How to Design an Experiential Activity for Teaching Restorative Practices
As I coach new volunteers through their first several experiences facilitating community restorative justice processes, the most common feedback I offer is to use more reflective statements and to practice reframing inflammatory or unhelpful statements. My coworkers and I agree that reflecting and reframing are two of the most essential skills needed by facilitators to take on more high-stakes cases and effectively manage the “difficultator” (our term of endearment for that person most likely to throw a curveball severe enough that it could make the whole restorative justice process go sideways).
Reflection and reframing require a facilitator to think on their feet, sometimes in a moment when they may feel uncomfortable, uncertain, or escalated. Knowing we could use an experiential activity to address this need, we created “Mirror Mirror” and “Race to Reframe.” These games provide a low-pressure way to practice these important skills. While “Mirror Mirror” can be used early during a class to generate connection while practicing reflective statements, “Race to Reframe” works well at the end of a class because it adds an element of time pressure and gets people laughing and competing. After several deliveries of “Race to Reframe,” we recognized it was necessary to increase the offensiveness of the statements needing to be reframed, in order to push the skill development of our advanced facilitators. We continue to revisit and adapt both games according to the context and skill level of the group in order to keep them fun and challenging.
—Kathleen McGoey
This chapter describes six steps for designing games and experiential activities for teaching restorative practices, including how to write scenarios and lead an effective debrief of the game or activity to deepen learning. These aspects of design and delivery are intended to help learners to understand the connection between the “micro” learning experience and the larger “macro” issues, concepts, or skills being taught.
Designing an Activity Step 1: Cultivate Self-Reflection and Willingness to Learn
The first step in the process of designing a restorative experiential learning activity is taking the time to reflect on your own relationship to and understanding of a topic. This will include identifying and considering your relevant history, assumptions, and biases. In order to be an effective teacher, you must be willing to learn through the teaching process.
Before you begin the design process, take the time to sit with your own needs and assumptions related to the topic or discuss them with other practitioners. How does this learning activity relate to your own worldview and notions of a desired future reality?
This process of self-reflection is ongoing. A sincere examination of one’s frames of reference is likely to lead to feelings of unsettledness, doubt, and vulnerability. Be ready to experience discomfort and significant personal shifts as you participate in this process, and consider who you may reach out to in order to discuss and understand this discomfort.
Designing an Activity Step 2: Identify a Need and Establish a Learning Objective
Next, identify a need in your learning community that you would like to address through the activity. Is there a certain skill or concept that your learners are struggling to grasp? What issue would you like to explore with the group? For example, maybe you work with a group of facilitators who are struggling to generate open-ended questions during the facilitation process and need to practice that skill. Or perhaps you have noticed your learners are not grasping the potential for creativity in responding to individual harms in the agreement-making phase of the restorative justice process. A group of new learners may need an activity that will help them understand what differentiates the restorative approach to crime and conflict from more conventional approaches. On a conceptual level, you may have noticed that your learners are too focused on the interpersonal dynamics of cases and are not grasping how larger structural inequities contribute to crime and conflict. Being aware of and responsive to your learners’ needs in this way will help you to present the right level of challenge for the group to facilitate transformative learning.
Once you have identified a specific need for learning in your community, establish a related learning objective or aim. For example, for the needs identified in the previous paragraph, the learning objective of your activity may be:
• Learners will practice the skill of generating open-ended questions on the spot.
• Learners will explore the purpose and potential of the agreement-making phase of the restorative process.
• Learners will experience what differentiates restorative approaches from other approaches.
• Learners will understand and engage critically with the larger structural roots of crime and conflict.
Once you have a clear learning objective established, you will be able to return to that objective throughout the design and debrief process to make sure you are achieving your aim.
Designing an Activity Step 3: Get Creative, Employ Models and Metaphors
Once your learning objective is clearly established, it is time to engage your creativity. What will help your learners grasp the new skill or concept? Is there a conceptual model or a metaphor that would help participants “get it”? How could you use that metaphor or conceptual model creatively in designing your activity? Learning often takes place through the imaginative use of metaphors or an engaged and interactive use of visual models.
Many of the games and activities included in Chapter 8 revolve around metaphors or conceptual models. For example, a game designed to help students explore how to respond to specific harms and draw on individual strengths in the agreement-making phase employs the metaphor of thinking “outside the box” as a way to highlight the importance of creative thinking. The game is titled “Out of the Box,” and participants literally free themselves from a physical box through generating creative agreement ideas as a team. A game called the “Social Discipline Window Shuffle” encourages learners to engage deeply with the conceptual model of the Social Discipline Window by asking them to step into a giant version of the model and act out or describe the different approaches in relation to real-life scenarios. This helps learners to internalize what differentiates the restorative approach from punitive, permissive, and neglectful approaches. In an activity called “Build the Nest,” learners come to understand how larger social and structural issues contribute to crime through engaging with the Nested Theory of Conflict model by actively “building a nest” of the contributing factors at each social level in relation to a real-life scenario. As you explore the activities outlined in Chapter 8 and implement them in your community, you will undoubtedly begin generating your own creative ideas for how to employ metaphors and models in your design process.
Designing an Activity Step 4: Design the Experience
Once you have your creative framework established, think about how you will facilitate participants’ experience of the learning objective. How will you set up and explain the activity? What will they be asked to do? What will be the tone of the activity: is it humorous, reflective, or solemn? Will it be fast-paced, or do you need to modulate speed and create space for silence? How can the activity be intentionally related to real life? How can you create an opportunity to practice a skill in a way that is fun and low stress? How will you help learners draw connections between the immediate learning outcomes and their long-term visions for a more just, equitable world?
Restorative practices fundamentally require a paradigm shift. It is crucial to allow learners the space to discover this new way of thinking for themselves in order to disrupt the conditioned behaviors and thought patterns instilled by the retributive system that is so pervasive in our lives. This is accomplished by facilitating experiences through which learners can undergo a shift in thinking themselves. In order to do this effectively, take time to consider how you will facilitate a meaningful and reflective experience for your learners in each stage of your activity.
Experiential learning activities or games will often involve a mock scenario of a conflict or crime. Writing effective scenarios is key to cultivating a successful learning experience, and having multiple scenarios can help keep the same activities engaging, or lead to discussions highlighting different learning points from the same activity.
In writing a scenario, first revisit your learning objective and consider what sort of discussion you hope to elicit in the group. Next, take the time to reflect on your own life and facilitation experience. The best scenarios are often inspired by real experiences. Writing case studies following each process you facilitate can help provide material for you to teach with later. Or, reflect on your own life. Consider times you experienced conflict or harm or times you caused harm to someone else. Starting with a real experience and changing personally identifying information or overly complex details often results in a scenario that feels authentic.
While designing scenarios, it is also important to pause and check your assumptions and what may be implicitly embedded within the scenario. Has the responsible party been given a name that suggests a certain ethnicity? What about the harmed party? What genders are the characters? Do your scenarios perpetuate destructive stereotypes, or is the scenario a way to engage with and challenge those stereotypes? Intentionally framing a scenario to generate dialogue among learners can be a powerful way to surface and challenge assumptions and shed light on the lived experiences of learners. How will you utilize this opportunity to empower the voices of students from marginalized communities? As the instructor, be prepared to facilitate a respectful dialogue when learners’ differing opinions, perspectives, and experiences are brought to the surface.
Designing an Activity Step 5: Design the Debrief
After you have prepared your experiential activity and any required scenarios, the next step is to think about how you will debrief the activity with learners. How can you encourage meaningful conversation, including critical reflection on social issues? Through an effective debrief, learners gain new insight about the meaning of their experience in the activity while integrating new understandings and skills.
The debrief process provides a space where learners can incorporate what has been experienced into their frame of reference and understanding of the world. Through facilitated debriefing, learners begin to see themselves within a web of connectivity that extends beyond the learning space and imagine their role and opportunity to impact larger social systems. When a teacher assumes that learners will integrate new information on their own without a facilitated debrief, they run the risk of providing a diluted learning experience.
An effective debrief should also help learners to understand the connection between the “micro” learning experience and the larger “macro” issues or concepts being explored. Dialoguing about difficult topics—such as structural issues and the role learners play in systems that cause harm—will likely cause tension and discomfort. As the instructor, model embracing this discomfort by courageously facilitating dialogue that upholds the values of respect and responsibility as the group reflects on the underlying issues that have been surfaced.
Conversations about crime scenarios will often provoke more philosophical conversation about the unjust conditions that frequently lead to crime, and the social responsibility necessary to change those conditions. These conversations are infinitely valuable and necessary in order to avoid the often-narrow focus of restorative justice on individual or interpersonal concerns. Cultivating this balance between individual matters and larger structural issues is not an easy task and requires practice, but the potential impact of these dialogues is immense.
• What was that like for you?
• What did you find easy, and what was more challenging?
• How did the activity change how you think/feel about ____________________?
• What did you observe in yourself as you practiced this skill?
• How does this activity relate to your lived experience?
• How does this activity help you better understand ____________________?
• How does this activity relate to your role as a restorative practitioner?
• What will be challenging about implementing this learning in your life/work?
• What is one thing you/we can do to address the issues surfaced through this activity?
• Don’t rush it.
• Ensure equal voice in the group.
• Provide validating responses to students’ sharing. Reflect back the themes you hear to affirm the wisdom of the group and to help land salient points that convey your learning objectives. Ask follow-up questions to lead students into deeper reflection and inquiry.
• Don’t shut down learners’ comments as wrong. Instead, dig deeper. Learners may initially respond with resistance, skepticism, or a problematic perception of the concept you have introduced. Rather than shutting down the observation or correcting it, ask the participant to reflect further on the source of the belief or reaction by posing additional respectful, open-ended questions. If you are working with co-facilitators, be prepared to support each other in the case that you receive feedback that is particularly challenging.
Designing an Activity Step 6: Review and Improve Your Experiential Activity
The final step is to review your design and to reflect on the successes and challenges that arise when you use the activity with your group of learners. This creative process involves constant reflection and refinement. As the restorative teaching approach flattens the hierarchy that is often found in teacher-student relationships, you will be a learner yourself at every stage of this process. This way of teaching demands a great deal of attention, skill, and courage.
Because of this demand, the authors recommend finding a group of like-minded trainers and facilitators with whom you can collaborate in the creative process. Through working as a team, you may be able to shed light on each other’s blind spots, and offer support through the sometimes-painful process of uncovering previously unidentified biases and assumptions. With the shared goal of designing meaningful, transformative, experiential learning methods, practitioners can share and support the courageous vulnerability that will ultimately lead to a more powerful experience for everyone present.