EDUCATING CHILDREN WITH EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIOURAL DIFFICULTIES: Inclusive practice in mainstream schools. By John Thacker, Dave Strudwick and Elly Babbedge. RoutledgeFalmer, pound;16.99.

A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO ANGER MANAGEMENT. By Paul Blum RoutledgeFalmer pound;12.99.

AN A TO Z PRACTICAL GUIDE TO EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIOURAL DIFFICULTIES. By Harry Ayers and Cesia Prytys. David Fulton pound;17.50.

BETTER BEHAVIOUR IN CLASSROOMS: A framework for inclusive behaviour managementn. By Kay Mathieson and Meg Price. RoutledgeFalmer pound;22.50

Behaviour management is never an easy topic on which to give advice. But happily, none of these books falls prey to the tendency to offer glib suggestions.

Educating Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties takes a fascinating look at what can be done to prevent behaviour problems emerging. The emphasis is on creativity and the book examines how teachers can foster humanity and better relationships. In a refreshing chapter on “the resilient teacher”, the authors discuss issues such as “sense of self”, “genuineness” and “empathic understanding”, and they manage to convey just how important relationships are in working with children. There are other important chapters on creating an inclusive classroom, good home-school relations, and on setting targets and learning from mistakes.

A Teacher’s Guide to Anger Management is a forthright book which forces some close self-inspection about the authority rituals adopted in schools. It examines pupil and teacher anger, and focuses on the damaging effects of the macho image, on “the anger cycle”, and on crisis behaviour and rage.

Paul Blum provides ways to think about anger and offers dos and don’ts for when they occur: do keep talking; don’t use confrontational body language. There are helpful sections on conflict resolution and whole-school approaches to anger management, and the book concludes with look at emotional intelligence and the wider systems in which children are expected to flourish.

An A to Z Practical Guide to Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties is a serious volume. Most entries are well thought through, and some offer references, but the the sampling of subjects is idiosyncratic with an emphasis on psychoanalytic terms. There are entries for “anal”, “castration complex” and “cathexis” but nothing on “inclusion”. And the style takes odd turns: the entry on ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is full of warnings about the validity of the syndrome, yet the entry for “Oedipus complex” tells us that it is about “Unconscious conflicts arising from the desire to sexually possess the parent of the opposite sex”. I expected a paragraph saying: “Of course, not many people believe this stuff nowadays,” but no such qualification followed. For readers with some knowledge in this field already, this book will provide a useful resource.

Better Behaviour in Classrooms includes some good nuggets of advice, all within the context of the metaphor of the brain containing three basic systems: a basic reptilian brain, an emotional brain and a thinking brain. The message is that it’s no use ignoring the emotional side of cognition. While this model can be a helpful metaphor for the kinds of processes that go to make up cognition, its use, if taken too literally - as with any biological metaphor - pushes the cause of the behaviour in question too far in the direction of the child rather than the child’s context. Nevertheless, the book contains much helpful advice relating to that context.

Altogether, these books are useful resources for teachers. Even if there is too often talk about “children with EBD”, as if this constituted some discrete clinical category, there is also a great deal that is sensitive and helpful.