Below are five questions I’ve received this year from parents, along with detailed responses to help clarify how our self-directed classroom operates and how we can continue partnering together to support each child’s success.

When we talk about training all staff in restorative practices across all three tiers of behavior support, we are ultimately talking about how a school chooses to define justice, accountability, and human dignity within its learning community. In education, we work with the understanding that every student, regardless of their behavior, remains a developing human being who deserves basic dignity, fair process, and the opportunity to learn from mistakes. Our discipline systems lose credibility...

As a result, communities ask schools to “prepare students for the real world,” while resisting reforms that would require schools to model the different or more humane version of that world. In this way, schooling tends to lean towards reproducing society as it is, rather than helping imagine what it could be. The Bottom Line: Schools don’t just "prepare students for the real world". Schools prepare students for the version of society they determine is legitimate.