What Makes a Discussion Question Restorative?

Not sure what sorts of questions to explore with your class or staff?

High quality prompts are questions that give the circle its energy and focus. The circle keeper asks a question and invites everyone on the circle to respond (including the circle keeper). Some questions are proactive and are about building and maintaining community. Check-in questions are an example of this. Some prompts are about responding to specific challenges.  Restorative questions are a sequence of prompts that guide dialogues leading to understanding the consequences of harmful behaviors, and agreements about how to repair those harms.  Closure questions invite reflection on what has happened in the circle.

High quality prompts have these characteristics:

• They are relevant: questions about something that is real and meaningful to the lives of students.
• Often a high quality prompt gives voice to existing unspoken questions that are in the social field; consider this: “What does it mean to be popular?” as an example of a question that is implicit in many students’ minds, but is perhaps rarely discussed openly.
• Simple and clear language is used.
• They are open-ended: not yes-or-no questions, but worded in a way that invites deeper inquiry.
• They are about inquiry, not advocacy; discovery, not teaching facts or proving a point. Thus, a prompt framed as “Why is it always best to be polite?” may be helpful, but it also assumes its own conclusion; you may as well say, “It’s best to be polite. Tell me why.”  It might be more interesting to ask, “What makes relationships work out well?”
• Often prompts are related to current events for which time is not planned in the curriculum. In the week after the earthquakes and tsunamis that devastated Japan we made time in all of our circles for students to share their questions and concerns. It was simply a matter of asking, “Does anyone have anything they would like to say about the earthquakes and tsunamis?” And you bet they did; the emotional load carried by many of these students was immense. Circles were a perfect opportunity to make room for them to ask questions. (We learned that many 4th and 5th grade students in the San Francisco Bay Area were afraid that the tsunami was going to wash them away, along with their school and families, and were sitting in their classrooms silently and politely containing their terror.)
• They support re-storying. Re-storying is the process by which we loosen the grip that stories that we have constructed about each other and our world have on us, thus opening up new possibilities for how we see and experience each other.
• They energize the class and get the attention of students.
• They invite deeper follow-up questions.

Want to see some example questions for your next circle meeting?

Here's a free "Quality Question Cheat-Sheet​, our printable gift to you:

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Quality Questions Cheat-Sheet

Free Training Manual

And if you'd like a complete introduction to Restorative Practice, help yourself to the free training manual (upper right).