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Recent news on school safety and efforts to improve school climate underscores the importance of building positive student relationships and resolving conflict in our nation’s classrooms. Restorative practices are currently gaining credibility and popularity as a means to build classroom and peer relationships. Through a descriptive study, we explored how to model the restorative practice of community circles with teacher candidates to prepare them to use the approach with their future middle school students. We describe how a teacher educator engaged middle-level teacher candidates with community circles in an internship seminar for this purpose. This article illustrates the powerful effects restorative practices had on the teacher candidates’ peer relationships and the connections they made about teaching young adolescent students. We also provide a step-by-step guide for implementing this practice in middle level teacher education programs.

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To create an equitable and ethical learning environment in the classroom requires teacher candidates (TCs) to develop positive relationships with students and to reflect on who they are. Using the elements of Richard Milner’s (2007) Framework of Researcher Racial and Cultural Positionality, this article presents an account of an innovative practice in how to engage secondary education TCs in a reflection of implicit biases, and how to interrupt them to become more ethical professionals. This article takes InTASC 9: Professional Learning and Ethical Practice as a point of departure and describes how a new teacher mentor piloted a series of exercises for majority white TCs to embark on self-reflection in their internship experiences in the secondary education classroom. In particular, they examined their cultural identities and how they may have developed into implicit biases that influenced their classroom management, planning, and instruction during their full-time internships. The impact of this reflective process moved beyond the self-reflection of TCs’ ethical practices and shifted to an outward look at mentor and school-wide ethical practice. An overview of the pilot to address ethical practice is provided.