Beyond Restorative Practices: Teaching Conflict Resolution in Schools

Restorative Practices and Conflict Resolution in Schools: A Vision Worth Planting

I had the honor of speaking to graduate students at California State University, Dominguez Hills on "Teaching Peace in Schools: Circles and More." This is my third year with this group. Every year I get to look hard at where the needle has moved on building peace in schools, and where it has not.

For a few years now, I have become passionate about the potential in teaching kids conflict management and communication skills in schools. We are missing an opportunity.

And I get that schools are already being asked a lot. I am a firm believer that we're asking our schools to do too much. I think we need to pause and look at the big "formal education" picture. What is the "why" of education? For me, raising the next generation of competent adults is a good goal. Not like-minded adults, but adults who can improve on the world we leave them.

Is it more important for a child to know where to put a comma in a sentence, or to have the tools for managing a conversation, particularly when they disagree? I am not saying we stop teaching grammar. I am asking what we have been leaving out, and at what cost. Which means we probably also need to look at what we're trying to squeeze in that really isn't serving children well.

I do this work with organizations, workplaces, and families. When we teach conflict management skills to adults, in addition to learning new skills, we're asking them to unlearn the old patterns that served them well for survival but not for relationships or community building. What if we could skip the un-learning, by teaching what works earlier?

There are some things I find steadfastly true in my work. And one of them is this:

"I have found that all of the markers in personal development, emotional intelligence, customer mindset, relationship building, are improved when people learn the roots and causes of conflicts, particularly in themselves, and learn tools to manage conflict in a way that works for all parties." – Joyce Weiss

I have concluded that there are very few "difficult" people. There is almost always a skill deficit. We are terrified of conflict and emotions, and we lack the skills to have the conversations that are challenging and matter the most. Yet they can be learned.

I wish I had learned what I know now, earlier. No telling how it would have changed the trajectory of my life.

So the question I keep turning over is this. Why not schools? Why not now, with kids, before the patterns set?

I have a vision. Title slide reading Beyond Restorative Practices: Teaching Conflict Resolution in Schools, by Kimberly Best, on blue background.

The pieces are not new. The research on each is clearer than the public conversation suggests. What is new is the integration. As far as I can find, no school is currently doing all of it.

We know what we have been missing. We have known for a while. We just have not built the structures to teach the next generation what we wish someone had taught us.

What We Know About Conflict in Schools

Conflict in schools is not a discipline problem. It is a daily fact of community life. Students argue. Teachers butt heads with parents. Faculty quietly resent each other after a curriculum decision they had no voice in. Administrators inherit board members who campaigned against the last administration. The school board meeting goes off the rails.

Most schools handle all of this reactively. Something explodes, someone gets disciplined, someone resigns, and the underlying patterns continue.

The cost is significant. A 2025 RAND survey found that teachers reported significantly higher stress and lower overall well-being than other working adults and cited student misbehavior as a primary reason. That is not a curriculum problem. That is a conflict skills problem stretched across the whole adult and child community.

As Dr. Sheila Wilson put it in Education Week: "Educators have come to realize that you can't punish a child into doing anything." And yet most school discipline systems are still punishment-first. Punishment doesn't teach people how to do things right. It often teaches them how to work harder to hide what they're doing wrong.

What Kids Actually Need to Learn

If we are going to teach kids conflict skills, we have to teach the why alongside the how. Skills without context are just techniques, and techniques fail under pressure. Kids need the biology, the psychology, and the sociology of conflict, because that is what makes the skills make sense. They need the things most of us did not get until our forties, after the divorce, after the lawsuit, after the falling out we did not have to have.

Kids need to know that conflict is biological. The racing heart, the hot face, the tight chest, the urge to fight or shut down: none of that is bad behavior. That is the nervous system doing what it was built to do. Everyone has these reactions, and the reactions come faster than thought. Emotions are information, not problems. Anger tells you something matters. Fear tells you something feels unsafe. Sadness tells you something has been lost. Most of us were raised to push these signals away, and that is part of why we are terrified of conflict as adults.

Kids need to know that being human is complicated. They are shaped by their family, their friends, their culture, their wiring, and the moment they happen to be in. So is everyone else. The person they are in conflict with is not bad. That person is human, with their own wiring and their own moment. Understanding that does not excuse harmful behavior. It just keeps us from making enemies out of the people we live and work with.

Kids need to know that disagreement does not mean someone is against them. It means that person is different from them. They can be for something without being against something else. They can hold a different position from a friend, a sibling, a teacher, or a classmate, and still be in relationship with them. These are not soft ideas. They are foundational.

Kids need to know that conflict done well is not just survivable. It is one of the few things in life that actually makes us grow. The relationships that go the deepest are the ones that have weathered a hard conversation and come out closer. The teams that do the best work are the ones that can disagree out loud. The communities that hold together are the ones that learned how to repair when they break.

Kids also need to know that life is an experiment. Every moment is one they have never been in before. Sometimes they will get it right. Sometimes they will not. That is the nature of learning. Schools that build a culture of getting it right teach kids to hide, to fake, and to avoid risk. Schools that build a culture of learning teach kids to try, to reflect, and to grow. That is the growth mindset, and it is the soil from which all conflict skills take root.

And underneath all of it, kids need to know that we believe in them. They are not too young. They are not too distracted. They are the next generation of people who will have to live with the world we leave them. They will rise to whatever expectations we hold for them. If we expect them to learn to handle conflict skillfully, they will. If we expect them to fail at it, they will deliver on that too.

The Pieces We Already Know About

When researchers talk about teaching peace in schools, they usually point to five layers that work together, and none of them succeeds alone.

School-Wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) is the behavioral foundation, the clear expectations and consistent responses that give kids predictable structure.

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is the skill-building layer, the self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making grown inside the student.

Restorative Practices are the relational layer, the circles and conferences and conversations that build community before harm happens and repair it when it does.

Peer Mediation is the student-led problem-solving layer, where trained students help other students resolve low-level conflicts before they escalate.

Peace Education and Conflict Resolution Education is the curricular layer that asks students to see themselves as global citizens and peacebuilders, not just rule-followers.

Schools where any of these work treat them as one ecosystem rather than five competing initiatives. That is also why genuine implementation takes five or more years. You are not adopting a program. You are building a culture.

What's Missing: The Adult Layer

Here is what almost no school has built, and what I believe is the missing piece.

The student ecosystem is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Students learn what adults model. A Conflict Competent School builds infrastructure for the adults too.

Conflict coaching for teachers and staff. This is not a workshop once a year. It is a standing resource. When a teacher is struggling with a colleague, with an administrator, with a hostile parent, with a board member who keeps weighing in on classroom decisions, that teacher needs somewhere to go. Coaching helps people prepare for the conversations they have been avoiding and find their best way forward. It does not solve the conflict for them. It helps them resolve it themselves.

Professional mediation for adult disputes. Parent-teacher disputes that have gone sideways. Teacher-teacher tensions poisoning a department. Board conflicts bleeding into community Facebook groups. Administrator-faculty breakdowns. These are exactly the conflicts where a trained neutral third party can change the trajectory. Most schools call lawyers instead. The conflicts that go to lawyers are usually the conflicts that nobody mediated when there was still time.

Modeling. Culture changes when students see the adults around them practicing the skills they are being taught. They see their teachers ask each other, "Do you want me to listen, or do you want me to give advice?" They see their principal sit in a circle alongside the cafeteria staff. They see the school board run a meeting with restorative norms instead of Robert's Rules deployed as a weapon. That is how a culture changes.

If the adults in a building cannot have hard conversations skillfully, no peer mediation program for sixth graders will save the school. Kids see through it.

And here is the deeper problem. Most of us did not learn these skills as children either. We learned to be right. We learned to win the argument. We learned to compete. Those patterns helped us survive certain kinds of childhoods, classrooms, and workplaces. They do not help us build community, trust, or partnership. Now we ask adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties to unlearn what they were rewarded for and learn something new. It can be done. We do it every day in mediation, in coaching, in training. It is also painful and slow. It would have been so much easier to learn at six.

Does It Work? The Honest Middle

The conversation about whether restorative practices and conflict resolution programs work in schools has become politically charged, and the political middle is less useful than the honest one.

The 2025 evidence is more positive than the loudest critics suggest. The University of Chicago Education Lab studied Chicago Public Schools' adoption of restorative practices and found a 15 percent decrease in out-of-school arrests, with the strongest effects for Black students, and no measurable decline in academic outcomes. Test scores held steady. The trade-off critics warn about did not happen. The Learning Policy Institute analyzed a large California data set and found that the more students experienced restorative practices, the more student behavior, mental health, and disciplinary outcomes improved, with stronger effects for Black and Latino/a students. A March 2025 systematic review in Frontiers concluded that restorative practices reduce violence, improve emotional well-being, and promote socio-emotional skills. In January 2025, the CDC named restorative practices an evidence-informed approach.

That is the positive case. Here is the harder one.

From 2015 to 2024, New York City invested an estimated $97 million in restorative justice programs. A 2022 evaluation of high schools in District 18 turned up no measurable effect on disciplinary incidents or suspension use. In April 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing the Secretary of Education to roll back the 2014 Obama-era guidance that had accelerated restorative justice adoption nationwide. A decade of federal encouragement reversed in one signature. The political climate around this work is no longer neutral.

And there is a real critique worth naming. When restorative programs fail, defenders say implementation was poor. When they succeed, defenders take credit. That can read as unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable claims are not science. They are ideology with citations.

I take the critique seriously, and the answer is in the pattern of the evidence. When the implementation is real and sustained, outcomes are real. When the implementation is piecemeal, outcomes are mixed. That is not an excuse. That is the finding.

Which brings us to the harder question. Why is implementation almost always piecemeal?

Why Nobody Has Built It Yet

A study of four elementary and middle schools using peer mediation programs tells the story. None of the four schools fully implemented the program. Each one did pieces. Training was inconsistent. Referral systems were partial. The full vision was not realized at any site. Students still benefited, just not as much as they could have. And the implementation gap was not because educators opposed the program. Teachers and administrators widely supported peer mediation. They believed in it. They wanted it to work. The shortfall happened anyway.

Why? Because there was no protected time in the schedule for training or mediation sessions. No dedicated staff person to coordinate the program. No funding for ongoing coaching after the initial training. Competing initiatives pulled attention in other directions. There was no clear referral pathway, so teachers did not know when to use it. Leadership turned over and continuity broke. District mandates did not match school-level capacity.

The schools where it does succeed share four things: five or more years of sustained commitment rather than a pilot, full-time restorative practitioners on staff instead of classroom teachers adding it on top of full loads, consequences that still exist but are reframed as accountability and repair, and buy-in built across the whole community, including the critics. Note what is not on that list: a charismatic principal, a wealthy district, a perfect student body. The schools where this works are not unicorns. They are the schools that committed long enough to let the seeds grow.

I went looking for a school doing all of it, the student ecosystem and the adult layer and the culture measurement, sustained for the time it takes. The closest historical concept is the Peaceable School model, developed by the Illinois Institute for Dispute Resolution in the 1990s. It described a school where conflict resolution had been adopted by every member of the community, from the crossing guard to the classroom teacher, infused into how business is conducted between students, between students and teachers, and between adults. That vision exists on paper. I cannot find a single school currently executing it at full scale.

There are partial examples. Calm Mediation in London integrates peer mediation training with parent and parent-teacher mediation. Pollack Peacebuilding offers adult-side school mediation as a service to districts. Various restorative-strong districts have built robust student-side ecosystems. What is missing in every example I found is the full integration sustained for the five-plus years it takes to work.

The vision is real. The execution is rare.

Schools Can't Do This Alone

There is also the question of priority. Schools are drowning. Teachers are exhausted. Districts are stretched. Adding one more initiative to an already overpacked day is a real and reasonable concern.

So the priority question has to be asked out loud. Is it more important for a sixth grader to memorize the parts of speech, or to learn that disagreement is not betrayal? Is it more important to perfect the five-paragraph essay, or to have a tool for the next time a friend hurts them? Is it more important to fill the homework folder, or to send a kid home with the language to repair what got broken at lunch? I will say plainly: I do not believe in homework that crowds out the things that matter more. We keep adding without subtracting, and we leave the unmeasurable things, the things that determine whether a person can live a connected life, to chance. Then we wonder why the adults we raise cannot have a hard conversation.

Children also do not live in just one system. They live in many: school, family, faith community, friend group, sports team, social media. Each one is teaching them something whether it intends to or not. A child who learns restorative language at school and goes home to shouting will internalize the louder voice. A child who learns to ask "what do you need?" in fourth grade and never hears it again after eighth has had a beautiful experience that did not stick. The school is one system among many. It can be a powerful system. It cannot be the only one.

Building a Conflict Competent School is a community project. It needs district commitment that survives leadership turnover, funding that survives a budget cycle, parents who learn alongside their kids, community organizations that reinforce the same language, and board members who model what they want kids to learn. The question of whose responsibility this is has a hard answer: everyone's. Which is why it rarely happens.

What a Conflict Competent School Looks Like

Picture a school that teaches conflict skills the way it teaches literacy, from kindergarten on, not as a special unit but as part of how the building functions. Proactive circles run in every classroom, students know the words for their feelings and the words for repair, and 94 percent of low-level conflicts get resolved by trained peer mediators before they reach an adult. The adults in that building have access to conflict coaching when they need it. The board has a standing relationship with a neutral facilitator. Parent-teacher disputes have a process that is not legal threats and never-ending email.

That school measures what matters, and what matters includes well-being, emotional intelligence, collaboration, belonging, and conflict skills, not instead of academic performance but alongside it. It asks the Climate Inventory questions out loud: Who are we? What do we value? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our gifts? What are our weaknesses? What is it like to be here? What is our vision?

That school knows what kind of adults it is trying to grow.

We Are Planting Seeds

This work does not pay off in a year. It pays off in five years for the school, fifteen years for the kids who got it, and thirty years for the kids those kids raise. The teachers and administrators doing this work today may never see the harvest. The board members who fund it will be gone by the time the data are conclusive. The parents who advocate for it will be sending grandchildren by the time the culture fully shifts.

That is not a reason to walk away. That is the reason to begin. Every adult in conflict work knows that the skills people learn at thirty are skills they should have been taught at six. The kids in your school right now will be the parents, the managers, the doctors, the elected officials, and the school board members of 2050. What they learn now about conflict is what they will model then.

This is also why what we need now is builders. We have enough theorists and enough conferences. What we need are builders, the people who design the system, hire the practitioners, fight for the budget, train the staff, and keep showing up for the five-year build. We know what works for organizations. We know how to teach it to adults. We know what information children need to do better than we have. We just have to build it. If you work with schools, you may be one of the builders. Find your version of starting.

What a Nephew Taught Me

There was a stretch of my own life when I was terrified of what my teenager might do. The pushback was hard. The teenage years brought fear that he would make some life-altering choice that would haunt him for the rest of his days. I felt like nothing I said was landing.

My nephew, a few years older than my child, said something to me then that I have kept in my pocket ever since.

"Don't give up on us. We hear you. Eventually we get it."

That is the message I want to leave for anyone who works with schools, for the teachers, the administrators, the parents at the board meeting, the board members weighing the next budget, and the mediators, coaches, counselors, and community members who keep showing up because someone has to.

You may not see the harvest. The students you teach may not show you the skills you taught them until they are thirty-five and finally having the conversation they could not have at fifteen. The kid who rolled his eyes in your circle in seventh grade may one day sit in a circle with his own children, not remembering where he learned the language he is now using. You will not always know that the seed took root.

Plant it anyway.

Don't give up on them. They hear us. Eventually they get it.