Restorative Virtual Circles

Transcript

Derrick Franke: Hello and welcome to this online instructional video on using restorative circles in an online environment. My name is Derrick Franke I am a trainer and facilitator of restorative practices. I’ve been with the International Institute for restorative practices for 15 years. I also am a specialist in the school of criminal justice at Michigan State University. I’m a researcher with the American institutes for research and a subject matter expert with the National Center for school safety. Just an important note before we get started, the intended audience here are teachers who are already using circles in the classroom and who have some training with three sort of practices. If you would like more in-depth resources for preparing for facilitating circles and trainings take a look at some links we provide at the end of the video.

You’re thinking about facilitating a circle online, where to begin? First things first so thinking about just your screen as a presenter, what do you want to see? And one of the things I like to do is I like to have my participants off to the left. For this video we use zoom but for any platform you use you’ll generally encounter the same sort of features. So as you can see here I’ve got some colleagues that helped me out with this. I’ve got them on a zoom call I can see all their faces over here on the left. On the right I’ve got some content so in this case we’ve got a check-in circle planned, a checkout circle. Both of those are going to be sequential. And then in the middle I’ve got some non-sequential questions. These are intended to be a little more in depth elicit some more emotion. So I’ve got these all written out so when I look at my screen I’m seeing this word document over here. I’m seeing my zoom screen over here. I’ve got my participant view here so I can keep track of everybody that’s in. I’m seeing whether all whether they’re on mute or not. I’ve also got my chat box feature open down here. I’ve got all of my controls down here and you can also of course maximize your zoom screen here. So if you’ve got a lot of students and you’d rather see their smiling faces you can maximize this bring up your other documents as you need to.

One note that I’m hearing from teachers is the size of these. Right, so what’s an appropriate size for an online circle like this and does it get unwieldy at a certain point? And from teachers here in Michigan that I’m hearing from, they tend to think that around 20 so far works pretty well or less, anything over that can get a little unwieldy. You might not see everybody on the screen so you might consider offering different sessions for different sections of your of your class.

Next you’ll want to determine the order of people speaking if you’re running a sequential circle. There’s a couple ways you can do this. One is you can simply use the chat feature type out your students names in order and they can find theirs they know when they’re going and who’s going next. Keep in mind with that if people show up to the meeting after you’ve entered these in you’ll just have to enter them in again so the new students who pop in can see the order. Another way to do it is to create a visual. And so you can share this with your students either through the screen share feature, you can share it in advance and it’s just a helpful way to see you know where folks are situated.

Next, so if you’ve done circles in the classroom you know how important circle norms are, circle guidelines. Online circles are no different, in fact there are a few extra challenges now. And one of those is audio and another one’s video. So in terms of audio you’ll have to make some decisions about how you would like your students to mute or unmute themselves or whether you want to control that. Teachers I’m hearing from that I work with it kind of depends on grade level. Younger students, I’m finding teachers prefer to control all audio themselves and so you can do that a number of ways. You can click here and even mute everybody when they enter the meeting. And here is where you can click allow participants to unmute themselves so if you don’t check that box then it’s up to you, right, to mute or unmute students as they go. You can do that as a group here mute all, unmute all or individually you can do that here by clicking on the microphone. Ao another potential distraction is the chat feature. Now there’s a couple ways you can manage this and if you’ll take a look right there you’ve got some options. Right, so you can set the chat feature so that none of your students can use it at all. So you use it to display the order of people speaking and that’s it. That’s fine. Some teachers actually finding some success with this using it for course content covering lessons and they want students to be able to answer. Now there’s a couple ways you can do that too. You can allow your students to like I said chat with no one, so that’s it’s essentially disabled the feature, or you can click host only. And so that might be answers to questions that you want to allow your students to communicate just with you and not with other students.

And last but not least the talking piece. And so this is actually a future of online circles that I like a lot because you can ask students to choose their own talking piece bring something from their home to the to the circle that’s meaningful to them. You’ll see in this circle even in our check-in I asked my colleagues to bring their own talking piece to this and to explain you know why they chose, it why is this meaningful to you. Naomi here is talking about her stuffed animal. And so the way I like to use the talking piece is say we’re doing a sequential go around and it’s Naomi turn. She would grab her stuffed animal, and she would show it and I would say I’m picking up my talking piece. And then when I’m done I would say I’m gonna place it back in the center. And then that would give the next student the indication that it’s their turn to pick up the talking piece, just like a non-sequential circle.

And so if you’re doing those like my question rounds here in the middle, you’ve got the screen you’ve got a, you know eyes on your class, and whoever is ready would like to participate would at that point grab their talking piece, show it to the screen. And then you might say okay I see Naomi has picked up her talking piece, go to Naomi, unmute Naomi, she speaks, and when she’s done she’ll announce that she’s putting her talking piece back in the center. I’ll mute Naomi, and then I’ll wait for someone else to grab their talking piece and just proceed accordingly like that.

Say you’ve got a large class and you see multiple talking pieces raised at the same time. You see here Phoebe’s got hers, Donnie’s got hers, that’s another time you could use the chat feature. You could type in the names of the talking pieces the students that that raise theirs and then that gives them just a sense of when their turn might be.

So thanks for watching. At the end of the day give it a shot. It might take a couple times to iron out the kinks, but from what I’m hearing overall from teachers this is a really valuable tool especially during social distancing to keep students connected with each other, with you. Especially in classrooms where circles have become a ritual, this is this can be a really important and valuable tool. So give it a shot, share your stories, let us know how it’s going and take a look at some of the resources we’ve got for you. Thanks again.