ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will look at two aspects of responding to and preventing stress and confrontations. First, I shall describe ways of coping with troubles and confrontations, including problems that can arise between colleaguesdirectly or indirectly as a result of pupil behaviour. This part of the chapter will largely focus on skills and techniques. Second, I will take the discussion further by considering the moral and personal aspect of teaching that we have touched on already in Chapter 3. The activities for this chapter are extensive and include opportunities to work on examples of stressful or confrontational cases and to formulate strategies for dealing with potential areas of conflict. There is also an invitation to reflect upon the place of the personal and moral dimensions of teachers’ work, and the contribution of such reflections to coping with difficult pupils. In focusing directly on day-to-day experiences, this chapter is in some respects a test of the argument and hypotheses of this book; and, in using activities more extensively than text, it practises the claim I have made in Chapter 3, that we learn more through active engagement than passive reading.
