ABSTRACT
As co-authors we started this project because of a strong joint interest in classroom management and a strong overlapping set of convictions about what helps in difficult school and classroom circumstances. The overlap in convictions wasn’t perfect and the parts hanging over the edges, the bits that didn’t match very well, provided us with many hours of discussion and debate, at the University of Cambridge, via e-mail between Australia and the UK, even at the Freud Museum in Hampstead. This, we believe, helped to inform our understanding of what the research tells us and what is practical or impractical for teachers, education managers and other staff to undertake in modern schools. We are optimistic because we also visited a number of schools in the United Kingdom and elsewhere and saw these schools looking at outcomes evidence in their own work, making decisions about what helps and what doesn’t and combining approaches in ways that enabled them to help students who some educators may have considered impossible to help.
