Fidelity in Implementing School-Based Restorative Justice Conferences

Many schools are attempting to reduce their reliance on suspension and exclusionary discipline to manage student behavior. One promising alternative involves restorative justice (RJ). However, many programs and interventions are being described as "restorative," without clarity regarding key components of a RJ approach, and few studies have measured program fidelity. This paper presents a measure of fidelity in implementing RJ conferences, which was used to rate RJ 105 conferences conducted in response to truancy, chronic disruption, and incidents with and without victims. These were implemented in the context of a larger effort that also included a whole-school intervention. Conferences showed very high fidelity in the behavior of conference facilitators, high fidelity in the interaction among conference participants, in contributions of participants to the action plan, and in consensus about the action plan. Student behavior was more varied, as was the extent to which the group offered forgiveness. Emphasizing consequences was associated both with more student remorse and with more student disengagement during conferences, both of which were associated with forgiving the student, but in opposite directions. This highlights a tension in RJ between holding misbehavior accountable while also showing students respect and helping them to repair harms they have caused.