One challenge of teaching today can include speaking to the plethora of education theory, research and policy over and above the curriculum. The challenge includes both how to meaningfully incorporate each project as well as communicate, explicitly, how you are doing so. As such, much can remain outside the everyday. What is needed is a praxis-a meeting of theory and action-in the everyday.

Restorative practices (RP) are this praxis. Facilitating a classroom that works WITH students, especially through the use of circles, creates and maintains the connection that is essential to learning. RP secures relationships that trigger brain growth and serve the emotional regulation that enhances learning. Here will be an introduction to restorative practices, but grounded in the theory and research found in Louis Cozolino’s The Social Neuroscience of Education, Patrick Carney's Well-Aware and Stuart Shanker’s Calm, Alert and Learning.

What will also result, is the realization of how RP-or how, for instance, teaching through circles-unearths current education theory, research, and policy.

“Experience without theory is blind,

theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”