How the Lived Experiences of Novice Teachers Relate to Their Use of Restorative Practices in Creating a Culture of Learning

The first years of teaching can be often some of the most stressful in an educator’s career. “Reality shock” is a phase new teachers go through when they transition from learning to being responsible for teaching in their own classrooms (Dicke et al., 2015). It often results in a “collapse of ideals or expectations developed during teacher education, following a teacher’s first confrontation with classroom reality” (Dicke et al., 2015, p.1). For some teachers, this may lead to despair and burnout. The ability to create positive relationships with students is a fundamental skill that is essential to support student learning, confidence, and self-worth (Reimer, 2018). Yet teacher preparation programs seem to lack instruction in this crucial pedagogical skill. Hollweck et al. (2019) found “few teacher preparation programs provide teachers with explicit guidance on how to build relationships especially with students whose life experiences may be quite different from the teacher’s own” (p. 249). Such relationships can be essential to student learning through creating a positive learning environment. This narrative study was conducted with the purpose of exploring and elevating novice teachers’ lived experiences as related to their use of restorative practices in creating a culture of learning. Through in-depth, open-ended interviews, four participants shared experiences from their first years of teaching related to the use of restorative practices as a method of creating a culture of learning. The knowledge gained in this study gives voice to each participant’s experiences and will contribute to a limited body of research on the topic.