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Nathan Sandberg
Dr. Dawn Montgomery
EDAD 677 - Advanced Colloquium
December 2016
EDAD 677 Final Project
As a classroom teacher, I have always come to enjoy all the wonders of the classroom. It
is very organic and no day is ever like the one before. Students come into each classroom
with a wide range of deficiencies and strengths. Each day it is up to us as educators to tap
into those strengths and support those deficiencies giving students the most equitable
education possible.
Coming into a new school is always exciting. This year it meant learning all new
systems, establishing all new relationships, and learning a job that I had no idea how or
where to start. See the classroom came easy to me, well at least I thought it did. I had my
struggles from time to time, but I knew what I had to do. Develop lesson plans, organize the
classroom, and make copies for the first day of classes. What I failed to recognize as a young
teacher 14 years ago, was that, even though those things matter, they come second at best to
forming the quality relationships with students. In my younger days, I lived and died by the
rule “They won’t care how much I knew until they knew how much I cared.” For some
reason, I said it all the time but I had many days that I didn’t live it. I put too much into
lesson plans and test writing than I did getting to know my students and forming those

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relationships. As the years progressed this shifted back to where I wanted to start.
So why do I mention this? Well this is very important for me. As I started this year
venturing into a new position in education as a vice principal, I knew that I had to keep
relationships at the forefront of how I approach things. Starting off this year my principal put
me in charge of the incentive committee. This was a great appointment for me because I am
a firm believer in PBIS and rewarding students for their positive behavior. I had a bit of a
learning curve as Ontario High School uses Safe and Civil Schools (SCS) as their PBIS
framework. I am not familiar with this framework as the background I have come from a
small group of people at my former high school just banding together to try to implement
PBIS in a school that has no positive incentives for students. This implementation was very
weak as I move forward learning about all of the umbrellas that encompass interventions.
The challenge we are facing is getting RTI out of the infant stage that it is currently in.
As we start this process we sat down and identified a number risk factors that could be
instructional barriers for our student body. The four main risk factors that we are targeting in
our data is attendance, behavior, ELA passing grade, and Math passing grade. Of these, Math
passing grade has the highest percentage of Tier III kids in that cohort. The lowest of the four
is attendance followed by behavior. I should jump for joy and people tell me that many high
schools would love to have attendance numbers like our, but I am unsatisfied by having over
2700 absences (counted by periods missed) in the month of November alone. This is down
from 3200 in the previous school year.
As my main charge at school is discipline and attendance, I am particularly focused on
these two risk factors. When looking at the data, I have been taking it to the next step to look
even further to see if there are any disparities with in attendance and behavior of our Tier III
students. The article “Eliminating Disparities in School Discipline” was the one article this

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semester that I utilized multiple times since reading. As our schools moves forward with the
RTI process I am concerned how staff will interpret these interventions and new policies to
be put in place. The article states, “The policies and actions of school leaders influence the
school climate, how staff interacts with students, and classroom management practices of
teachers.” (Nishioka, 2013) It takes a strong leader to get staff to see that their connections
with students are key to their success.
As I spend time trying to get a pulse on the culture of the new school that I am in, I
tend to see some of these disparities present within the daily work of the school. Our high
school is 60% Hispanic and many of these students come from wage working families or
families that live-in Section 8 housing. We have several Hispanic students who are always
sent to the Office of Student Conduct for disciplinary reasons. All four of these students have
had a history of disciplinary issues since elementary school.
These low-income students have come to school with less maturity than their
counterparts. (Farkas, 2003) They have also shown that they have put forth less effort in their
school work which is why as freshman they are already in an alternative setting. Much of the
infractions that are put forth by teachers are due to defiant type behavior. These students tend
to not do work that is assigned by their teachers. Many times, they sit there and do nothing
during the class period. Under our progressive discipline system, even silent defiance is still
defiance. At times, I reflect on this and wonder if them sitting there is defiance, or a lack of
skills to move forward in their learning. As part of the SCS Behavior Management Rationale,
“Students should be taught the skills and behaviors necessary for success.” When I sit with
students that get sent down for issues like this I speak with them about asking their teacher
for help and how to ask for help. Many throw their hands up and say “I don’t get it!”
Many students have come through my office have left to go home for suspension within

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our progressive discipline system. Upon their return, we always have a meeting with the
student and their parent and sign a behavior contract. It is these types of suspensions that
have me thinking about moving forward with a restorative justice approach as well as
implementing more home visits for students and parents who may feel disenfranchised in our
current school setting. In the article “Teaching Restorative Practices with Classroom Circles”
it states that school discipline for the most part has taken its cue from the prison system. I
agree with this statement. I have sent many students home wondering if there was another
way that we could give these kids the social and emotional learning that they need to be
successful in school.
The more I reflect on this topic the more I want to explore restorative justice as a practice
for these repeat offenders. For safety reasons, I cannot have students who fight on campus
not leave without a suspension, but upon their return I believe that restorative justice could be
the key to help these students be successful in the classroom and later in life. The problem? I
have no idea where to start. All the readings on this topic were very intriguing, but I am very
much a visual learner. As I move forward with exploring this implementation, I will seek out
schools who are successful with implementing restorative justice to try to plug myself in and
get to witness this process first hand. I will also seek out curriculum that is focused on
restorative justice and work with staff on campus to design a process that works for our
school. I do not want to just see a process in place at another school and try to duplicate that
same process for our school. I want to be thoughtful on how it is packaged and delivered.
The document “Teaching Restorative Practices with Classroom Circles” provides some great
resources for me to start but these were developed for a different school with a different
culture. My hope is that through a process like this, equity and the disparities that I am
seeing in school discipline will tip back into balance.

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In conclusion, this class has really stretched me as a leader. There were a few times
during this course and from issues in my daily job that I was getting the feeling that I was not
cut out to be a leader. I had a few days where I felt like I needed to quit my job and move
back to the classroom. My principal was not giving me feedback and I couldn’t find a
foothold in anything that I did. I lacked the nerve to just sit down with my principal and get
some guidance. I made some calls to some of my former principals to seek some guidance
and all of them said that I needed to have a conversation with my principal. So I did. I am
glad I did because the guidance and feedback that she gave me really put me back on track.
It was the internal feelings that were eating me up and causing me to ridicule my
performance as a leader. Turns out I am my own worst critic. I still have my learning days. I
don’t think those will stop anytime soon and nor should they.

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References
1. Nishioka, Vicki. "Eliminating Disparities in School Discipline." Principal Leadership 13.8
(2013): 46.
2. Farkas, George. "Racial disparities and discrimination in education: What do we know,
how do we know it, and what do we need to know?." Teachers College Record 105.6
(2003): 1119-1146.
3. "Restorative Justice What It Is and Is Not." Rethinking Schools 29.1 (2014)
4. Teaching Restorative Practices with Classroom Circles