The Harder Kind of Accountability

What restorative practice can teach leaders about responsibility, repair, relationships, and what happens after something goes wrong

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

When something goes wrong in a school, we understandably want accountability.

A student harms another student.

Someone speaks abusively to a teacher.

Trust is broken.

A conflict escalates.

A person makes a choice that affects the safety, dignity, or learning of others.

The instinctive questions are often:

What rule was broken?

What consequence applies?

Those questions matter.

But restorative practice introduces others:

Who was affected? What harm was done? Who is responsible for addressing it? What needs to happen now? And what would it take for someone to re-enter the community responsibly?

Current research suggests that restorative approaches can strengthen relationships, school climate, connectedness, student autonomy, emotional well-being, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline. But the evidence also carries a warning: restorative practice is not a quick disciplinary technique. Implementation is uneven, outcomes remain context dependent, and practices can become diluted when leaders underestimate the time, training, coherence, and cultural change required. (Frontiers)

There may be an even larger lesson for leadership.

What if accountability does not end when we identify who was wrong?

What if the more consequential leadership question is:

What does responsibility require now?

I think restorative discipline may be one of the most misunderstood ideas in education.

Depending upon whom you ask, it can sound either transformative or hopelessly naïve.

Supporters describe relationships, belonging, student voice, repair, equity, and responsibility.

Critics sometimes describe something quite different:

A student behaves badly.

There is a conversation.

Everyone talks about feelings.

The student says sorry.

Nothing meaningful happens.

The student returns to class.

The teacher is expected to move on.

If that is the practice, I understand the frustration.

But I am increasingly convinced that what is being criticized in those situations may not actually be restorative practice.

It may be accountability avoidance dressed in restorative language.

That distinction matters.

Because the research does not describe restorative practice as the removal of standards.

Alberta Education's current guidance explicitly frames restorative practice around high standards and high support, relationship building, empowerment, and responding to harm rather than relying only on punishment. It also describes a continuum ranging from everyday relational practices to more formal restorative conferences. (Alberta.ca)

High standards.

High support.

Both.

That is where I think the leadership conversation becomes interesting.

Punishment and Accountability Are Not the Same Thing

Punishment is often relatively straightforward.

Something happened.

A rule was broken.

A consequence follows.

Detention.

Suspension.

Loss of privilege.

Formal discipline.

Sometimes those responses are entirely appropriate, particularly where safety, repeated behaviour, serious misconduct, legal obligations, or protection of others requires clear action.

Restorative practice does not make those realities disappear.

But it asks a question that punishment by itself cannot necessarily answer:

What happens to the harm?

A suspension can remove a student from school.

It does not automatically repair the relationship with the teacher who was threatened.

A consequence can establish that a behaviour was unacceptable.

It does not necessarily help the student understand why it mattered.

An employee can receive a formal reprimand.

That does not necessarily restore trust inside the team.

Someone can "pay the price" and remain angry, disconnected, ashamed, defensive, or unchanged.

That is why I find the restorative question useful.

Not:

How do we avoid consequences?

But:

What would meaningful accountability actually require?

Sometimes a consequence is part of the answer.

It may not be the whole answer.

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

What Happens When Restorative Practice Becomes Culture Rather Than a Program?

Moran, Walsh, and Sloan's 2025 study asked nine Irish primary school leaders about what it takes to develop a restorative culture.

Their findings describe something much more substantial than implementing circles or changing the discipline handbook.

Leaders described a progression beginning with visible restorative actions and gradually developing into a deeper cultural shift, including stronger student autonomy and changes in how members of the school community interacted with one another. Crucially, the researchers emphasize that embedding restorative practice requires enduring commitment rather than short-term implementation. (ScienceDirect)

A related 2024 systematic review by Moran and colleagues examined teachers' experiences implementing restorative practices with early adolescents. Relationships emerged as foundational, but so did the need for changes in adult attitudes, expectations, policy, support structures, and leadership. The authors argue that implementation ultimately requires a broader shift toward viewing teaching and learning as relational work. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

That feels important.

Restorative practice is not simply something adults do to students after behaviour occurs.

It is a way a community learns to deal with:

• difference,

• responsibility,

• conflict,

• voice,

• power,

• mistakes,

• and repair.

Those things are cultural.

Which means leaders cannot implement restoration entirely through the discipline office.

What Are We Restoring?

This may be the question schools should ask before adopting any restorative initiative.

Because you cannot restore something that was never built.

If students do not experience meaningful relationships with adults—what exactly are we restoring after conflict?

If a teacher believes leadership will not support them when something serious occurs—what relationship are we asking them to return to?

If students routinely feel excluded from decisions—does a restorative circle after an incident suddenly create a genuine voice?

If adults work in a culture of blame, defensiveness, and fear—why would students believe our language about restoration?

This is one reason proactive restorative work matters.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes restorative practices as encompassing both strategies that build and maintain relationships and processes that repair relationships when they have been harmed. (CDC)

That distinction is essential.

Restoration does not begin with the incident.

It begins with the community.

The Research Is Encouraging — and It Is Not a Blank Cheque

There is evidence of positive outcomes.

A 2025 systematic review examining restorative practices, school violence, and emotional well-being ultimately included 13 empirical studies after screening 860 publications. Across the selected research, restorative practices were associated with improvements in areas including school climate, aggression, bullying, cohesion, respect, emotional well-being, empathy, and social skills. (Frontiers)

But the authors are appropriately cautious.

The evidence base remains geographically concentrated, study designs and samples are heterogeneous, and longer-term evidence remains limited. They explicitly caution against assuming that observed benefits will transfer identically across contexts. (Frontiers)

That matters because restorative practice can sometimes be discussed as though the research has delivered a universal verdict.

It hasn't.

The emerging evidence increasingly shows that implementation matters enormously.

That may actually be the more useful finding for leaders.

"It's a Practice, Not a Program"

Lustick, Hakouz, Ward-Seidel, and Gaias put this directly into the title of their 2024 study:

What makes restorative justice equitable? "It's a practice, not a program."

Their research examined barriers to equitable implementation of restorative justice and worked with restorative coordinators to develop responses to those challenges. (ResearchGate)

That phrase stays with me.

Because schools are exceptionally good at programs.

Purchase the resource.

Train several people.

Create a flowchart.

Introduce it in September.

Put "restorative practices" into the discipline policy.

Then expect culture to change.

But a practice lives in repeated behaviour.

How does the principal respond when a teacher makes a mistake?

How does a teacher respond when a student challenges them?

How do staff members work through disagreements?

What happens after someone apologizes?

How is harm named?

Who gets heard?

What does accountability actually look like?

Can relationships survive conflict?

Those are not program questions.

They are culture questions.

Implementation Is Leadership Work

Recent implementation research makes this very clear.

Dhaliwal and colleagues' 2025 mixed-methods study drew on surveys from 493 educators and 4,805 students, along with interviews with 47 staff across nine schools. They found substantial variation in actual use of restorative practices. Roughly half of classroom teachers reported using proactive circles, fewer used formal restorative conferences, and students were less convinced than educators about some community-building and conflict-reduction effects. Leadership expectations, alignment with existing practices, and site-specific discipline systems all influenced implementation. (Sage Journals)

A 2026 mixed-methods study of a school-based diversion initiative across 15 Connecticut middle and high schools reached a similar conclusion. Staff knowledge increased, but sustained implementation depended upon staff buy-in, ongoing training and consultation, school-community coordination, and enough structural capacity—including time—to actually do the work. (ScienceDirect)

And a 2026 district-leadership study identifies recurring barriers including limited resources, incompatible beliefs, unclear policy and practice expectations, and restorative efforts competing with multiple disconnected initiatives. (Default)

The recurring message is remarkably consistent.

You cannot announce a restorative culture into existence.

The People Doing the Work Have to Believe the System Will Support Them

This may be one of the most important implementation hazards.

Imagine being a teacher who has just been sworn at, threatened, hit, undermined, or repeatedly disrupted.

Then imagine being told:

Use a restorative approach.

If what you hear is:

You are on your own. The student will not experience any meaningful accountability. Please repair the relationship yourself.

restorative practice has already failed.

Not because relationships are unimportant.

Because the adult has learned something about the organization:

Your safety and dignity are secondary to our desire to avoid punitive discipline.

That is not restorative.

Restoration has to include the people who were harmed.

Canadian restorative justice guidance outside the school context is explicit that restorative processes are voluntary, must attend to those harmed, and require responsibility from the person who caused harm. (Alberta.ca)

Those principles matter in education, too.

Restoration should never require a harmed person to perform forgiveness.

It should never mean forced reconciliation.

It should never make safety negotiable.

And it should never place the burden of repairing harm primarily on the person who experienced it.

Canadian Research Gives Us a Useful Warning

A particularly relevant Canadian study comes from Michael Adorjan and Mohana Mukherjee at the University of Calgary and Rosemary Ricciardelli at Memorial University.

Their 2024 study examined Canadian educators' experiences and perceptions of using restorative practices to address digitally mediated harm such as cyberbullying and sexting.

Educators who had implemented restorative approaches were largely positive about their potential to resolve online conflict and restore classroom relationships. They emphasized meaningful behavioural change and the possibilities that arise when people come together face-to-face.

But some also questioned whether restorative approaches were appropriate for more serious forms of online harm, and the researchers emphasize that local school context and broader systemic conditions affect implementation. (Taylor & Francis Online)

I like the caution here.

The restorative question is not:

Can we use restoration for everything?

It is:

When is restoration appropriate, for whom, under what conditions, with what safeguards, and alongside what other responses?

That is a leadership judgement.

High Standards and High Support

This may be the simplest framework in the entire discussion.

High standards without support can become punitive.

You broke the rule.

Here is the consequence.

Figure it out.

High support without standards can become rescuing.

We understand why you did it.

You were struggling.

Let's move on.

Neither necessarily develops responsibility.

Restorative leadership tries to hold both:

What happened was not acceptable.

and

You remain capable of learning, repairing, and participating responsibly in this community.

Those two sentences can live together.

I think they often need to.

Because one without the other gives us either control or avoidance.

Together, they create the possibility of development.

Accountability Should Face Outward, Not Only Upward

Traditional discipline often positions accountability vertically.

The student answers to the teacher.

The teacher answers to the principal.

The principal answers to the superintendent.

The employee answers to the supervisor.

But harm often travels horizontally.

I embarrassed a colleague.

I frightened another student.

I undermined a team's trust.

I left someone else to clean up my mistake.

I damaged a relationship.

I made somebody's work harder.

Restorative practice asks us to look sideways:

Who else experienced the consequence of what happened?

That is an important leadership lesson.

Because compliance with authority and responsibility to the community are not the same thing.

A person can satisfy the boss without ever fully confronting the impact of their actions on others.

Restorative Leadership Cannot Be Reserved for Students

This is where I think the argument becomes bigger than discipline.

Schools sometimes adopt highly relational approaches for children while maintaining remarkably punitive cultures for adults.

A teacher makes a mistake.

Blame.

A staff conflict emerges.

Avoidance.

Someone disagrees with leadership.

Defensiveness.

An initiative fails.

Find who was responsible.

Trust breaks down.

Never discuss it again.

Then we walk into classrooms and ask students to engage in dialogue, reflection, repair, and reintegration.

The contradiction is obvious.

Canadian research published in the Alberta Journal of Educational Research examined a four-year school journey toward a restorative culture through the lens of relational leadership. Although that study predates the current 2024–2026 window, its leadership finding remains highly relevant: sustaining restorative culture required leaders to create the spaces, processes, language, attitudes, and questions that allowed dialogue and relationships to develop. (Journal Hosting)

Current leadership research is arriving at much the same place.

Restoration is not something leadership administers.

It is something leadership has to model.

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

Change the Questions After Something Goes Wrong

The next time a meaningful mistake, conflict, or harm occurs, do not abandon the questions about rules, policy, safety, or consequences.

Add another layer.

Ask what happened before deciding what the story is.

Ask who has been affected—including people who may not be immediately visible.

Ask what each person needs in order for the harm to be addressed.

Ask what responsibility belongs to the person who caused the harm.

Ask what can realistically be repaired and what cannot.

Ask what needs to change so the same conditions do not simply reproduce the same outcome.

Then ask one question that traditional disciplinary processes often leave unanswered:

What would responsible re-entry look like?

Not forgetting.

Not pretending.

Not restoring the relationship to exactly what it was.

But determining what needs to become true for someone to move forward as a responsible member of the community.

That is a very different understanding of accountability.

Re-Entry May Be the Missing Leadership Practice

Schools know how to remove people.

We are often less skilled at bringing them back.

A student returns from suspension.

An employee returns after conflict.

A leader apologizes after a significant mistake.

A team resumes work after trust has been broken.

Now what?

If nothing has changed except the calendar, the underlying problem may still be waiting.

Restorative practice reminds us that accountability has a future tense.

Not simply:

What happened to you because of what you did?

But:

What will be different because we dealt with what happened?

That is where learning enters.

The Hazard of Dilution

There is a pattern in the implementation literature that leaders should take seriously.

Restorative practices can become diluted.

The language survives while the deeper commitments disappear.

Circle becomes meeting in a circle.

Restoration becomes have a conversation.

Accountability becomes say sorry.

Relationship becomes be nice.

Student voice becomes everyone gets to speak.

And eventually educators conclude:

This doesn't work.

Sometimes that conclusion may be correct for a particular intervention or context.

But sometimes the organization never implemented the thing it believed it was evaluating.

The 2025 mixed-methods research showing uneven teacher use, student skepticism about some effects, and strong variation by leadership and local discipline systems should make us cautious about treating "restorative school" as a binary category. (Sage Journals)

Implementation quality is part of the intervention.

Restoration Is Not the Opposite of Consequence

I think this is the misconception I most want the blog to unsettle.

The choice is not necessarily:

Punishment or restoration.

For serious incidents, safety actions, formal consequences, or temporary removal may be necessary.

The more useful question is:

What does the consequence accomplish—and what remains unfinished afterward?

A consequence can establish a boundary.

Restoration can address the human aftermath.

A consequence can protect others.

Restoration can build understanding.

A consequence can communicate seriousness.

Restoration can create responsibility for repair.

Sometimes both are required.

The leadership challenge is to avoid confusing consequence with accountability and compassion with permission.

A Final Provocation

What if the hardest form of accountability is not accepting a punishment, but staying present long enough to understand what your actions did to other people—and taking responsibility for what happens next?

That is not soft.

It asks a great deal.

It asks people to hear things they may not want to hear.

To recognize impact that was not intended.

To remain connected to people they may have hurt.

To repair what they can.

To accept that some things cannot be fully repaired.

To demonstrate change rather than simply promise it.

And it asks leaders to do something difficult, too.

Hold the boundary without abandoning the person.

Protect the community without making exclusion the only available response.

Support the person harmed without forcing reconciliation.

Create accountability without humiliation.

And build enough relational trust before the conflict that there is actually something worth restoring afterward.

Perhaps that is what education can teach leadership more broadly.

We will make mistakes.

We will hurt one another.

Conflict will occur.

Policies will be violated.

Trust will sometimes break.

The measure of a healthy organization cannot be that none of those things ever happen.

It may be what the community knows how to do after they do.

Punishment asks what happens to the person who caused the harm.

Restorative leadership also asks what needs to happen to the harm.

That may be the harder kind of accountability.

Reflective Questions

Where in your school or organization have consequence and accountability become interchangeable?

When harm occurs, whose experience does the existing process centre?

Are your restorative practices primarily reactive, or are relationships deliberately being built before conflict occurs?

Do staff understand that restorative practice includes high standards as well as high support?

Can teachers trust that leaders will protect safety and uphold boundaries while still pursuing restoration?

What happens when a student—or an adult—returns after a significant conflict?

Are people ever implicitly pressured to forgive, reconcile, or participate before they are ready?

How restorative are the leadership practices used with adults?

And perhaps the question worth carrying forward:

After accountability has been assigned, what still needs to be repaired?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Adorjan, M., Ricciardelli, R., & Mukherjee, M. (2024). Responding to cyber risk with restorative practices: Perceptions and experiences of Canadian educators. British Journal of Educational Studies, 72(2), 155–175. DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2023.2247475. (Taylor & Francis Online)

Alonso-Rodríguez, I., Pérez-Jorge, D., Pérez-Pérez, I., & Olmos-Raya, E. (2025). Restorative practices in reducing school violence: A systematic review of positive impacts on emotional wellbeing. Frontiers in Education, 10, 1520137. DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1520137. (Frontiers)

Dhaliwal, T. K., Anderson, K., Graham, J., Richards, D., & Chiang, Y.-C. (2025). Becoming restorative: A mixed-methods analysis of educator and student perspectives of restorative practices implementation. Teachers College Record, 127(5), 3–39. DOI: 10.1177/01614681251359533. (Sage Journals)

Government of Alberta. (2026) Restorative practices. Ministry of Education and Childcare. https://www.alberta.ca/restorative-practices

Her, M., Uva, S., Delaney, M., Bracey, J., Russell, B., Lang, J., & Vanderploeg, J. J. (2026). Implementation of a school-based diversion initiative to advance restorative discipline: A mixed methods study of school implementation processes. Children and Youth Services Review, 184, 108905. DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2026.108905. (ScienceDirect)

Kho, A., Smith, S. L., Dhaliwal, T. K., Huerta, A. H., Torres, G., & Marsh, J. A. (2026). Building restorative school cultures: Insights from peer mediation programs in elementary and middle schools. Journal of Educational Change. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1007/s10833-026-09553-8. (Springer)

Lustick, H., Hakouz, A., Ward-Seidel, A., & Gaias, L. (2024). What makes restorative justice equitable? "It's a practice, not a program." Journal of Educational Administration, 62(4), 403–416. DOI: 10.1108/JEA-05-2023-0122. (vLex)

Moran, E., Sloan, S., Walsh, E., & Taylor, L. (2024). Exploring restorative practices: Teachers' experiences with early adolescents. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 6, 100323. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedro.2024.100323. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Moran, E., Walsh, E., & Sloan, S. (2025). Promoting a restorative culture in schools: Insights from school leaders. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 8, 100397. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedro.2024.100397. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Webb, O. (2021). Enacting relational leadership through restorative practices. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 67(2). DOI: 10.55016/ojs/ajer.v67i2.68603. (Journal Hosting)