This one!! I love seeing a teacher doing this. It's so important and you're in such a good position to teach messages like this. 3rd grade is a great age to learn this stuff, too.

I remember being a kid and being forced to apologize. It was always these situations where the adults didn't see what happened, and one kid told them a version of it. Then the adult decided it was just low level kid bullshit and was just like, "OK everyone apologize". These usually involved a cousin with severe behavioral issues. I will never forget having to apologize to her when she locked me in a room and flushed the key down the toilet, so I was stuck in this room until my uncle could come home, take the door off the hinges, and get me out 2 hours later. I was made to apologize because "clearly I did something that made her mad".

I was 10 and couldn't explain why it felt wrong, but it did. I was terrified, locked in a room in a strange house, my cousin taunting me outside the door, but "now, girls, apologize to each other and hug." was somehow the reaction?! I told my dad about this and he agreed with me but his sister, my cousin's mom, never listened to him about anything, so it didn't matter.

I'm a parent myself now, and when my kids were little, I told them that apologies are good, but only when we understand what we did and actually feel remorse over it, or even just as a courtesy like you step on someone's foot, "oh sorry about that!" Sure, that's good. But we've never done "everyone apologize to each other" in this house. If everyone is in the wrong, and sometimes they are, we talk about it until everyone understands how whatever it was got out of hand in the first place. Then they can decide if or when to apologize. Like your students, they often do apologize after realizing the full context and impact of whatever they did.