Practical advice for building behaviour skills: A Q&A with Sue Cowley

Top tips for proactive behaviour management, with Sue Cowley.

Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Hello! My name is Sue Cowley and I’m a teacher, author, presenter and teacher trainer. I’ve taught in all phases of education – early years, primary and secondary, as well as working with adults. My work involves a real mix of different things, including travelling around the world providing training for schools and other settings, writing books and articles for teachers, and helping to run my local early years setting.

What prompted you to write a book on behaviour management?

I wrote the first edition of my book on behaviour in 2001, when I had just moved from London to Bristol, and I was doing some supply teaching between jobs. My first practical handbook for teachers had been successful and my publishers asked me to write another one. I had taught in a number of schools, and learned some great strategies and techniques for managing behaviour, so I wanted to share these with other teachers. At the time, there really weren’t many practical handbooks on the market.

What are some common misconceptions about behaviour and behaviour management?

I think one key issue is where behaviour gets seen as separate to teaching and learning, whereas in reality, it is part and parcel of learning. When children struggle to learn to read, we don’t jump to sanctions, we scaffold and support them to build their understanding and knowledge. I think it’s useful to approach behaviour in a similar way, seeing it as a set of skills that can be built, not just something that children do (or don’t do) that means we can ‘get on with’ teaching.

Another common error is to wait for poor behaviour to happen, and then react to it. A much better approach is to pre-empt the behaviour so that you avoid it happening in the first place. To consider ways to do this, it’s worth reflecting on your own behaviours, particularly when you were at school. What did some teachers do, that made you and your classmates want to behave, focus and learn? Often, it’s about having a teacher who believes in you, but also a teacher who shows their human side and has a sense of humour or creativity, as well as being firm around expectations.

What are some key behaviour issues you are seeing in a post-pandemic classroom?

I talk a lot about this with the teachers I work with, and the two main concerns that they bring up are issues around social communication/peer group relationships, and also young people struggling to cope when things go wrong. We have seen similar issues in our setting, to be honest. Interestingly, I think this might be as much about the opportunities to socialise that went missing during the pandemic, rather than just about the partial closure of schools.

One issue we’ve found in our setting, around social communication and peer group relationships post-pandemic, is children struggling to share. A practical way in which we have worked to resolve this is to encourage children to self-regulate their behaviour when taking turns. We introduced a small sand timer and explained to the children that they could have a turn but that when the sand had run through, this meant it was someone else’s turn. Using the sand timer makes the idea of ‘my time/your time’ really concrete for the children. After modelling this several times over, the children have now taken control of the resource and we find them timing each other to take turns, everywhere around the setting!

With older learners, a good way to support social communication can be to offer lunch clubs, but to ensure that these are based on learners’ interests rather than on academic or curriculum demands. In the secondary school that my children attended, teachers support students to run their own lunch time clubs. One of my teens ran an esperanto club, and another ran a Japanese club. By building on learners’ interests, we can encourage them to reach out to their peers and find shared interests to explore together.

Why is self-regulation important and what are some ways teachers can foster this?

Self-regulation is basically what teachers mean when they talk about ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ behaviour. It’s a set of skills that all human beings need to build, in order to be able to learn effectively. Self-regulation is about our ability to reflect on and manage our emotions, our attention, our behaviours, and so on. All the behaviours that we need to see in the classroom, to enable children’s learning, come under the umbrella of self-regulation.

A key way in which teachers can foster self-regulation is to find ways to give children agency – to put the responsibility of behaving in their hands, rather than the teacher doing all or most of the work. This might be about offering them choices, giving them tasks that require them to be responsible, or finding ways to incorporate and build on their interests.

We need children and young people to feel invested in their learning so that they believe that the choices they make around their behaviour really count.

What is restorative practice and how can it be used to help manage conflict?

Restorative practice is essentially just a way of approaching behaviour that looks for solutions rather than focusing on systems to do all the work. One of the key issues we have around behaviour in our education system is that the same young people keep making the same poor choices over and again, and often end up being removed from class, or even excluded from mainstream settings, for repeated poor behaviour. If children (and often those with SEND) are not coping with the system as it is, we need to be asking ourselves what is going wrong.

By asking young people to take more responsibility around how their behaviour impacts on others, we are basically trying to change rather than just ‘manage’ their behaviour. However, if these  proactive approaches to conflict resolution are going to work, it’s really important that these are not just seen as an ‘add on’. They have to be embedded within the setting as a whole. They need to be about values, not just about asking teachers to ‘get an apology’ from a learner, where this may not be sincere.

How can student behaviour impact on teacher stress and vice versa?

It’s useful to understand that poor behaviour triggers an emotional response in teachers. Every time we feel ‘threatened’ by inappropriate behaviour, we get the ‘fight or flight’ response. This floods our system with adrenaline, which has nowhere to go, because of course we cannot run away or fight back! Clearly, where teachers are struggling to teach, because learners are interrupting, this can be very stressful. This is especially so because of all the pressures on teachers to get their learners to do well for accountability purposes.

Teachers who are stressed and overworked will obviously be in less of a position to stay calm when faced with poor behaviour. In my opinion, teacher wellbeing is the number one thing that leaders should prioritise and we make a point of doing this in our setting. Being flexible, and adapting the curriculum to better meet children’s needs, are two key strategies that we have used to make behaviour easier and better for everyone.

What are some key dos and don’ts when it comes to behaviour management?

Probably the key ‘don’t’ is not to give all your focus to poor behaviour, because this just highlights it for the rest of the class, puts you in a bad mood, and often leads to a loss of perspective. Even in the most difficult of classes, it is likely that the majority of learners want to behave and learn.

This is not to say that we should ignore inappropriate behaviour, but instead we should make it clear that most of our focus, energy and attention is going to go to the children and young people who are doing the right thing. This is why one key tip that I give new teachers is to try to offer five positives, before they deal with a negative. For instance, thanking five learners for being ready to start the lesson, before you worry about the handful who are not.

I think the other key strategy for me is around flexibility and creativity. These two aspects of teaching seem to have gone missing a bit in recent years, but to my mind they are fundamental, and the colleagues that I work with tend to agree.

If something isn’t working, try something else!

For more information, check out our R.I.S.E. review of Sue Cowley’s book: ‘Getting Your Class To Behave’.