Abstract
Increasingly, school officials are administering discipline, particularly exclusionary disciplinary practices such as suspension and expulsion, disproportionately to students of color and students with disabilities. An alternative to exclusionary discipline is restorative justice practices (RJP). RJP is a collection of strategies that educators can use with students and stakeholders to establish positive relationships to reduce unacceptable student conduct and increase time learning. Through this study, I explored the factors that influence the perceptions of teachers and leaders and how those perceptions impact the integration of RJP in individual classrooms. Three critical aspects comprised the conceptual framework: (a) administrator beliefs and practices, (b) teacher perceptions, and (c) valid enactment of RJP. Through an explanatory intrinsic case study, teachers and administrators were interviewed using an interview protocol to determine their perceptions of a RJP workshop that was delivered during the pre-school week of the 2019-2020 academic school year and the impact it had on their implementation of those practices in their classrooms. Relevant documents such as disciplinary referral data, workshop training materials, and school and district discipline policies were collected to add trustworthiness to my findings. Through an analysis of the data collected, the following factors emerged that impacted the use of RJP at East Middle School: (a) time, (b) workshop format, (c) experience, (d) administrator philosophy, (e) administrator commitment, (f) positive perceptions of support, and (e) negative perceptions of support. Implications that arose from the study were: (a) aligning administrator philosophies with the program that is being implemented, (b) tailoring professional development to the teachers in the building, and (c) instituting an appropriate monitoring and accountability plan for the implementation process.