk conversations? (Invited manuscript) Prevention Researcher, 20(1), 18-20.

Snow, P. (2019). Speech-language pathology and the youth offender: Epidemiological overview and roadmap for future speech-language pathology research and scope of practice. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 50, 324-339.   https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2018_LSHSS-CCJS-18-0027

Snow, P.C., Powell, M.B. & Sanger, D.D. (2012). Oral language competence, young speakers and the law. (Invited manuscript) Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools, 43, 496-506. https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2012/11-0065

 

©2026 Bill Hansberry and Pamela Snow