One of the big areas of anxiety for anyone starting to teach is whether classes will behave. More than concerns about status, pay or working conditions, it’s discipline that keeps us awake the night before we’ve got a difficult group of kids.

In the past, there was a “good-teachers-are-born-not-made” mentality around in schools, but few people would seriously argue today that sound classroom discipline is purely intuitive.

Instead, there are a series of strategies and skills which, thoughtfully applied, can bring a sense of order to most difficult classes. And, as a new teacher, you won’t be short of advice.

Michael Marland’s The Craft of the Classroom (Heinemann pound;10.99) is the book that first led to my relieved recognition that classroom management is a learnable approach rather than a blessing from the Almighty.

This slim, wise volume set many of us off as teachers with a sense of clarity and all-pervading reassurance. “A good teacher is a good classroom manager,” Michael Marland wrote in 1975 - although the book has been thoroughly updated since then. “A mastery of group management techniques frees a teacher from concerns about group control.”

Every ingredient in the teacher’s repertoire is suddenly made a vivid, common-sensical contributor to orderly control, from how to take the register to how to hand out equipment. For me, this remains a seminal work for revealing the essential things that effective teachers do.

Marland’s approach is re-echoed by a number of other discipline “gurus”.

The guru to end all gurus is Bill Rogers. An Australian teacher and now adjunct professor of education at Griffith University in Queensland, Rogers has inspired a generation of teachers through his books and lectures.

He has credibility: he talks to real teachers about real classrooms and never patronises us. He gives practical advice on posture and use of gesture, and offers examples of how we might phrase our comments to a reluctant class or student without provoking further confrontation.

True, you have to modify these a little for the UK context, otherwise it can sound as if you’re trying to bond with the kids by speaking like a minor character in Neighbours.

His most recent books - both from Paul Chapman Publishing - are Behaviour Management: A Whole-School Approach (pound;17.99) and Cracking the Hard Class (pound;16.99). Both are excellent and, if you can catch him live on one of his UK roadshows, you’re in for a real treat. This practical approach from writers who have clearly retained at least a notional foot in the classroom is the one that works best for me.

School discipline is something that can be theorised about endlessly - and is - but on a wet and windy Thursday afternoon with class 10C, sociological theories about male stereotyping can seem a little remote.

That’s why I’m such a fan of Sue Cowley’s Getting the Buggers to Behave (Continuum pound;9.99). Who could resist a title like that? The author is a former drama teacher. She not only dishes out supremely helpful advice, but also presents two versions of a number of vivid scenarios, such as those corny “before and after” photographs in slimming magazines - the first in unflattering black and white, the second in smiling colour.

These set-pieces teach us how not to handle a situation, and then re-run it more effectively. It’s a superb technique for making the mystique of classroom control tangible and attainable.

There are many other guides to classroom management on the market. John Robertson’s Effective Classroom Control (Hodder amp; Stoughton Educational pound;16.99) is particularly popular on PGCE courses: good, sound, largely practical stuff.

Among the guides that take a broader perspective. Martin Mills’ Challenging Violence in Schools (Open University Press pound;16.99) and Paul Blum’s A Teacher’s Guide to Anger Management (RoutledgeFalmer pound;12.99, reviewed in Friday magazine, October 19) both make a convincing case for the harmful effects of a macho culture that leads to boys behaving in certain stereotypical ways.

Writing at the end of a long day taking 100 Year 10 students by coach to London, I’m suddenly less sure about this. Laddishness no longer seems a purely laddish phenomenon.

Of course, our culture affects the way our pupils behave, but for me the biggest change in behaviour in my 15 years in the classroom has been a general ebbing away of courtesy and accepted responsibility among many of our clients-girls as well as boys, parents as well as students.

But let’s stop there. In that direction lies the “when I was young, things were better” argument, which is the curse of many staffrooms.

A good book and a good mentor can help you develop and improve your own classroom management techniques.

But perhaps most important is a prevailing sense of optimism that good classroom management really is achievable, and that most pupils - whatever you might think initially - really do want to learn, and that good teachers never give up on them.

Geoff Barton is deputy head at Thurston community college in Suffolk