Training, Services, Interventions, & Consulting
Garrity Mediation & Consulting supports schools with restorative practices, mediation, classroom circles, and bullying prevention through:
- Training, services, interventions, and consulting for schools
- Building, maintaining, and restoring positive relationships.
- Making connections and building positive relationships between teachers and students, and among students
- Creating a positive classroom and school climate for academic success
Restorative Practices / Restorative Justice in Education
- Restorative Practices include both proactive and responsive methods for building, maintaining, and restoring positive relationships in schools.
- Restorative Practices serve all students, parents, and staff across cultures and differences to support school climate and academic success.
- They have been shown to reduce the disproportionality of school discipline between different cultural groups.
- Garrity Mediation & Consulting supports restorative practices in schools through training and services.
Training participants will learn and practice:
Skills for teachers to build, maintain, and restore positive working relationships with each student and their classes.
Skills and methods for staff to bring students back to class and school in a positive, productive way that restores relationships and makes things right.
Proactive and Responsive skills and methods including:
- active listening
- appreciation statements/positive praise
- private support/redirection
- emotional intelligence
- cultural competencies
- classroom circles
- restorative questions
- restorative circles/conferencing
- restorative reentry after referrals or suspensions.
Services include:
- Facilitating restorative circles, when someone has been harmed or the class or school have been affected.
- Providing restorative mediation for conflict between and among students, students and teachers, staff members, staff and parents.
- Co-facilitating classroom circles
- Conducting a restorative reentry process when a student has been suspended from school
Mediation – a restorative practice
- Conflict in school can distract students and staff from teaching and learning.
- Mediation services and training for staff and students help schools address and manage conflict to ensure a positive learning environment.
Training
Mediation training participants will learn and practice knowledge, skills, and methods in:
- Listening, paraphrasing, and problem solving skills
- Pre-conference process and skills
- Mediation session process
- Working with anger and strong emotions
- Thinking like a mediator
- Patterns of conflict
- Training and managing student mediators and mediation services.
Services
Garrity Mediation & Consulting provides direct services in mediation, facilitating proactive and responsive classroom circles, restorative circles involving of students, staff, administrators, and parents, as well as responding to bullying and bullying prevention.
Classroom Circles/Class meetings
Classroom circles/class meetings
- build relationships and community among students and teachers,
- reduce conflict and bullying, and
- help student feel respected in the classroom and the school.
These conditions support academic success and behavioral improvement.
Training participants will learn and practice
- Proactive and Responsive classroom circles
- The effectiveness of dialogue circles/class meetings
- Planning for classroom circles
- Skills and methods for facilitating meetings effectively
- Using circles for community building, decision-making, problem-solving
Bullying Prevention
Students who are bullied, who bully, or who observe bullying are negatively affected in their academics, morale, feelings of safety, confidence, and social interactions.
A whole-school approach to bullying prevention, which includes both proactive and responsive methods, supports student achievement by enhancing school climate and increasing school safety.
Garrity Mediation & Consulting will:
- Coach and consult on bullying situations
- Develop a school-wide bullying prevention approach
- Train a coordinating team
- Train school staff
- Conduct lessons for students
- Link the approach with other programs and methods in the school
Discipline Disparity Assessment & Response
Research reported by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder indicate that African American and Latino students are three times more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers. Schools can address this question through a process of assessment, planning, training, implementing, and reassessing. Reducing suspensions and building positive relationships enhances academic achievement and behavior.
Garrity Mediation & Consulting will support schools with:
- Assessment
- Planning
- Training
- For teachers and staff
- Skills and methods for building positive relationships with students Cultural
- competencies
- Methods for restoring relationships
- Interventions
- Implementing new methods
- Reassessment