Staff from Lutheran schools across Queensland attended Restorative Practices training lead by Margaret Thorsborne from 21 – 23 August. The training was informative and provided practical training whilst challenging staff to consider their current practices when dealing with behaviour incidents in each of their school contexts.
One significant learning from the professional development was about teaching students the soft skills: how to behave, how to get along with others, how to be considerate and thoughtful, are among the most difficult skills to teach students. As educators, we often focus on teaching students hard skills such as reading and writing, but it is these soft skills that we need to explicitly teach students.
The training provided information on children’s brain development and how it is important to have a general understanding of neuroscience if we want to teach students about behaviour.
Another key takeaway was ‘shame cannot survive empathy’. A short clip featuring Brene Brown discusses the impact shame can have on our students. By employing restorative practice principles to incidents in schools, staff and students work together to show empathy, repair relationships and repair trust between individuals.
Melissa Tronc
Director of Senior Primary Living Faith
