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.
Ask most children what a rule is and they can usually give you an answer pretty quickly. Don’t run in the hallway. Raise your hand. Keep your hands to yourself. Wait your turn. Rules are familiar territory in school because children hear them all day long.
Ask the same group what a right is and the answers tend to get a little more interesting.
Some children will describe something they are allowed to do. Some will talk about fairness. Others will name something they want. Younger children often connect the idea of rights to things that feel very personal to them, like their favourite game, their family, their body, or the things they like and do not like.
That is actually a useful place to begin.
Before children can understand how rights connect, how one person’s rights can come into tension with someone else’s, or why communities need agreements, they need a simple understanding of what a right is in the first place. In the Web of Rights, I usually begin with a straightforward idea: a right is something every person deserves because they are a person.
That sounds simple, but it changes the way we talk to children about school.
A child does not earn the right to feel safe by behaving well. They do not earn dignity by completing their work. They do not lose the right to be heard because they made a poor choice. There may still be boundaries, consequences, routines, and adult decisions. Schools need structure. But rights do not switch on and off depending on whether a child is being compliant.
I think that is where some of the confusion begins. Children are often very familiar with privileges because schools use them all the time. Computer time might depend on expectations. A preferred activity might depend on the circumstances of the day. A teacher may decide where students sit or when certain things happen. Those decisions can change.
A child’s dignity should not.
When I first began exploring rights with young children, I found that identity was often one of the easiest ways into the conversation. A child understands that I cannot tell them what their favourite colour is. I cannot tell them their favourite food is hummus because mine is. They know that preference belongs to them. From there, the thinking can stretch. Their body belongs to them. Their feelings and identity are part of who they are. They deserve to feel safe. They deserve to be treated with respect.
And then comes the harder part: so does everyone else.
That is the beginning of the Web.
Teaching rights is not about telling children, “You have rights, so you get to do whatever you want.” A student can have the right to express an opinion and still hear no. They can have the right to play and still encounter limits around where, when, or how that play happens. They can disagree with an adult while the adult remains responsible for making the final decision.
What they are learning is that some things about being a person deserve protection even when adults are setting limits.
This is why I would not begin with a long lesson or a complicated definition. I would start with conversation.
What is something every person in this room deserves? Should everyone feel safe here? Should people be able to say when something is bothering them? Should people still be treated respectfully when they make a mistake?
I would also ask whether the teacher has rights.
That question is important because a rights-informed classroom is not built around children on one side and adults on the other. Everyone is part of the same community. The teacher has the right to feel safe. The student beside you has the right to learn. The child across the room has the right to be heard. You have those rights too.
Once children begin to understand that, the conversation starts to move away from “What am I allowed to do?” and toward something much more useful: “How do we live together when all of us have rights?”
That is where the real learning starts.
I would keep the first conversation small. There is no need to turn this into a giant unit on day one. If students leave understanding one idea clearly, that is enough: I have rights because I am a person, and so does everyone else.
Then use that language again when the classroom gets real.
Use it when someone interrupts. Use it when a child needs space. Use it when two students disagree about a game. Use it when you have to say no and want students to understand why.
The Web of Rights becomes useful when rights stop being something students learned about and start becoming language they use to understand the life they are already living together.
Want to Introduce This in Your Classroom?
If this feels like a useful place to begin, the free Web of Rights Starter Guide takes the next step. It includes foundational rights language, classroom examples, and discussion prompts designed to help students begin thinking about safety, dignity, voice, and shared responsibility.
Or, if you want to understand the framework before bringing it into your classroom, you can explore the Web of Rights here →
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