“This doesn’t look like any detention I ever seen!” Marcus says about the ring of chairs I’ve set up for our school’s daily in-school detention.
I welcome him to the group and ask him to take a seat.
“Welcome,” I say, “I am so happy that I get to work with you today. Today we will be discussing some topics, but really it’s an opportunity to practice our personal and social skills — skills that help us become successful in life!”
As a restorative justice (RJ) facilitator at a high school in the Bronx, the staff and I had the job of creating a detention program that would help reduce the need for out-of-school suspensions. The goal is to help so-called “at-risk” students identify and explore their intense emotions and challenging circumstances.
Rather than the “traditional” style of detention, which seems simply punitive, with students sitting in rows in silence for an hour, I decided to apply my passion for social emotional learning to reimagine what a constructive/instructive detention might encompass.
[For more of this story, written by David Levine, go to http://jjie.org/the-revolution...ntion-can-be/285674/]
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