Designing Professional Development in Restorative Practices: Assessing High School Personnel's, Students’, and Parents’ Perceptions of Discipline Practices

We conducted focus groups with high school staff, students, parents, and administrators to gain information about how to design professional development training supporting high school staff in implementing restorative practices within a multitiered support system. Results indicated that all stakeholders valued trust and relationship building and identified equity, accountability, and home−school communications as key elements of effective discipline approaches. We provide recommendations for designing professional development for high school staff in effectively and sustainably integrating restorative practices with existing multitiered student support systems.

The Family-School Relationships in Europe: A Research Review

The literature on research carried out in the field and parents’ and teachers’ declarations all point in the same direction: good collaboration between home and school is useful to the child-student for his education and learning. Despite this, parent-teacher relationships in Europe (and elsewhere), from Spain to Sweden, from Ireland to Greece, and from Italy to the Czech Republic, represent an unresolved issue. This is a complex relationship that calls into play various social spheres: macro (social), intermediary (institutional) and micro (relational); in fact, there are as many diverse realities as there are schools. In Europe, the relationshipbetween individual behaviours (parents vs. teachers), social orientations (neoliberalism) and institutional frameworks (school markets) appears significant: scarce parental participation, lack of adequate forms of home-school communications, and the need to make investments inparent and teacher training. Nevertheless, family and school are called on to create a dialogue in order to contribute to the processes of training new generations. They both need each other in order to carry out that task in the best way. This paper presents and discusses the results of a theoretical analysis conducted on the basis of the international literatureconcerning research on the school-family relationship, with particular attention on the situation of different European countries, and concludes with suggestions for some practical improvements.