A shift in the conversation

New 2025 research suggests that restorative practices in schools are most effective when they operate as a whole-school relational framework rather than as a loose set of classroom activities or an alternative discipline script. The strongest message across the recent studies is that implementation quality, leadership coherence, and student experience are now the central questions for the field, not whether restorative practices are appealing in principle.eric.ed+1

What the strongest study adds

One of the most useful new contributions comes from Tasminda Dhaliwal and colleagues in Teachers College Record, who examined implementation across four districts in a Michigan county where restorative practices were mandated in discipline decisions. Using surveys from 493 educators and 4,805 students, along with interviews with 47 staff members across nine schools, the study offers one of the more substantial recent pictures of how restorative practices look in real schools rather than in idealized policy language.eric.ed

Adoption is real, but uneven

The headline finding is both encouraging and sobering. About half of classroom teachers, particularly in elementary schools, reported using proactive circles, while fewer than half used formal restorative conferences. That tells us two things: first, restorative practices are present in many schools; second, they are often only partially embedded, with stronger uptake in lower-intensity, community-building activities than in more demanding harm-repair processes.eric.ed

That distinction matters for practitioners. Many schools can say they are “doing restorative” because circles or check-ins occur with some regularity, yet the newer evidence suggests that deeper implementation remains uneven. If formal restorative responses, reintegration practices, and shared staff expectations are underdeveloped, then schools may have adopted the language of restorative practice without yet building the infrastructure that makes it credible in moments of real conflict.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin+1

Students do not see everything the same way

A second insight from the Dhaliwal study is especially important for practitioners and administrators alike: students and adults do not always see implementation the same way. Students generally reported observing educators use restorative practices, and middle school students responded more positively than high school students on implementation-related survey items. At the same time, students were less convinced that circles actually built community or reduced conflict, which is a crucial warning for schools that rely too heavily on staff self-report as their main evidence of success.eric.ed

For restorative practice practitioners, this is a significant shift in emphasis. The field has often focused on training adults in techniques, but the newer research points to the need for a stronger student-experience lens. It is no longer enough to count how many circles were held or how many staff attended professional development; schools must ask whether students feel more respected, more heard, and more fairly treated when harm or disruption occurs.eric.ed

What the systematic review shows

Another important 2025 contribution comes from the systematic review published in Frontiers in Education, which examined 13 studies from school settings, mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The review found that restorative practices were associated with reduced violence, improved emotional wellbeing, and stronger socio-emotional skills, while also supporting more peaceful, inclusive school cultures.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin

This is encouraging, especially because it reinforces what many practitioners have observed for years: restorative practices often show their strongest value in school climate, relational trust, and emotional regulation. Yet the review also urges caution, noting that the evidence base remains limited by a predominance of quantitative studies, a lack of longitudinal work, and the need for more mixed-methods research in varied contexts. In other words, the broad direction of the evidence is positive, but the field still needs more robust work on long-term effects and implementation sustainability.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin

Why leaders should avoid overclaiming

That caution is important because school leaders are often under pressure to justify restorative practices in narrow disciplinary terms. Administrators want to know whether office referrals fall, suspensions drop, and test scores improve. Those are understandable questions, but the 2025 literature suggests that schools should resist overpromising short-term hard outcomes, particularly if implementation is still shallow or inconsistent.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin+1

Implementation is not linear

A related insight comes from the implementation-focused studies you identified, especially the newer work tracking restorative practice strategies over time in a PK-12 district. The available abstract indicates that restorative practice use fluctuated over a five-year period across school levels in an equity-focused district, reinforcing the idea that implementation is not linear and does not simply deepen on its own once a district adopts the approach. For school administrators, this is a reminder that restorative reform is not a one-time initiative but an ongoing organizational change process that requires sustained leadership attention.semanticscholar

This may be one of the most practically useful insights in the current wave of research. Restorative practices do not fail only because staff resist them or because schools lack good intentions. They also stall when leadership expectations are unclear, when restorative processes are not aligned with existing discipline systems, and when different schools in the same district receive inconsistent support, coaching, and accountability.semanticscholar+1

Rethinking fidelity

For practitioners working inside schools, the emerging evidence points toward a more disciplined view of fidelity. Fidelity should not mean rigid script adherence or the mechanical use of circles. Instead, fidelity should mean coherent relational practice across settings: proactive community building, clear use of affective language, meaningful repair after harm, and shared norms about how adults respond when behavior escalates.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih+1

Leadership is central

This is where school administrators play a decisive role. The Dhaliwal study found that implementation varied based on leadership expectations, alignment with existing practices, and site-specific discipline processes. That means principals and district leaders cannot delegate restorative practice entirely to a dean, counselor, or specialist; if leadership treats it as an add-on, staff will too.eric.ed

The best administrative response is to build restorative practice into the operating system of the school. That includes induction and coaching for staff, clear expectations for classroom community-building routines, workable pathways for restorative responses after harm, and evaluation measures that capture both quantitative and qualitative indicators. A sensible implementation dashboard might track referrals, repeat incidents, attendance, and exclusionary discipline alongside student perceptions of belonging, fairness, and voice.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin+1

Different schools need different strategies

Another practical lesson from the 2025 literature is that restorative implementation may need to look different across school levels. Elementary classrooms appear more likely to use proactive circles, while student perceptions become more skeptical in high school settings. This suggests that older students may require more authentic, context-sensitive restorative processes and may be quicker to detect superficial or performative uses of the approach.eric.ed

That has implications for both training and design. In elementary settings, the implementation challenge may be consistency and quality in everyday classroom routines. In secondary schools, the challenge may be legitimacy: whether restorative practices are experienced as meaningful, fair, and relevant when power, identity, conflict, and discipline become more complex.eric.ed

More than a behaviour tool

For the restorative practice field more broadly, the newer research also sharpens an old but unresolved tension. Schools are often drawn to restorative practices because they want alternatives to punitive discipline, but restorative work cannot be reduced to a behavior-management tool alone. The current evidence increasingly supports the view that restorative practices are most effective when they are relational, preventive, and participatory, with disciplinary outcomes emerging from that broader culture rather than from isolated interventions.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih+1

What schools should do next

This is why the language of “implementation” now matters so much. The field is maturing beyond early advocacy claims and entering a more demanding stage in which schools must show not only that restorative practices are present, but how they are enacted, by whom, under what conditions, and with what student experience. That is a healthy development, because it moves the conversation from aspiration to disciplined practice.public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin+1

For practitioners, the new research points to several clear priorities. First, invest as much in adult relational capacity as in circle facilitation. Second, measure student experience directly rather than assuming that visible routines produce invisible trust. Third, strengthen the less-developed side of restorative work, particularly formal response and repair processes, so that proactive culture-building is matched by credible action when harm occurs.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih+1

For school administrators, the priorities are equally clear. Treat restorative practice as a change strategy, not a program; align it with behavior policy, staff development, and trauma-informed supports; and expect variation across schools unless implementation conditions are deliberately strengthened. Most of all, avoid the temptation to declare success too early: the 2025 evidence suggests that schools become restorative gradually, unevenly, and only when leadership, practice, and student experience begin to move in the same direction.semanticscholar+2

Annotated bibliography

Dhaliwal, T. K., Anderson, K., Graham, J., Richards, D., & Chiang, Y.-C. (2025). Becoming restorative: A mixed-methods analysis of educator and student perspectives of restorative practices implementation. Teachers College Record.
This peer-reviewed study is the strongest item in the set because it examines restorative practice implementation across four districts in a state where restorative approaches were mandated in discipline decisions, using surveys from 493 educators and 4,805 students plus interviews with 47 staff across nine schools. Its main contribution is showing that implementation is real but uneven, with about half of classroom teachers using proactive circles and fewer than half using formal restorative conferences, while student and educator perceptions do not always align. For practitioners and administrators, this is a valuable implementation study because it moves beyond advocacy and highlights the importance of leadership conditions, school context, and student experience.

Simonson-Borg, K. (2025). Impact of restorative practices on student engagement and academic performance in an elementary setting: A mixed-methods study. ProQuest dissertation.
This dissertation appears to focus on elementary schools and examines how educators perceive the influence of restorative practices on engagement, achievement, and school climate. Its strongest apparent contribution is the argument that restorative practices function as a systemic relational framework whose impact depends on professional learning, leadership modeling, and shared expectations, which aligns closely with the stronger implementation literature. Because it is a dissertation and the full methods details were not available here, it should be treated as emerging evidence that is useful conceptually but less definitive than peer-reviewed multi-site research.

Kervick, C. T., Knox, P. N., Garnett, B. R., et al. (2025). Taking stock of restorative practices strategies implementation over time in an equity-focused PK-12 school district. Contemporary Justice Review.
This peer-reviewed article appears especially useful for administrators because it tracks restorative practice strategy use over a five-year period in a diverse PK-12 district and highlights that implementation fluctuates over time and across school levels. Even from the available abstract information, the study reinforces the idea that restorative implementation is not linear and should not be assumed to deepen automatically after policy adoption. Its practical value lies in showing that schoolwide reform requires sustained monitoring and differentiated support rather than one-off rollout efforts.

Perrotte, S. A. (2025). Restorative practices and their impact on student behavior and perception. ProQuest dissertation.
This dissertation focuses on high school students’ perceptions of how restorative practices influence behavior, conflict, disruption, referrals, and suspensions. Its apparent contribution is to foreground student perceptions and to connect positive views of restorative practices with stronger student-teacher relationships and safer learning conditions, which complements Dhaliwal et al.’s emphasis on student experience. As a dissertation, it is better used as supportive evidence for emerging themes than as a stand-alone basis for policy claims.

Thomas, K. (2025). Aligning responses to challenging behavior with schoolwide trauma-informed and restorative practices. ProQuest dissertation.
This qualitative dissertation appears to explore how school leaders and staff align trauma-informed and restorative approaches within behavior systems, using interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations. Its likely value for practitioners is not in outcome measurement but in explaining the barriers schools face when trying to shift from exclusionary, punitive responses toward more proactive and relational systems. For administrators, it seems particularly relevant because many schools now attempt to combine restorative and trauma-informed frameworks but struggle with coherence in actual practice.

Garofalo, M. P. (2025). The relationship between the implementation of restorative practice programs and behavior frequencies in the K-5 classroom. ProQuest dissertation.
This study is notable because it reportedly found no statistically significant difference in the frequency of reported behavioral incidents between implementing and non-implementing districts over one academic year. [user query] That makes it an important counterpoint within the bibliography, especially for leaders tempted to make strong short-term claims about behavior metrics. [user query] Its likely limitation is that causal-comparative district analysis over a single year may miss implementation quality, fidelity, and school climate effects that do not show up quickly in incident counts.

Cipolla, J. (2025). Creating a culture of care: An exploratory study of the impact of community-building circles on the elementary learning environment and classroom dynamics. ProQuest dissertation.
This exploratory qualitative study appears to focus on community-building circles in elementary classrooms through interviews, observations, and student reflections. [user query] Its reported findings, that circles strengthen belonging, relationships, voice, inclusion, and social-emotional development, fit closely with the broader literature showing stronger support for climate and wellbeing outcomes than for hard academic effects. [user query] This makes it a helpful practice-facing source, especially for elementary educators, though the likely limitation is that it centers one strategy rather than whole-school implementation. [user query]

Entsminger, J. R. (2025). Responsive Circles: A guide to resolving student conflict and building school community. Book.
This is best understood as a practitioner guide rather than a research study. [user query] Its value lies in translating restorative principles into concrete facilitation steps for responsive circles and conflict resolution in K-12 settings, which may be useful for training or implementation support. [user query] It should not be weighed alongside empirical studies when evaluating evidence of effectiveness, but it may still be useful as a practice companion to the research. [user query]

Alonso-Rodríguez, I., Pérez-Jorge, D., et al. (2025). Restorative practices in reducing school violence: A systematic review of positive impacts on emotional wellbeing. Frontiers in Education.
This is one of the most important items in the set because it uses a systematic review method to synthesize 13 school-based studies and concludes that restorative practices are associated with reductions in violence and gains in emotional wellbeing, group cohesion, and socio-emotional skills. At the same time, the review notes limits in the evidence base, including concentration in the United States and United Kingdom, variation in study designs, and a lack of long-term and mixed-methods research. For administrators, this is a strong source for framing restorative practices as promising but still dependent on careful implementation and evaluation.

Dietz, T. T. (2025). “Just explaining myself”: An exploration of how restorative practices empower students and support the disruption of the racial discipline gap. ProQuest dissertation.
This dissertation appears especially relevant for equity-focused schools because it examines student experience, emotional regulation, belonging, agency, and the role of a dedicated restorative practices room within a secondary district. [user query] Its likely contribution is showing how restorative dialogue may help students feel heard and may support efforts to address racialized discipline disparities, themes that connect with prior restorative research on exclusionary discipline. [user query] As with the other dissertations, its value is strongest as emerging qualitative or mixed-methods insight rather than definitive proof of system-level impact.