It’s Friday afternoon, and as you watch the last students file onto the bus, your mind races. There’s talk of an off-campus fight involving several of your students—a conflict that began long before you met them, but now intrudes on your classroom, your lessons, and even your sense of safety in certain moments.

You’ve tried facilitating talking circles and mediations, but the students aren’t interested. They trust you, but not each other. Plus, their past experience with discipline responses make them equate accountability with punishment, forgiveness with weakness. You can understand why they’re hesitant to trust adults to help them resolve the conflict they’re in. Heading to your car, you can’t help but wonder: “Does it have to be like this? Is there another way?”

This vignette represents the tension that educators often navigate when trying to support students through conflict and/or harm-repair. Often viewed as endpoint destinations, accountability and forgiveness can feel like faraway ideals. When framed as skillsets, however, they can offer relational practices that students will use for the rest of their lives.

The costs of punishment

Conflict and harm in schools aren’t just inconvenient. They strain relationships, undermine learning, and erode safety and belonging. When incidents occur, traditional responses often default to exclusion—detentions, suspensions, expulsions, and even arrests.

Research shows, however, that punitive responses often cause more harm than they do good. For example, research suggests that students who attend schools with higher suspension rates are 15–20 percent more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults and are also less likely to attend a four-year college, with male pupils and students of color being most affected.

These outcomes persist, in large part, because punitive policies and practices prioritize rules and punishment, and do not offer access to relational care or addressing root causes of behavior. As a result, accountability and forgiveness can often look and feel like superficial apologies and forced reconciliation. Accountability often feels synonymous with guilt, shame, and exclusion.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is an alternative: a restorative lens that approaches accountability and forgiveness as relational skills—ones everyone can learn, practice, and deepen together.

A restorative approach

Restorative practices are rooted in Indigenous philosophies and have been adopted by schools worldwide. Their central belief? We are all interconnected. Harm doesn’t just break a rule—it disturbs the social fabric and the well-being of a whole community. Thus the restorative responses aim for healing instead of punishment.

Traditional disciplinary systems view incidents of harm as acts of individual moral failing. A student makes a mistake, and the response is often to shame them and remove them from the group, isolating both the “offender” and those affected by the incident. But by sidelining relationships and focusing on punishment, these systems do little to teach, heal, or promote belonging.

Restorative practices take a different path, asking: What circumstances or unmet needs —internal and external—contributed to this incident? Through this lens of harm, the process shifts from “Who’s at fault?” to “What does healing look like here?” The goal isn’t just to move past the incident, but to attend to every person’s humanity, dignity, and need to heal.

Accountability as daily practice

We often imagine accountability as a one-time act—a confession, an apology, or a consequence. But restorative practices view accountability as a lifelong relational skill. Like any skill, it can be nurtured and developed through intentional practice. Accountability shifts from being an admission of guilt to an opportunity to make right: with self, with others, and with community.

What does meaningful accountability look like? It’s a lifelong practice that is built through everyday reflection and repetition, gradually shaping how we act and relate to others. Accountability is centered on connection, not coercion.

As a skillset, accountability includes:

• Honest Self-awareness: Recognizing my actions and their impacts without defining myself by my mistakes.
• Accepting harm: Acknowledging what happened and how it affected others, moving toward empathy and responsibility.
• Identifying patterns and root causes: Understanding personal and systemic factors to make meaningful change.
• Unlearning old behaviors: Noticing harmful triggers and building healthier responses.
• Learning new behaviors: Practicing and reinforcing positive actions, supported by relationships and community.

How accountability fuels forgiveness

Forgiveness is often misunderstood in restorative practices. It’s not a condition of being restorative—and certainly not something that can be pressured or prescribed. Although not a requirement of restorative practices, forgiveness can be a potential outcome of genuine accountability: empathy, growth, and changed behavior.

Restorative justice explores harm, not as isolated incidents, but the surfacing of unmet needs often stemming from trauma, interpersonal dynamics, and broader systemic inequities. As restorative justice practitioner Danielle Sered says, “No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.”

By painting a fuller picture of the conditions in which harm happens, we are often able to develop more empathy for people and situations, which sets the stage for meaningful accountability, dialogue, and repair. Research backs this up. Studies show that when students experience empathy in the aftermath of harm—rather than being shamed or “othered”—they are more likely to take responsibility, repair relationships, and avoid future conflict.

Further, restorative justice believes that, because of the inequitable design of our systems, we all cause harm. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big ways. Acknowledging this and building our own Self-awareness and accountability around this idea helps us build understanding that when harm occurs, the self is not the act.

When we can face the harm we’ve caused—without the shame—we can begin to reconnect with our own humanity. And once we can see ourselves with compassion, it becomes easier to truly see and care for others, even those that we’ve caused harm to. We are not the worst things that have happened to us–or that we have done–but we do have a responsibility to tend to the healing of both.

Cultivating accountability skills

In Barbara Coloroso’s discussion of discipline, she argues that punishment and discipline have been conflated—but in fact they mean very different things and have very different outcomes. Discipline, she says, is designed to do four things:


• Show a person what they’ve done without judgement;
• give them as must ownership of the incident or problem that they can handle;
• support them with options for problem-solving and repair; and
• most importantly, leave the dignity of the person intact.

What are some ways this looks like in practice? Consider these concrete steps:

1. Create safe, nonjudgmental spaces

• Ask, “What happened?” and not “Why did you do that?”
• Focus on listening—without interruption or judgment.

2. Reframe accountability and shame

• Shift language from “Who’s to blame?” to “What needs to change—in me, in us, in our school?”
• Normalize making mistakes and emphasize repair over punishment.

3. Address trauma and ownership separately

• Recognize that trauma can help explain actions but does not excuse harm.
• Offer support and guidance but hold space for responsibility.

4. Model honest self-reflection

• Educators and leaders can share times they’ve made mistakes and how they’ve tried to repair them.
• Students notice and emulate adult vulnerability and growth.

5. Practice community repair

• When conflict impacts a group, invite everyone to co-create solutions and agreements.
• For example: group agreements, joint service, or collaborative art marking repair.

6. Broaden the frame

• Ask what systems, conditions, or policies helped create the harm.
• Don’t place all responsibility on individuals; locate accountability in both people and structures.

7. Encourage repetition and small wins

• Treat each circle, check-in, or restorative dialogue as practice.
• Celebrate progress, and don’t expect perfection.

Accountability within a punitive system

Developing meaningful accountability skills is lifelong work that can often feel at-odds with immediate responses or urgent needs from people that have been affected by an incident of harm. As a non-prescriptive and often non-linear process, accountability looks different person to person, relationship to relationship, incident to incident. Trauma, certain belief systems, and lack of relational trust are all examples of barriers to meaningful accountability.

In all of these ways, restorative justice is not an easy fix. While accountability is a goal, healing for people impacted from harm cannot depend exclusively on it. It’s important to remember, as Dr. Fania Davis says, that multiple pathways to healing exist.

A broader challenge to meaningful accountability is the reality that most educators and students are forced to operate inside larger systems, beliefs, and practices that default to punishment. We may not be able to change policy overnight—but we can embody restorative ways of being in our everyday interactions, habits, and decisions. “Ways of being” refers to the overarching values, mindsets, and belief systems that inform one’s actions. At heart, restorative ways of being serve as a compass to guide leaders as they navigate the tension of operating restoratively inside punitive systems.

Instead of searching for “the answer,” ask: “What steps can I try first?” and “How can I center everyone’s humanity as I move forward?” How we make decisions, despite challenging circumstances, can move us closer toward greater alignment with a future world we believe is possible.

Schools as communities of healing

Meaningful accountability isn’t just about fixing the past. It’s also about investing in a future where harm is less likely to occur—by strengthening relationships, networks, and systems of belonging. Mia Mingus, a transformative justice and disability advocate, invites us to ponder:

• What if accountability was hard, but not scary?
• What would it look like if accountability was relational, not connected to exclusion?
• What would forgiveness feel like to be offered authentically, not demanded?
• What if, when harm happened, our default was to gather—to listen, reflect, and repair as a community?

When we offer connection instead of isolation, accountability becomes less about punishment and more about growth. The more we nurture and deepen relationships—the more resources we have for healing when harm occurs. By working to embed these practices, we lay a foundation where everyone—students, educators, parents—can heal, belong, and thrive.