WORKING WITH EMOTIONS: responding to the challenge of difficult pupil behaviour in schools. Edited by Peter Gray. RoutledgeFalmer pound;17.99

INVESTIGATING TROUBLESOME CLASSROOM BEHAVIOUR: practical tools for teachers. By Loraine Corrie. RoutledgeFalmer pound;16.99

A clutch of good books shortens the longest journey, even a late-night Virgin from Euston to Birmingham New Street. Bill Rogers was so good that, reading Classroom Behaviour in one gulp, I almost ended up in Wolverhampton.

This colourful, Australia-based behaviour management guru is a cult figure. Every couple of years he flies into the UK to run teacher workshops on discipline and behaviour. He’s often here for only a precious few months, but his current tour will run to the end of the year.

Bill Rogers’s events are always sold out, and anyone who has attended once tries to go again. He presents with vivid authenticity - his stories are always a potent cocktail of pain and humour - tales of classroom and school challenge with which any practising teacher immediately identifies. He has that uncanny and rare knack of throwing a sharp focus on everyday classroom instances which all of us intuitively knew all along, but which we had never realised with such clarity and precision. His workshops last a day and he never loses the riveted attention of his audience. I confess to being an addict, but I never thought the Bill Rogers effect would translate into a book.

Having read Classroom Behaviour (published last year but available only at events until recently) I am seeing teachers - and my own management and parenting skills - with such a sharp focus that it is like putting on my first set of glasses. I had internalised the book’s messages about “tactical ignoring”, “tactical pausing”, “non-verbal cueing”, “incidental language”, “take-up time”, “behavioural direction”, “prefacing”, “distractiondiversions”, “questioning impact”, “blocking, partial agreement, refocusing” and other techniques. Of course some of these are familiar, but I have never seen them presented with such empowering clarity. That is this book’s effect: it empowers and energises teachers, and it is a must for every department and school. Indeed, it would be a useful focus guide for teachers observing each other’s practice pre-Inset.

The other two titles are curate’s eggs. Peter Gray’s excellent top-and-tailing of Working With Emotions doesn’t quite hide the variable quality of what lies between. I was enchanted by the account of the “riot at the famous public school in 1957, when pupils armed themselves with Enfield rifles, Bren guns, thunderflashes and live ammunition, commandeered an RAF hut as their headquarters and took to the streets of Winchester” - with no mention in the press for 40 years. Who would have suspected Nick Tate would later take on such a blackboard jungle? It puts into perspective claims of a past golden age when adolescent behaviour wasn’t an issue.

Almost at the last, Amanda Daniels and Hugh Williams describe a “framework for intervention” that justifies any secondary school buying a copy of the book. As you might guess, the framework provides a way for individual teachers and schools systematically to evaluate the everyday classroom environment and their teaching practice. If I could wave a magic wand I would like to see this framework used in every school in the land.

Finally, Loraine Corrie speaks to primary practitioners. Investigating Troublesome Classroom Behaviour is a must for anyone doing a national professional qualification for headship or a masters degree in education, for teacher trainers and for any teacher questioning the adequacy of “gold stars, Smarties in the jar, and praise, praise, praise” as a sufficient behaviour management technique in the primary classroom. It is worth buying for its helpful guide to the energising impact of teachers acting as their own researchers in their own and colleagues’ classrooms.

Tim Brighouse is chief education officer for Birmingham. Bill Rogers answers teachers’ questions about discipline in First Appointments, free with The TES this week. Details of his publications and UK are at www.sagepub.co.uk