‘The things I say make sense in the reality of a classroom’

The bestselling author of more than 25 books for teachers, Sue Cowley tells Helen Ward about her past as a school refuser, swapping dancing for teacher training and why her life has never taken a single track
15th September 2017, 12:00am
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‘The things I say make sense in the reality of a classroom’

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/things-i-say-make-sense-reality-classroom

Sue Cowley does not assume the teachers who attend her talks are going to behave.

“An Inset for 150 student teachers can be a lot harder than taking a class of 30 kids,” Cowley, the best-selling author of Getting the Buggers to Behave, explains.

“I treat them like I would the kids: there is the rule of one voice talking at any time, there are rewards - I have a raffle - jokes, volunteers. It’s interactive. I involve them in the experience of learning.”

The talks demonstrate one of the teacher-turned-trainer’s key messages on behaviour - that engagement helps.

Saying that lessons need to be engaging is not about blaming teachers when children behave badly, Cowley is keen to stress.

But she is concerned that teachers’ lives are being made unnecessarily difficult by the growing trend of focusing on how to manage children’s behaviour without paying any attention to what is going on in the lesson - or the rest of their life - as if behaviour is entirely independent of context.

“The greatest tool you have as a teacher is your ability to engage a child,” she says. “Because when they are engaged and relate to you they are far more likely to behave for you because they are focused on learning.”

Cowley is well-placed to know, not only because of her position as one of the country’s foremost school behaviour gurus. She is also steeped in the educational world, volunteering as chair of a preschool committee and working with children in the local primary to produce a school magazine, giving talks and training teachers around the UK and abroad.

“I’m still essentially a teacher, even though I’m not in a classroom,” she says. “When I go into these schools I don’t approach it from the senior leadership point of view. I approach it from the ground up.

“I know what they need: they need to laugh, they need to think and I need to demonstrate to them, through how I teach them, how the things that I am saying make sense in the reality of a classroom.”

Tears at the school gate

Cowley’s own experiences as a pupil were mixed. She loved infant school, but in junior school she became a school refuser.

“I remember being terrified,” she says. “I would be in tears at the school gate.” But she was much happier at her secondary, Burlington Danes in West London, a school she describes as “creative” and “eclectic”, where she loved English and the arts.

She was academic, obtaining seven As and two Bs in her O levels. But following her mother into teaching never occurred to her, because from an early age Cowley was determined to be a dancer. “I was doing classes from the age of 3,” she says. “Ballet, dance, tap and jazz.”

At 16, she got a place at the Central School of Ballet and began full-time training.

But, aware that dancing could be a precarious career, she also did two A levels in one year, English and art, through evening classes.

“I was never going to be a top-flight ballet dancer,” she says. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, I just knew that I wanted to dance.”

At the end of three years’ training, she injured her back and the possibility of any career in dance vanished overnight.

A few temporary jobs followed, before she persuaded Kingston University to let her on to the four-year BEd course and then started teaching in primary and secondary schools in London. Her second career had begun.

Then, a few years later, came the writing. Cowley had moved to Portugal with her partner but had nine months free before starting a teaching job in Lisbon. So she decided to write the kind of book she’d have liked to read as a new teacher: How to Survive Your First Year in Teaching.

The book first came out under a different title, Starting Teaching, in 1999 and its fresh, funny advice is still relevant almost 20 years later: do not overplan, stock up on eyecatching resources, insist to your class that one person - you - speaks at a time and perfect your “deadly stare”.

“You have chosen a career that is exhausting, incredibly hard work and that may sometimes reduce you to tears,” she writes in the introduction. “The thing to hold on to though, during the tough first year, is that you can make a real and genuine difference to your children’s lives.

“And at some point in the future they may look back and remember you as someone who really mattered to them. What other career could offer such a wonderful reward?”

Getting the Buggers to Behave - now seen as the bible on classroom management - was published a couple of years later. By then Cowley was supply teaching in Bristol and she wrote the book in just six weeks. Since, she has written more than 25 books. The latest, The Artful Educator, with practical, innovative ideas about how to use an arts-based approach in teaching, was published in April.

Negative pressures

But it seems that her own career, despite the best efforts of her younger self to find a vocation, has never been about taking a single track. In her 2016 book Road School, Cowley recounts the time she and her partner took their two children out of school for several months to go travelling.

Cowley is startled when her partner puts “writer” on her visa application for China.

“That is what you do for a living, isn’t it?” he points out.

“But I train teachers, too,” she adds.

Cowley’s life’s work has been supporting teachers, and she is happy to speak out for the teaching profession. Her outspoken opinions, including deep concerns about how Sats distort the curriculum in primary schools, have helped her to attract more than 20,000 followers on Twitter.

But while she trains, writes and speaks about teaching, Cowley does not think that she is cut out for what the job of a full-time teacher has now become.

“You come into teaching because you want to work with kids,” she says. “When the pressures of what you’re being asked to do appear to adversely affect those children, it’s like a cognitive dissonance.

“I don’t think that I could be a full-time teacher in a classroom any more. I wouldn’t be able to keep my mouth shut. I wouldn’t be able to capitulate. I’m unmanageable. I would just be too mouthy.”


@teshelen

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