Series · Teachers Media
Manage That Class With Sue Cowley
Sue Cowley's series on classroom management draws on her decades of experience as a teacher, trainer and writer. Her practical, no-nonsense approach — informed by extensive supply teaching in challenging schools — has made her one of the most-read voices on behaviour in UK teaching.
About this series
Sue Cowley has been writing about behaviour and classroom management since the late 1990s, most influentially through her Getting the Buggers to Behave series. Her work is unusual in the behaviour-writing genre for being explicitly rooted in the reality of the day-to-day classroom rather than in ideological positions about how schools should operate.
The Cowley approach tends to emphasise: the primacy of relationships (pupils will accept firm boundaries from someone they know cares about them); specific, learnable techniques rather than personality traits (behaviour management is a set of skills, not a gift); and pragmatism about the messy reality of classroom life (perfect adherence to a school's behaviour policy is rarely possible; the question is what actually works with the pupils in front of you).
For teachers looking for entry points to classroom management, Cowley's materials — video, books, blog — are often more accessible than the more polemical writing in the field. They meet teachers where they are and offer specific things to try tomorrow, rather than arguing for a whole-school culture change.
Discussion prompts
- What specific technique for managing a class have you learned from a writer or trainer, and how much of your current practice was shaped by that source?
- Where does Cowley's pragmatic style land differently from more ideologically-charged behaviour writing? What are the strengths of each?
- How do supply teachers develop behaviour management skills, given they often lack the relational foundation regular class teachers rely on?
Try this in your school
- Read one Cowley blog post or watch one episode with a specific challenge in mind — a class, a pupil, a routine that isn't working. Try one thing.
- Compare Cowley's approach with one other behaviour writer you've encountered. What do they agree on? Where do they differ?
- If you're a mentor, use one Cowley resource as the basis for a mentor conversation about a specific behaviour challenge the mentee is facing.