Without paying much attention to it I got restoration up to 50 then decided to try to work it up higher by focussing on it. I told Aela to wait outside then I went in a fortress and let some novice necromancers cast at me while I kept ward up. That seemed extremely slow compared to other schools of magic, so I dropped the ward and just healed myself. Still very very slow. I also tried using equilibrium plus healing and that didnt seem so good either. Is restoration supposed to go slower or am I doing something wrong?

It's just really slow. I think the only ways to level it is to go to High Hrothgar before you meet Paarthurnax, or go underwater and keep healing, or as you said equilibrium and healing. There is no practical way to level it up on the field. You have to grind it.

It levels slow. The only time I've seen it go up quickly is while fighting fire breathing dragons as a vampire. Every breath attack can one shot me and I have to spam the [censored] out if dual casted fast heals. This does not make an efficient grind lol

With restoration experience is gained based on the amount of HP that is healed or the amount of damage that is deflected not the amount of times or duration that it is used. So yeah, it can be slow if you pay too much attention to it. For mage classes especially it can take ages as they usually don't have all that much HP to work with.

It's faster than some other skills, like Destruction. Even spending 90% of my mage's time blasting Destruction spells, he ends up with Alteration, Illusion and Conjuration higher than Destruction. Could definitely use some tweaking. But there's always training, as long as you're willing to put up with little miss "Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic! Right?! Right??!!"

The Circle of Protection spell can also be used to grind Restoration. It's expert level, though, so you'll need a decent restoration skill to purchase it. I did find it once as random loot, so you could luck out that way.

I use to go to a dungeon and leave a single Draug alive in a room then spam Turn undead untill OOM, go wait in a corner for him to comeback.

I find that healing others seems to skill up faster than healing yourself