Transforming.

So Saturday, I got up early and took our very handy local and efficient public transportation system into the City of Brotherly Love to attend a conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on using “restorative practice” in schools.  Restorative practice is the somewhat clunky and not-quite-accurate name for, amongst other things, using things like “circles” and principles of “restorative justice” as part of school community building and discipline.  That’s only a part of it, though.

I had never been to a Quaker-sponsored workshop for educators before, and I came out of it invigorated.  Excited.  Juiced.  Yes, some of it was a bit pie-in-the-sky and pretty touchy-feely (many of the teachers who were there teach elementary school, and, let’s face it, we can’t do some of the things in a public schools that Friends can do at a Friends school), but a lot of it can, I think, have a real world application to what we do at my public middle school.  It was also very affirming to realize that we already do a lot of this stuff, and that I have been doing many of these “best practices” in my classroom for years without even knowing it.  I’m hoping now to get some kind of grant from our district or someplace else to develop a pilot program for our district to incorporate some of these ideas into our school community. The state of New Jersey, in their infinite wisdom and in their usual dictatorial style, has mandated zat vee vill reduce the number of suspensions und recidivist cases involving discipline und vee vill do ziss, mach schnell.  Of course, they haven’t told us how,  just what.  As per usual.

I’m hoping this might be a way to get to how.

Anyway, this would be a big deal.  It means changing the school culture in a lot of different ways.  It means more parental involvement, and not everybody likes that.  It means bringing the kids in as more active participants in the system.  Their responsibility level also goes up with their level of participation, and some won’t be able to handle that.  It means that many teachers and administrators need to let go of some of their power, and some have to shift their roles a bit, and that is a very big hairy deal.  It means going through a very involved transformational process.

This led to the closing of Saturday’s workshop, and the reason for this post.  The lead facilitator for the day had a short period of worship and worship-sharing scheduled in at the end of the day’s work.  He had formulated a query based on all he had seen and absorbed during the day, and he wanted us to focus on that query as part of this closing period of worship.  His query has stuck with me into today, and I’ll come back to it often, I think.  It was simple, and yet really very provocative:

“How am I readying myself to be transformed?”

Good question. 

For all of us, I think.