After a school conflict, did students understand why a boundary was needed? Did they have a chance to be heard and learn how to take responsibility?
These questions are at the heart of my recent episode of the Ontario Principals’ Council’s Leadership Talks podcast, “From Compliance to Community: Student Voice with Structure in Ontario Schools.” I’m grateful to OPC for the opportunity to explore them with fellow school leaders.
Three ideas to take into your school
Set clear boundaries while protecting students’ dignity.
Make space for student voice when responding to conflict.
Connect participation with responsibility to others.
What is our structure helping students learn?
As a principal, I care about whether our expectations help people learn and work together. Schools need clear boundaries. Teachers need support when those boundaries are crossed. Students need adults who will respond when someone is hurt or learning is interrupted.
Within those responsibilities, there is room to look closely at how we use our authority.
Consider a student who interrupts another child repeatedly during a discussion. The adult needs to intervene. A response might sound like: “I want to hear your thinking. Right now, someone else is speaking, and they need the same opportunity. Hold that thought until they’re finished.”
The boundary is clear, and the reason for it is connected to another person. The student is being asked to practise the responsibility that comes with having a voice.
This is the kind of everyday connection I want to make through the Web of Rights: helping students understand how their safety, dignity, and participation sit alongside the same needs in others.
Student voice needs a place in the process
For me, meaningful student voice requires adults to be clear about where participation can happen and what will happen with what students tell us.
After a conflict, that might mean giving each student time to explain, checking our understanding before making a decision, and explaining the next steps. The adult still carries responsibility for safety and follow-through. Students have a place in the process, including when their actions need to change.
I would bring that same lens to leadership conversations with staff. When we review a recurring behaviour concern, we can ask about the process students experience: When are they heard? How are decisions explained? What support helps them take responsibility and rejoin learning?
Those questions give us something concrete to examine together.
Bring one question back to your school
Think of one familiar school routine: an office referral, a classroom agreement, or the conversation after a difficult recess.
Where, within that routine, does a student have a clear opportunity to be heard and understand their responsibility to others?
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.
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.
