The Restorative Future of Student Engagement
Written by Adam Voigt, Founder and CEO, Real Schools
BACK to the future.
It’s a dangerous, although entirely understandable, habit to look to the past for answers when it comes to improving matters of student behaviour in the classroom and the plummeting levels of engagement or respect experienced by Australia’s teachers.
After all, if schools are the only places we choose to look for answers, then we only really have the schools of the past to examine. Nostalgic eyes encourage us to see the schools of the 1950s as idyllic, orderly and calm. We mentally conjure sepia-toned images of students smiling in individual desks, completing their spelling tests while a teacher meanders nonchalantly around them handing out A+ marks and sending Beaver to the principal’s office if he steps out of line.
That romantic human condition is why I’m forgiving of those who strain to recreate that picture in 2024 and who crave some recognisable teacher control and student compliance.
The reality, however, is twofold different from that picture. Firstly, these classrooms, designed for an industrial age model of schooling, weren’t all that wonderful for many students. Many were orderly because order was underpinned by threats of either exclusion or physical punishment. We all know what happened to Beaver when he got to the principal’s office.
Secondly, today’s kids are entirely different creatures from those of the 1950s. All teacher can speak to the increasing neurodiversity in their classrooms and the spiralling number of students with additional needs.
Even further, we’re also teaching young people in a western world dietary shift that is robbing their growing minds of nutrition; and a social media generation whose values are determined more by immoral social media ‘influencers’ than their parents or teachers.
Teaching now is hard. It’s harder than it’s ever been. And, as our students continue to become less recognisable from those of the 1950s, it stands to reason that the answers aren’t necessarily waiting for us in a school system with an outdated purpose, working with students of a completely different ilk.
Run an experiment with me for a moment. If schools had never been invented and you were asked to design the world’s first, where would you look for guidance and inspiration? I’d contend that you might examine systems where people come together, or randomly intersect, in cooperation. We might even look at traffic.
This is what the US state of Indiana did when they changed 256 of their traffic lights into roundabouts. They realised that traffic lights require the authority to do all the work in design and implementation. They noticed that all that’s expected of participants at a traffic light is to comply – or speed up for an orange light. They noticed that failure in the system requires cops, cameras and fine collections at a volume that they lacked the resources to sustain.
And so, they installed roundabouts at these intersections because the participant role is activated in such a system. The authority to run the system is shared with participants at roundabouts and failure is met with scorn from other users, often in the form of a flipped bird or an angry insult.
But regular users of the roundabout got better at using the system over time.
The emotion underpinning that learning was shame as participants deal with publicly falling short. The qualities that develop through exposure to roundabouts are compassion and empathy as drivers of social learning.
Further results included stark reductions in fatalities at 90%, collisions at 76%, pedestrian injuries at 30-40% and also a 50% improvement in traffic flow.
My question to you is – would your school like to develop students with more compassion and empathy as triggers of learning and self-regulation?
Would you like to reduce negative interactions between students, without increasing the authority exertion?
Would you be interested in a system that reduces its reliance on rules, penalties and control as means for improving student performance?
If you’re an, “Oh my goodness, yes please!” to these questions then your school’s future is a restorative one. A sound, contemporary restorative model is one that moves on from the restorative justice approaches that are better suited to judicial endeavours and allows the principles of how people intersect to be evident daily in the busy-ness of a contemporary Australian school.
As such, there’s a lot more to working restoratively than carrying around a question card for moments where kids screw up. And counterintuitively, there’s also a lot less.
Working restoratively means flipping our reliance on large programs and frameworks for improving behaviour and engagement. These approaches have cost educators enormous tracts of time, energy and money in the form of mini-lessons, theme days, posters and murals. The return for this investment, in terms of student behavioural shifts, has typically been either miniscule or negative.
Instead, working restoratively involves only small shifts in three key areas:
Language
Conduct
Mindset
Within each domain, teachers can learn a series of tiny shifts that, taken to scale and habit, have the potential for monumental impact. Teachers deserve a return for their efforts above their investment.
This has been the case for teachers we’ve worked with who’ve used Affective Language to deal with behaviour such as swearing in their classrooms. Affective Language is really just including a feelings word in your typical language.
So instead of, “Don’t swear in here,” a teacher might say, “It disappoints me when you swear in here.”
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it’s also the equivalent of seeing an angry, frightened face at a roundabout and responding a little better next time.
The learning that drives self-regulation comes from knowing how our behaviour affects others. Some teachers have reported to me that they can effortlessly use hundreds of Affective Statements a day and some have reported drops in problematic behaviour, like swearing, of up to 70% through their use.
This low-investment high-return mindset can also be applied to conflict and wrongdoing. Further, when we make small changes to our teaching and classroom architecture that reflect the human condition, the benefits are amplified exponentially.
And it’s all borne of a mindset that says I’d rather my school be a little more like a roundabout than a set of traffic lights.
When we see schooling differently and stop looking to the past for answers, we open several possibilities. The first is a school built on trustworthy scientific evidence from the realms of social psychology and Affect Theory.
Another possibility is a future where the staff of your school access the personal benefits of working restoratively that I’ve encountered across a thirty-year career. The first is more impact. I know for certain that young people make more progress, academically and socially, in my company when I practice restoratively.
An even bigger benefit is a reduced stress level, evidenced in getting to my car after each day of teaching knowing that my practice of the day matched my deep purpose for working with young people.
There are too many Australian schools full of too many Australian teachers placing their hands, if not their heads, on the steering wheel at the end of the day and contemplating forlornly, “This is not why I got into teaching.”
That change is in your school’s restorative future.
The second edition of Restoring Teaching by Adam Voigt is now available as both an eBook and audiobook, and it’s free for all delegates attending the Wellbeing for Future Focused School Conference. This new edition expands on Adam’s Restorative Practice “RP2.0” methodology and includes practical resources, templates, and no-nonsense advice to help educators implement restorative practice in their classrooms.
Join Adam at the Wellbeing for Future Focused Schools Conference in Melbourne on 28 August 2025. He will be speaking on ‘You Had One Job’ Do you remember a time when a School Leader’s job seemed simple and straight forward? It was, you know… to lead the school! But somewhere across the years we absorbed an inordinate number of ancillary responsibilities as educators and now it can feel as though we’re not specialising, making a difference in what matters or even working in our purpose. That needs to stop.
Adam will challenge you to re-imagine your school leadership as a leader of school culture. That really can be your ‘one job’ if we get clear on what culture is, how it underpins every school objective, how it promotes strong practice, optimises wellbeing and why it’s the practical work you were born to do in your school every single day.