Reinstating old-school behaviour management approaches is wrong: Voigt

By Sarah Duggan

(Source: EducationHQ)

When Adam Voigt is told restorative practices are simply too soft to tackle really challenging student behaviour, the expert has a comeback at the ready.

According to former principal Adam Voigt, the myths plaguing restorative practices – such as they set low expectations and don’t involve any consequences for poor behaviour – need to be cleared.

For when given the choice, most students would rather be handed a lengthy suspension than sit and digest the full impact of their poor behaviour, Voigt points out.

 “I’m often saying in reply, ‘well, how come they’re choosing the four days punishment if that’s the hard option?'

“Taking genuine personal responsibility for the way that you’ve affected people around you, is far, far more confronting, far more challenging for these students, than a few days home on the Xbox.”

The ex-principal and now CEO of Real Schools, a company that offers mentoring and coaching to schools in restorative practices, is concerned about the 'authoritarian' direction Australia is heading in when it comes wrangling poor behaviour in schools.

Last week a senate inquiry into disruptive classrooms called for a national ‘Behaviour Curriculum’ to be introduced as a means of ensuring good behaviour is taught explicitly at the whole-school level. 

The proposed curriculum should outline the essential habits and instructional routines that are conducive to positive learning environments, the committee said. 

Voigt is firmly against the idea. 

“The model of trying to control people into better behaviour is flawed, especially for today’s kids,” he tells EducationHQ. 

“I’m concerned that we’re going to overwork more teachers. I’m concerned that we’re going to ask them to deploy ways of working that don’t match with their moral purpose with being educators in the first place.”

Voigt says if we think we can ‘hark back to the glory days’ and reinstall a model of behaviour management that worked in the 1960s then we are sorely off the mark. 

“[The call for a behaviour curriculum] is making an assumption that habits, that routines and that values are not being taught by teachers, and it’s just giving them a list of things that they can tick off and make their kids do…

“It doesn’t help them to value that behaviour, it doesn’t help them to actually want to do that behaviour…”

Although there’s no harm in teaching kids good behavioural habits, Voigt says imposing a regime of behaviour standards via an authority figure was not the way to foster empathy, self-regulation and compassion in children. 

“In an environment where young people feel that they need to do that behaviour to try and get a reward, or if it feels like a dare to do a negative behaviour without getting caught, then we’re not encouraging the growth and the development of empathy that our young people need – we’re not building their value for working collaboratively.

“We’re teaching them it’s something they need to do to please us, and I don’t think that’s the most productive way to build a young person that is ready for the real world,” Voigt argues. 

Rather, the key ‘social piece’ for schools is to empower students with the tools of self-regulation and collaboration – and this should be done “without having Big Brother watching them or without having a list of behaviours that we can take tick off and say, ‘I’ve got that done,’” Voigt adds. 

Yet Tom Bennett, the British Government’s ‘behaviour tsar’, who in October outlined a case for Australia to adopt a stand-alone behaviour curriculum and also spoke at the inquiry, has taken direct aim at the use of restorative approaches in schools.

Bennett contends that relying on these as the only means of rectifying challenging school cultures “almost guarantees a future crisis of misbehaviour and danger”. 

The expert argues that restorative approaches are only useful when students are capable of remorse and understanding consequences, and can learn what they did was wrong, and not for those who won’t take responsibility.

Voigt maintains that restorative practices are the most effective way for schools to turn around a culture of misbehavior, while also enacting “a little bit of a moral mission as well”. 

“I want to acknowledge that like any model, if it’s implemented poorly in schools it can produce results that we’re not looking for,” he concedes. 

“But what we are seeing in Australia is hundreds of schools, who are implementing restorative practices successfully, who are not pushing their school to the edge of a crisis, who are actually making this the legacy work of the school leaders in the school. 

“We’re seeing countless schools at the moment that are able to drive up their staff retention, because their staff feel like this is work that is close to the reason that they got into teaching in the first place.” 

Voigt reports that those schools following restorative practices – with the right supports in place for staff – are reducing the amount of complaints from parents, slashing the frequency of suspensions and building thriving professional learning communities around their work. 

To this end he cannot get his head around the criticism cast at restorative approaches. 

“I certainly don't understand why there are proponents in the community that would not look at [those schools’ success and not] support it. 

“And I have no idea why some people who are big on what they call the ‘older-school ways’ of working, would feel the need to so vehemently attack schools who are doing it really, really well,” he says. 

Bennett has flagged what he sees as another flaw with restorative practices: students can learn to game the system and simply spit out the desired response to ‘speed through’ the process. 

“Finally, restorative practices ignore the sad truth that a lot of misbehaviour is wilful and intentional. Deterrents like sanctions are a necessary part of providing boundaries of conduct. Boundaries with no consequences are not boundaries, but suggestions,” he adds on X.  

Voigt says the idea that students can outsmart the system and offer fake apologies is “a really good example of restorative practices being rolled out in a school in an unsupported way”.

“The role of restorative practices is not to get them to say the right words, [it’s] for them to be able to repair harm. 

“So, we have schools who even use the analogy of ‘UN’, which is that if your actions led someone to feel scared, then your job is to UNscare them. A fake apology won’t do that job for you. 

“You’ve got work to do, you’ve got time to spend, you’ve got effort to provide, to make sure that that harm is fixed up if these are behaviours you’re going to choose.”

According to Voigt, the myths plaguing restorative practices – such as they set low expectations and don’t involve any consequences for poor behaviour – need to be cleared. 

“…schools (must) understand that this isn’t about conducting a good conversation. It’s about conducting a conversation that leads to a young person taking supported personal responsibility,” he says. 

“And then for a staff member to be able to thank and congratulate that kid for doing it. That becomes a model that’s really high expectations, but it’s also a model that’s really fair…

“Now, the only way to actually get people engaged in a really highly cooperative way, is to have them feel that the school is a fair environment for them.” 

Voigt fears that as a nation, we’re swerving too far towards ‘control bias’ in our bid to stamp out disruptive student behaviour. 

“If we’re looking to just build a sequence of habits, behaviours and values that we’re going to teach the young people, we will feel like we’ve made progress when we tick them off, but then we’re going to look out the window and see that they haven’t actually changed their conduct,” he says. 

“We felt the thrill of progress without actually noticing whether it was making a difference…”

More rules, more control and more behaviours to teach is a solution to be avoided, he warns. 

“We’re creating systems that require enormous surveillance. 

“And particularly at schools where the biggest challenges are, they don’t have the workforce to be able to provide all of that effort.”