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Claire de Mezerville López 

Hello everybody and welcome to Restorative Works!, a podcast where learning, practice, and research open new paths for transformation. My name is Claire de Mezerville Lopez, and it is a joy to introduce our guest, a friend of the podcast, Dr. Doug Judge. Doug, welcome. How are you today?

Doug Judge, Ph.D

I'm doing great. Thank you. How are you?

Claire de Mezerville López

I'm so glad that we get to have this conversation and that we get to learn, not only from your experience, but also from your writing. Before getting started, I'm going to remind our audience about your experience. Dr. Doug Judge has more than 25 years of experience in education, administration, large-scale implementation in schools, social work, and youth services. His career has focused on addressing systemic inequities in influential public institutions. As a social worker in foster care and schools and as a juvenile probation officer, he was disturbed by the stratification and disproportionality he witnessed. He served as a special education teacher in a variety of public and institutional school settings and as a school administrator at a large public alternative high school in Seattle, focused on providing restorative and healing-centered wraparound supports. As a director of social and emotional learning for Highline Public Schools, Doug led the district-wide implementation of restorative practices, positive behavior supports, and social emotional learning. Doug also offered coaching in schools and districts across Washington state with the Center for High School Success. And he taught research methods courses for doctoral students at Antioch University. Doug's research interests include international comparative approaches to inclusive and restorative practices, multi-tiered restorative practices in schools across the prevention continuum, positive behavior supports, school mental health, trauma and resilience, anti-racist SEL and leadership, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline. Doug earned his Master of Arts in Teaching at Western Washington University. He also earned his BA in social welfare, his principal and program administrator certificate, and his PhD in special education at the University of Washington. And Doug, welcome back to the podcast. Let me start with this, because I want to start with a hard one. Change is structural. We know that. But change is also cultural. It's also emotional. Would you please explain that to us so we can understand the different dimensions of walking collectively through change.

Doug Judge, Ph.D.

Sure, I'd be happy to. First, just thank you for inviting me. It's a real honor to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast and I'm thrilled to share a little bit more about some of our insights. I think for this one, I wanted to start with; it's such an excellent question. Change is structural, but it's also cultural, emotional. This one, I kind of, I want to share a personal story because, like most things in life, I think I learned the most when I'm disturbed by something. And for this one, I kind of came into change management thinking I had it figured out and of course realizing I was wrong and then learning a lot from the process. And so, in this case, I came into my doc program after, you know, after working in juvenile justice and special ed and teaching in big schools and small schools and prison schools and alternative schools and public schools. So, I had a lot of exposure to a lot of structures. And at that time, I was just overwhelmed by the lack of what I was viewing as really effective model programs for youth. And particularly with my background orientation was, you know, these are like middle and high schoolers who've been kind of ill supported by existing schools and structures. And so having, you know, begun in the juvenile justice system, I was really close to kids who were not... the schools were not designed to help them thrive. And they were kind of pushed out early. And then finding my way upstream, you know, metaphorically as a special ed teacher, I kind of sought to get into those institutions and find what was working, replicate it. And I was just really disheartened by what I saw at the time as a lack of evidence. What I was seeing as evidence based practices. I was seeing a lot of the kind of pedagogy that I received, you know, many years earlier as a learner in the you know, the kind of worksheet driven teaching detached from kids lived experiences that really bothered me. And so I went into my PhD and thought, gosh, if teachers just knew what evidence-based practices were, then things would get better.

And so, I chose to pursue that as the next step in my career and just quickly learned, thankfully, as a part of the doc program there at the University of Washington, was invited into a two-year cohort led by my mentor, Dr. Carol Davis at the University of Washington College of Ed. And it was really, it was all about implementation science. It was a real eye-opener for me. Implementation science is this field of study, although informally it's been around for generations, formally, it was established about, approximately, 20 years ago. And the whole goal is to examine this gap between theory and practice. So, we know what works, we know what evidence-based instructional strategies are, but we just can't seem to make it happen in the real world, the messy world where I live and work. And so that was implementation science. What I learned there was one of my favorite concepts from implementation science. This is from Laura Danschroeder. She was one of the lead developers of one of many implementation science frameworks called the CFIR, it's the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. And it's one of the most widely cited and used frameworks. But her thing that I love is that knowing what works is never enough, you know, effective change implementation mandates that we focus on what works where and under what conditions. And so, this kind of strategic attendance towards these conditions, you know, moving from a passive approach to, you know, implementation, kind of what we describe as like letting it happen to more of an active approach implementation. Making it happen is kind of what moved me out of just, guys, if people just knew, you know, how to make secondary history lessons exciting or secondary reading instruction helpful, they would do better, but now I just have a lot more context and humility around how hard it is to make things happen. So, the cultural and emotional dimensions, therefore, are central. So that's the idea of moving what we might, if you were just looking at it from, "people just knew how to do better, they would". Things like feelings and relationships feel pretty peripheral to that. It's just about knowledge.

But when you actually center this idea, it's about understanding what works where and under what conditions people's attitudes towards change, their feelings about a change initiative, for example, are now central because they could, you know, we call these determinants. These are the things that can either make something thrive or make something kind of fizzle. So, implementation science and change implementation, gives us some of the language and tools to describe these phenomena so we can be more strategic in our planning. The risk, and I'll end here, is just that if we don't attend to these predictable speed bumps for change of augmentation, we really risk reinforcing what we call initiative fatigue. The latest thing is coming and no one really knows why it's happening, what it's happening, and predictably most of those initiatives flounder over time. When that happens, it reinforces the status quo. People who've experienced that often say things like, yeah, I tried that, it didn't work, and I'm going back to the way I did things before. So I think those are a couple of thoughts on kind of centering those determinants.

Claire de Mezerville López 

The implementation change is so important, but I can also imagine that it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of intention, it takes a lot of knowledge and method, but also a lot of patience and love, I imagine, because it's very long term and you need to be rooted on wanting to do this and seeing its importance. How do you think that restorative practices could help?

Doug Judge, Ph.D.

I have found that restorative practices is both: it's a helpful set up again, like implementation science tools; restorative practices has its own discourse language tools, ethos mindset that I find really helpful in managing change effectively. I wanna highlight three for you. The first is, you know, kind of building what I was saying a little bit earlier, I think the process of change is something that can either really bring people in or it can really push people away. And so we know, in restorative practices, we have a concept called fair process. And this is, you know, it's a restorative way of making decisions and disseminating the information about decisions. We describe the three E's of fair process. The first is engagement. The idea is that all the voices of everybody who's gonna be impacted by a decision should be a part of making the decision. The second E is explanation. And this is explanation where, after a decision is made, the reasoning, the context, the criteria are clearly shared for everybody. And the third E is expectation clarity. And so that everyone who's affected understands specific expectations and standards and consequences tied to the decision. So, fair process is a really powerful kind of leadership tool, but it's also just, you know, it's about making the implicit explicit. So creating agency amongst stakeholders, the decisions don't just happen to you, but you're a part of them. Within change management, I think specifically one of the most powerful determinants for whether an initiative is gonna work or not is in the pre-planning phase; is getting our heads around urgency for change and readiness for change. If people are maxed out and it's, I think of the academic year, if it's April, May, and everybody involved in school in the US, most schools are out in June and launching a new initiative in April. It's just kind of bad timing because people are kind of tapped out.

But I think that metaphor for readiness, in terms of time of the year also applies to a new approach to student discipline or a new approach to having students involved in, you know, substantive decision making around school culture, climate, that if the adults involved and the students involved aren't intentionally prepared or, you know, the change agents aren't keenly aware of, are people excited by this? Are they curious about it? These are all conditions that can really make something either contribute to initiative fatigue and kind of flop, or they can make it something that really grows some legs and sustains itself. So that's the first one, is fair process. I think it can really help in that. The second resource from restorative practices that I think is helpful in change management is our approach to this idea of a continuum of restorative supports. And so we promote at the IIRP that we're investing in what we call it the 80-20 rule. Promoting, you know, it's like that basic kind of proactive multi-tiered model, but we're investing most of our energies, 80 % of our energies into the preventative restorative work. And so here we're talking about community building, relationship development, you know, normalizing conflict amongst humans as part of being a human being, as we get in conflict in the workplace sometimes, and kind of, you know, integrating affective statements, emotional intelligence training and supports for adults, these are all things that if we do more of these, we'll need less of the responsive restorative approaches for reparation of harm and stuff like that. That's the second one. I really feel like if we're, when we're thinking about change initiatives, we're thinking as a continuum of supports with a heavy emphasis on the proactive. That's the second one. And the third way that restorative practices can help with this process. And this is something that I highlighted in a recently published book, Restorative Practices in Education, Research and Applications was a chapter where we focused on approaching community voice in a restorative and strengths-based way.

And so, there's a restorative way for us to engage with stakeholders and acknowledging, know, historical patterns, really centering the expertise of schools. This takes the form of really centering the expertise of families and culture and local communities and kids and students in a way that is not loaded with kind of there is a tendency in schooling sometimes to have a deficit ideology kind of predominate that schools are there to fix parents and fix kids that are broken and that is just fraught with fraught with deficit language. And I really lean into Ann M. Ishimaru, her concept of Equitable Family Collaboration. And of course, Luis Moll's concept of Funds of Knowledge are really central ideas that kind of disrupt that deficit approach to working with families and really centering change efforts in communities.

Claire de Mezerville López 

Doug, this is so important, and I would like our audience to know that we have all the information about Doug's new book on this episode's description. Please go and check it out. We're going to take a short break and then we're going to continue this interview with Doug Judge. Please stay tuned.

Welcome back to Restorative Works. Doug, will you please share with us one or two stories of how you have witnessed these processes and what can we learn in the face of new challenges coming our way?

Doug Judge, Ph.D.

Sure, Claire, thank you. Recently in early 2026, I wrote a presidential paper for IIRP and it is loaded with stories. It's a paper that I sought to build upon existing literature in helping schools in particular identify factors that are strongly predictive of the sustained implementation of restorative practices in schools. Currently, there are some models and templates out there from small-scale research, but there aren't yet strong, well-validated, psychometrically validated tools for these predictive factors, a sustainable limitation. I gathered experts from across the US, folks who are change-implementation leaders and researchers, school district leaders, school leaders, trainers, coaches, et cetera, to get a sense of their prioritization of factors. And then I kind of aligned them and compared them to a few other studies that looked at the same phenomenon. And produced a set of 10. And I'm just gonna kind of highlight a couple here. The first is focusing on adult climate and culture first. I have both in my practical background, like directing this work with a large school district or a school, the concept of living restoratively is something that teachers do well when they've seen it and they've experienced it from other adults who supervise them, train them, evaluate them. And then they come to realize the experience of a restorative space. And then when they're translating those experiences to their own classroom or their own team or an IEP meeting, a math lesson, a home visit, et cetera, you've felt it. It feels like to be in a restorative space.

And so it just feels really different when adults first learn about restorative practices and they receive trainings and they practice it, but then they also see people of positional authority within organizations actually living restoratively and being restorative in their actions with others so that when it then comes time to translate that into your sphere of influence, it feels more authentic. I have felt myself working closely with a lot of teenagers who were kind of ill treated again by systems and adults, and they can smell out inauthenticity pretty easily. It's pretty immediate when they feel like adults are kind faking something or just doing something in a perfunctory way. So that's kind of one set of stories I have myself personally, so many examples of things happening to adults that they didn't necessarily want to do or buy into or see the deep meaning in. And they just kind of ended up kind of passing along to students. One other one I'll kind of highlight is just stories around building capacity within, this is like one of our factors, is building capacity and ownership for, within organizations. And by this, I mean the folks that are often tasked with leading restorative work in schools, it can be very isolating work. You might be the only person in the school district leading the work, or you might be the only teacher in a school who's tasked with bringing restorative justice or restorative practices to an entire school.

We've just learned that, and I myself had a team like this, and we quickly learned that these folks, the simple nature of isolation can make it feel like it's not a priority, but just creating a community of folks across, like a network of professional community of support, a professional learning community, where people can meet regularly, predictably, have kind of shared repositories for, you know, training slides and core readings, develop a common language so that when people go to their spaces where they're the person that has supposedly kind of the carrying the yoke of like making this happen, that they don't feel like they're on their own anymore. So those are just two stories I'll highlight. I know they're pretty high level stories, but there are other factors in the paper that we noticed as pretty strong trends across both our own data set, but also across relevant literature.

Claire de Mezerville López

But I relate to those two stories so much. I remember during the pandemic when we were talking about "how do we use restorative practices in this situation?". And the teachers would tell me, "But who's doing them with us?" We're also needing to start with the adults. And also I remember in this public high school here in Costa Rica, just the small team of counselors and some students that they feel like they support one another. It wasn't just one person.

Claire de Mezerville López

So, it resonates with me so much. Doug, as we get close to wrapping up this episode and this important conversation, as you know, some changes don't come, but we actually want to make them happen. And as a restorative scholar and as a practitioner, what would be a final advice? What would you suggest for us, change advocates, so we can navigate restorative works and making change happen?

Doug Judge, Ph.D.

Yeah. Well, I have a couple of things. One is I think that, you know, that concept of  understanding what works where and under what conditions. I think learning from what's taking a strengths based approach to your own context, asking yourself institutionally as a team or department or even an entire school or district community like, what has worked here before? Like what initiatives really have stuck around for years? They've become a part of the culture, how we talk about ourselves to others. And really learning from that: why did this previous initiative really stick around and how was it rolled out? How did we build buy-in? How are we retraining people constantly? I know in schools, the August back to school professional development is like this really sacred time. You don't get much of it. It's very expensive. And what school and district leaders choose to do with their very limited amount of training time before the kind of craziness of the school year hits is really reflective of their values. And so I just like, what's on that? It's a two day training agenda. What's on it? That's like, you know, a budget is a moral document. Your training calendar is also a moral document; it reveals your values and commitments. And so I would just like to look at that and ask, what are the things that are always on there? Why are we all talking about like, you know, like positive supports is a great example. It's the most broadly implemented evidence-based practice in US education in more than 20,000 schools across the country. Like there's something there that has staying power. What is it about it? Is it the rollout? Is it the assessment? Is it observability? Is it multi-tier? You know, like what's the thing? So I think that's one thing. And I think similarly on the opposite side of that coin is, I think, attending to friction. If there's constant friction in your climate, you we've know, got Jeff Duncan-Andrade as a scholar, who I really respect, but he has this phrase, you know, the meaning is in the mess. And so, if there's like pushback that's consistent, much like the success stories, the bright spot analysis, what are some hotspots that we need to really lean into, organizationally to kind of make sense of?

The second one, and I'll end here is just, I think, really centering your equity goals. In the presidential paper, I kind of highlight three starting points that this really beautiful 2021 article by Bauman and Long, they really give these awesome recommendations. One is engaging directly with historically underserved community members. And this is about really being honest, a kind of a reckoning with patterns. If there's a group of students, a group of families, a group of students receiving certain services who've kind of been ill supported by a certain school district or your organization over time, like really engaging directly with those folks. The second one is implementing and measuring interventions with the greatest long-term benefits. This is a big one. There is a lot we can do in schools, a lot we can choose to focus on restoratively. And we make those powerful decisions about what to do and what not to do often in pretty small groups, pretty isolated groups, where once students leave high school, their parents are our students first and forever teachers. And when they leave high school, they're still rooted in the community, they're rooted in the family. And so really think like having families have a voice and students have a voice and a say in which of those things we choose to emphasize and de-emphasize over time. And then lastly, think identifying strategies that emphasize improving these conditions and structures through policy reform, rather than focusing on student responses to inequitable systems. And this is like this beautiful way of saying, you know, we should be the thermostat and not a thermometer. This concept of, you know, students respond, adults respond, we all respond to the learning that's available to us. That's true in all settings. And I just think like, us owning that ecosystem and like really leaning into creating the policies that are addressing the equity outcomes that brought us to restorative practices in the first place?

Claire de Mezerville López 

What I love about what you're describing is that it's not about following steps for a recipe, you know. It speaks to me about something that is living organic and larger and that it takes a lot of intention and a lot of collaboration. Doug, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Doug Judge, Ph.D.

My pleasure, Claire. Thank you so much for having me.

Claire de Mezerville López

And thank you all for tuning in to Restorative Works. To learn more about our guests, log on to IIRP.edu and let's continue to build transformation through dignifying relationships, kind conversations, and stronger communities. Until our next episode.