Practitioners
Peter Ross
“Too often I think we’re too quick to look at the extraneous things that bother us (teachers and administrators) rather than getting to the heart of the problem…”
Background
Peter Ross has been Principal of Charnwood Primary School since 2002. Originally trained as a High School Mathematics teacher, Peter completed a course with the NSW Department to teach junior and senior primary. He has taught in a one-teacher school and in metropolitan schools in NSW and the ACT. He purchased a business and worked in it for two years before returning to teaching. Peter’s experience includes two years as a Mathematics and Gifted Education consultant for the ACT Department of Education as well as Deputy and Acting Principal at a number of schools.
Peter, why did you choose restorative practices as the model for addressing bullying and harassment at Charnwood PS?
When I first came to Charnwood PS I was thrown by the level of violence and the speed with which things would escalate – both in the classroom and the playground. The system that was in place wasn’t working – it was a fairly punitive approach – so I started looking for alternatives. I was looking for a way, not just to change the violence, bullying and harassment, but to change the culture in the school - to teach the kids on a daily basis how to change their attitudes about the way they solve problems.
How would you describe restorative practices?
Restorative practices are about human relationships – building positive human relationships. That’s it in a nutshell. Everything we do in school is about human relationships and the only way to build relationships is when people interact. If you’ve got a dispute between two kids and you separate them and you deal with the perpetrator and you tell the other kid that you’ve punished the perpetrator – how have you built any relationship at all? When you bring people together where they both have an opportunity to have their say then you’re building skills and the relationship. That’s what restorative practices is all about.
How is the restorative practices model different from other strategies for addressing bullying and harassment?
We don’t define behaviour. We don’t talk about “bullying and harassment”. We talk about someone being harmed. If someone feels they have been harmed they have the right to a conference where they have the chance to confront the person who’s doing it to them. So the word “dobbing” doesn’t exist in this school. Kids come up to a teacher and they don’t say someone’s hurt me, they simply say I need a conference. Then we get the kids together, run the conference, come to a resolution, and if both parties are happy with that resolution then we move on.
What do you see are the strengths of restorative practices?
- The process allows people to think constructively about what they are doing and what they want done.
- The kids are identifying what the REAL problems are – rather than us just punishing the overt behaviour.
- The kids come to their own resolutions. At first they were quite punitive but we realised that they were just modelling what we had been demonstrating to them for years. They also went through a phase where they didn’t want an apology – because it didn’t mean anything. Now they can be very creative in their resolutions.
- The process works with everyone – students, staff and parents.
How long before you noticed changes in the school culture?
It was an evolutionary process. We started out with a couple of us trained and eventually the whole staff was trained. We had a huge advantage here. Because of the level of violence in the school, staff were ready to try anything. So once we had everyone trained and full staff consensus that this was what we were going to do it was only a matter of weeks before we started to see signs of things changing – in how the kids were reacting and how they were treating each other.
What recommendations would you have for schools interested in restorative practices?
It’s been an interesting journey – one I would sell to anybody and say that if you, as a school, have the philosophy and the belief that this is the way to go and if you stick to it, then it can have a dramatic effect.
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