In the spring of Jasmine’s senior year, a conflict between two students in a third-period class got handled without a single adult leaving the room. Two members of the peer mediation team, students she had recruited and helped train, appeared at the classroom door, collected both students, walked them down the hall, ran the mediation, and sent them back to class. The teacher never stopped teaching. Most of the class never learned what the conversation was about. The remarkable thing about that afternoon was not that a conflict got resolved, because adults resolve student conflicts all day long in every school in the country. The remarkable thing was who got the practice.

That distinction sits underneath everything I have come to believe about this work. If we want students to gain fluency with accountability, responsibility, self-regulation, metacognition, active listening, and empathy, it is not enough for them to participate in the conversations that restorative practices produce. It is not even enough for them to attend a summer program where those tools get taught explicitly, which is exactly what Jasmine did. Participation is exposure. Instruction is exposure. Fluency comes from holding the practice, and holding it repeatedly, in circumstances that matter.

Consider the arithmetic in a well-run adult-led program. A dean of students or a restorative coordinator might run two hundred conflict conversations in a school year. By April, that person is genuinely skilled. They can read a room, slow a heated exchange, ask the question that unlocks the thing nobody has said out loud, and hold two people in a conversation neither of them wanted to have. That is real expertise, built the only way expertise gets built, through repetition under pressure. Now consider what the students in those two hundred conversations received. Each of them was mediated once, maybe twice. They experienced restoration. They did not build it. Being mediated teaches a student what repair feels like from the receiving end. Leading a mediation teaches a student how repair is constructed, which is a different kind of knowledge and a far more portable one.

So the school ends up with one adult who is exceptionally fluent in the tools, and a few hundred students who are not. The adult in question, it is worth saying plainly, usually arrived already possessing more of these tools than the students did. They were hired partly because they had them. Two hundred repetitions later, the gap between the adult and the students is wider than it was in September, and the school describes this arrangement as a restorative practices program.

This is why the word “student-led” has to mean something operationally rather than decoratively. It does not mean a student advisory group that meets monthly and offers input on the discipline handbook. It does not mean students reading a script while an assistant principal runs the actual conversation from the corner of the room. It means students schedule the circle, open it, hold the protocol, manage the silences, close it, and follow up afterward, with adults training them, supervising them, debriefing with them, and staying out of the middle of the conversation itself. The adult role shifts from practitioner to trainer of practitioners, which is a harder job and a less immediately satisfying one, because the person doing the training has to watch a sixteen-year-old handle a moment they could have handled more smoothly themselves.

There is a practical dividend that schools tend to discover only after they have made the shift. When the response to a conflict requires an adult, the response consumes instruction. A teacher stops teaching, or a student leaves for the office and waits for an administrator to become available, and the ripple runs through the building. When Jasmine and her classmates pulled students out of class, navigated the conflict, and sent them back, teachers were able to keep teaching while students kept learning. The mediators were learning too, at a higher rate than anyone else in the building, which means the school was manufacturing fluency in precisely the population that needed it most rather than in the one that needed it least.

None of this makes the shift easy, and I do not want to pretend the objections are frivolous. Handing the practice to students requires adults to be trained, supervised, and, in a real sense, displaced from work that many of them find meaningful. Confidentiality has to be thought through carefully, and so does the question of which conflicts belong to students at all. Situations involving serious violence, harm between an adult and a student, or a significant power imbalance between the parties are not student-led situations, and a school that pretends otherwise is not being ambitious, it is being careless. The field tends to fail in two opposite directions here. The first failure is refusing to hand over anything, keeping every conversation in adult hands, and calling the resulting program restorative because the vocabulary changed while the ownership did not. The second failure is more damaging: handing students the entire practice with a two-hour orientation and no supervision, watching it go badly, and then citing that outcome as evidence that students were not ready. The students were not the unready party in that scenario.

I am not opposed to adult-led restorative practices. Any movement away from retribution as the default increases the odds that students end up with the tools they deserve, and a school with a skilled dean running good conversations is materially better than a school with a suspension matrix and nothing else. But the aspiration cannot stop at students experiencing restoration. The aspiration is students who can generate it, in a dorm room at nineteen, in an apartment with a roommate at twenty-three, in a workplace, in a marriage, with their own children. That capacity is not conferred by having been on the receiving end of a well-run circle in tenth grade. It is built by having run forty of them.

Any school can audit this in an afternoon. Count the conflict conversations that happened last month, and write down who ran each one. Then look at the list of names. Whoever appears most often is the person in that building who is becoming most fluent at repairing human relationships. In the overwhelming majority of schools, that person came in already holding the tools, is compensated for being there, and will carry every bit of that accumulated fluency to whatever job they take next. The students, meanwhile, will graduate carrying only what they were permitted to practice. The arithmetic is simple: if you want students to have the tools, let them hold the practice.