Schools talk often about student voice, but the harder question is whether students actually experience school as a place where their voice can shape what happens next.
That was the heart of my recent conversation on Restorative Works!, a podcast from the International Institute for Restorative Practices. I joined host Claire de Mezerville Lopez to talk about the Web of Rights, restorative practice, democratic schooling, and what it means to build school communities that serve students rather than simply manage them.
Listen to the Conversation
Listen here, or open the episode in your preferred podcast app.
One of the tensions we explored is familiar to many educators. We want students to feel safe, respected, and engaged, but many of the systems we inherit still begin with compliance. Students are told the rules, corrected when they miss them, and often given very little space to understand why those expectations exist or how their own voice fits inside the community.
That approach may create order for a while. It does not always create responsibility.
The Web of Rights begins from a different place. It helps students understand that rights are connected. A student’s right to speak connects with another student’s right to be heard. A student’s right to play connects with another student’s right to feel safe. A student’s right to identity connects with the community’s responsibility to protect dignity and belonging.
In the podcast, I shared a classroom example from kindergarten, where three children wanted to play together outside, but their rights were overlapping in real time. One child loved rough-and-tumble play. One child was worried about being hurt. One child wanted to be part of the game but did not want certain kinds of touch.
A compliance-first response might have been simple: no wrestling.
But a rights-informed response asks a better question: what agreement could protect everyone’s rights?
The students worked toward a shared structure. One became the referee. They created a stop signal. They found a way for play, safety, and identity to exist together. The point was not that adults disappeared. The point was that adult structure helped students practise community.
That is where restorative practice and the Web of Rights meet so naturally for me. Restorative work cannot be only reactive. It cannot just be the card of questions we pull out after harm has already happened. The strongest work is preventative. It is built in the daily language, routines, agreements, and relationships that help students understand themselves as part of a shared community.
That is one reason this conversation felt meaningful. The International Institute for Restorative Practices has spent years helping schools, organizations, and communities think more deeply about relationships, repair, and community-building. Their work includes professional learning, graduate education, implementation support, research, and resources for people trying to move restorative practice beyond a single strategy or script.
That connects closely to how I think about the Web of Rights.
In my own work, restorative practice is not separate from rights-informed education. Both ask adults to take relationships seriously. Both require structure before conflict, not only response after harm. Both ask us to slow down enough to notice who has been affected, which rights are involved, and what kind of agreement could help the community move forward.
That is why IIRP’s ongoing work is important. Schools need more than isolated tools. They need training, research, implementation support, and communities of practice that help restorative ideas become part of the daily culture of school.
This is also why student voice needs structure.
Voice does not mean children make every decision. It does not mean adults step back from responsibility. In fact, meaningful student voice requires strong adult facilitation. It requires clear boundaries, developmentally appropriate language, and a shared understanding of safety, dignity, and responsibility.
When students are included in that process, school starts to feel different. Rules become less arbitrary. Conflict becomes more teachable. Repair becomes more possible. Students begin to understand that their voice is important, but so is the voice of the person beside them.
For educators and school leaders, that shift is not always easy. We work inside systems shaped by curriculum pressure, assessment demands, policies, staffing realities, and limited time. I understand that. I have lived inside those pressures too.
But I also believe we can build classrooms and schools where structure serves students more clearly.
Sometimes that begins with one small question:
Which rights are involved here?
That question can change the tone of a conflict. It can slow down blame. It can help students move from defending themselves toward understanding impact. It can help adults respond with more clarity and less reaction.
I’m grateful to Claire and the IIRP team for creating space for this conversation. If you are an educator, school leader, parent, or anyone thinking seriously about dignity, student voice, restorative practice, and the future of schooling, I hope you’ll listen.
You can find the episode on most streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on the official IIRP website.
You can also explore more of IIRP’s work here:
And if the conversation connects with work you are already trying to build in your classroom or school, you can explore the free Web of Rights Starter Guide and other implementation resources.
The next step does not have to be large. It can begin with one classroom conversation, one shared agreement, or one moment where we pause and ask students to think not only about the rule that was broken, but about the rights that need to be protected.
Real change in public education is not about polished slogans or performative innovation. It is about noticing where the system stops serving students well, listening carefully to the people inside it, and helping guide change toward something more honest, more humane, and more worthy of the community it is meant to serve.
The phrase change agent gets used so often in education that it can start to feel strangely hollow. It appears in leadership bios, school improvement plans, professional learning spaces, and conference language until it begins to sound less like a serious responsibility and more like a flattering title adults give themselves when they want to sound forward-thinking.
But real change in public education is rarely flattering. It is rarely smooth. And it almost never begins with a slogan.
We would be hard pressed to find anyone who truly believes change can be avoided. At every level of life, change keeps coming. Technology changes. Communities change. Students change. Public expectations change. The social world children are growing up in changes constantly. And yet even when people acknowledge that change is inevitable, many of us still resist it, especially when it threatens routines, habits, or systems that have long felt stable, even if those same systems are clearly holding people back.
Public education is full of inherited structures that many adults know are no longer serving students as well as they should, and yet there is still deep apprehension about what it would mean to do things differently. That apprehension is understandable. Schools are public institutions. They carry enormous pressure, enormous visibility, and very real constraints. But the presence of that fear does not remove the responsibility to respond.
A real change agent is not simply someone with new ideas.
Public education has never been short on ideas. Every year brings new initiatives, new language, new frameworks, and new promises. Much of it sounds impressive for a while. But new language is not the same as change. A school can update its vocabulary and still leave its deepest habits untouched. A district can talk constantly about innovation while students continue moving through structures that feel impersonal, rigid, and overly adult-centered.
A real change agent is someone willing to notice the gap between what we say school is for and what students actually experience once they are inside it. We say schools are here for children. We say we care about learning, belonging, fairness, safety, and voice. And yet many students still move through systems that ask for compliance more quickly than they offer explanation. Many adults are still working inside routines that may be efficient for institutions, but frustrating for human beings. A real change agent is someone who refuses to treat that contradiction as normal.
But that does not mean the job is to force change on people.
That is one of the places where the phrase change agent can easily go wrong. It can start to sound like one person arriving with clarity, vision, and answers, ready to drag everyone else toward progress. I do not think that is the work. Being a change agent is not about imposing change. It is about listening, learning, and acknowledging that change is already happening, whether we welcome it or not. The work is to help guide that change toward the outcome that the community hopes for.
That requires a different posture. Less performance. Less ego. Less attachment to being the person with the best language in the room. More humility. More attention. More willingness to hear what students, educators, families, and communities are actually experiencing. Change agents leave their selfishness aside. They do not treat change as a personal brand, a leadership performance, or a chance to prove that they are more evolved than everyone around them. They help guide change toward where the collective wants and needs it to go. That is not passive work. It is disciplined work.
It means listening deeply enough to tell the difference between nostalgia and wisdom. It means recognizing when resistance is pointing to something worth preserving and when it is simply fear dressed up as common sense. It means helping a community move without losing itself. And when that community arrives somewhere better, the work does not end. A real change agent listens again, because change never stops. The needs shift. The context shifts. The people shift. The work of paying attention begins again.
To me, that is the part that matters most. I am less interested in the adult who can speak fluently about transformation than I am in the one who can help a classroom or a school function differently on a hard Wednesday afternoon. I am interested in the teacher who stops asking only, “Who started it?” and starts asking, “What is this conflict showing us about safety, dignity, voice, or belonging?” I am interested in the school leader who can look at a blanket practice and ask whether it is truly serving students well, not just whether it looks clean and consistent on paper.
This matters even more now because the world around school is changing quickly, while many school structures still carry an older logic. Students are growing up in a world shaped by constant information, algorithmic influence, shifting ideas of authority, and deep uncertainty about institutions. The pressures they bring into school are not the same as they were twenty years ago. And yet many of the systems they enter still rely on predictability, control, standardization, and narrow definitions of success. That mismatch is becoming harder to ignore.
So perhaps one of the central questions for a change agent now is not simply, “How do we improve school?” Perhaps it is, “What kind of human experience are we building inside school as the world changes around it?”
That question pushes the conversation in a more serious direction. It asks us to think beyond shallow innovation language and toward something deeper. What if the future of public education is not mainly about making systems faster, more efficient, or more measurable, but about making schools more legitimate in the eyes of the people living inside them? What if the schools that matter most in the years ahead are the ones that can protect dignity, teach responsibility, and make room for meaningful participation without losing structure? What if the next important shift in education is not only technological or organizational, but moral?
I think a real change agent lives inside those questions.
They notice when fairness has been reduced to sameness. They notice when discipline is serving adult relief more than student growth. They notice when silence is being mistaken for health. They notice when student voice is welcomed only when it is tidy, grateful, and easy to manage. And then, instead of stopping at critique, they begin creating better conditions. Sometimes that looks small from the outside. It may mean explaining a decision instead of hiding behind authority. It may mean teaching students language for boundaries before the next conflict begins. It may mean slowing a moment down long enough for dignity to survive it. It may mean building routines where students are not merely managed through the day, but meaningfully included in the life of the community.
Other times the work is larger. It means rethinking how conflict is handled across a school. It means challenging the assumption that order alone is the goal. It means helping adults see that structure and voice are not opposites. It means moving a staff conversation away from control and toward legitimacy, shared responsibility, and repair. That kind of work can be uncomfortable because it asks adults to examine not only student behaviour, but adult habits, institutional reflexes, and the deeper values underneath them.
That is why being a change agent in public education is not mainly about charisma. It is about integrity. It is about knowing what you believe about children, power, learning, and public responsibility, then being willing to act from those beliefs even when it would be easier to fall back into inherited habits. It is about resisting the pressure to confuse efficiency with justice, consistency with fairness, or calm with health. And it is about remembering that no meaningful change can last if it is detached from the people who actually have to live inside it.
Public education still matters because it is one of the few places where a society can decide, in public, what it owes young people. Schools are not just instructional sites. They are places where students learn what kind of authority they are expected to live under, whether their dignity is something adults protect or merely talk about, and what it means to live in community with other people. A change agent takes that seriously. They understand that every routine teaches something. Every policy carries a message. Every response to conflict tells students what kind of community they are standing in.
So no, a change agent is not simply the person with the newest language or the most visible passion. A change agent is the adult who can see where public education is falling short of its own values, listen closely to the people most affected, and still help guide the community toward something better in practical, grounded ways. They are not chasing change for its own sake. They are trying to make school more honest, more humane, and more aligned with what we claim to believe.
In that sense, the work is both modest and ambitious. It may begin with one classroom, one routine, one conversation, one conflict handled differently, one decision explained more clearly. But underneath those small shifts is a larger commitment. A commitment to the idea that public education should not merely process children efficiently. It should help form human beings who know what dignity feels like, what responsibility requires, and what it means to participate in a shared world.
That is the kind of change worth working for.
A practical next step:
If this is the direction you are trying to move in, the free Web of Rights Starter Guide is a practical place to begin. It offers an accessible entry point into the language of safety, dignity, voice, and shared responsibility. For educators ready to move from belief to daily implementation, the Web of Rights Implementation Planner offers a more structured next step.
I recently had the opportunity to join Dr. Sheldon Eakins for a conversation on his platform, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.
It is always energizing to sit down with someone who is asking serious questions about education, not just how schools run, but who they are really serving, what discipline is actually doing, and whether our systems are helping young people grow or simply asking them to comply. That is part of what made this conversation feel so worthwhile. The episode is now live as “Why Everything You Know About School Discipline is WRONG!” on YouTube and in the Leading Equity podcast feed.
Watch or Listen to the Conversation
Watch the full conversation here, or open the episode in your preferred podcast app.
In our conversation, we explored school discipline, blanket policies, student voice, and the importance of moving beyond exclusionary responses that often say more about adult systems than they do about the needs of the child in front of us. We also talked about some of the ideas behind my Web of Rights work, especially the belief that schools should be communities built with students, not systems imposed onto them.
One of the ideas that came through strongly for me is this: consistency is not always the same thing as fairness.
In many schools, discipline policies are written broadly so they can be applied uniformly. On paper, that can look clear and efficient. In practice, it can flatten context, ignore identity, and miss the real needs behind behaviour. That is a problem. A school cannot claim to care about equity while refusing to consider the lived reality of the students it serves.
We also talked about the difference between facilitation and control.
I believe deeply that educators have experience, responsibility, and an important role in helping children navigate conflict. But that is not the same thing as dictating every agreement from above. A healthy classroom is not a dictatorship. It is a community. It is a place where students learn that rights matter, that other people’s rights matter too, and that conflict is something we can work through with structure, honesty, and care.
That kind of work is not always easy. It asks a lot of educators. It asks us to reflect on our own instincts, to question policies that may be convenient for adults but harmful for students, and to stay grounded in integrity when systems make that difficult. But I think that is part of the vocation of education. If we are here to serve students, then our structures, our discipline approaches, and our relationships all need to reflect that.
I appreciated the chance to explore these ideas with Sheldon because his work is clearly rooted in helping educators think more deeply about belonging, leadership, school culture, and what it means to create student-centred learning environments. Through Purposeful Teaching Academy, his services for schools and leaders, and his broader writing and speaking, he continues to create space for conversations that matter.
If this conversation resonates with you, I encourage you to check out the full episode and spend some time with Sheldon’s work as well.
You can watch the conversation on YouTube, and you can find the episode in the Leading Equity podcast feed on Apple Podcasts. Sheldon’s current work can be found through Purposeful Teaching Academy, and educators or school leaders interested in workshops, coaching, or consulting can start on his services page or contact page.
He also has several books worth exploring, including Meaningful Classroom Management, which ASCD has listed under his author profile, and What Are You Bringing to the Potluck?, available through Solution Tree. A Wiley listing also continues to carry Leading Equity: Becoming an Advocate for All Students.
I’m thankful to Sheldon for the invitation and for the chance to talk with someone clearly committed to supporting educators who want to build schools that are more thoughtful, more just, and more human.
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