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Karl Pupé is a teacher, blogger, and behaviour management specialist from East London in the UK. He is a former NEETs coordinator and SEMH teacher, and has worked with students who come from all kinds of backgrounds and challenging situations. Karl shares his wealth of knowledge and training with other teachers through his workshops that are designed to help teachers feel like heroes in their classrooms. He is the author of The Action Hero Teacher, a book that makes classroom management and addressing behaviour issues easy and accessible for all teachers. He also writes a blog that ranges from topics such as classroom management to self care.
My route into teaching
“I’ve been in education for about ten years now, and I started off on a bit of a peculiar path. In the UK, the most common route into teaching is doing a PGCE. Instead, I got what’s called a DTLLS: a Diploma in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector. I come from a sales background, and I lost my job during the 2008 crisis, which made me reconsider what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to work with young people, so I volunteered at a music studio in a youth center and while I was there, someone told me I had a talent and I should pursue it as a career. I decided to get my teaching certificate and became something called a NEETs coordinator. Lots of students from disadvantaged backgrounds drop out of school before their GCSEs, and my job was to work with them to get them into education or training: otherwise they can end up in gangs or involved with drugs. The funding for that programme ran out, so I went into mainstream schooling, where I currently am, and I wrote my book.
The Action Hero Teacher
When I was working in alternative provision, I was dealing with very vulnerable people who had specific needs and I got a lot of specialist training. I worked with social workers, local authorities, the police and youth-defending teams, and I gathered a whole hodge-podge of knowledge to be able to work with children who were emotionally dysregulated or emotionally hijacked. When I went into mainstream education I was surprised to discover that my colleagues didn’t receive the same training. One colleague told me he’d only done a three-week module on behaviour management where he was taught things like: saying “please and thank you” or clapping. When you go into a classroom with thirty sets of eyes on you, it’s very different. So I wanted to put a book together that would be simple and easy to digest, for teachers to learn these skills in the easiest way possible.
What teachers should know about behaviour management
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” That quote is my north star. To break it down, you need to have a relationship with someone before you can educate them. Until you have a relationship, you can be Albert Einstein, Leonardo Davinci or Tony Stark. It doesn’t matter. If the kids don’t think you like them, and care about them and their wellbeing, then you will only ever get compliance from them. They will give you the bare minimum. To get true engagement you have to build relationships. Once you know them: who their siblings are, where they come from, and what their culture is, then you’ll know what influences them and only then can they learn.
There are several techniques for building relationships with your students. What you need to understand is that behaviour management comes from you. Take the student out of the equation for a moment: it’s about you and your leadership style. Any great leader has a combination of two traits: strong authority, and compassion. Some people see authority as a dirty word, like a superman villain — kneel before me, this type of thing, but authority means you know your stuff. Doctors are the authorities when you go to them to solve health problems. You are the authority in the classroom. Then there is emotional intelligence, which I call warmth in my book. You need to step into your students’ shoes and see the world through their eyes. Once you have that magical combination, that’s what makes a great leader.
I come into my classroom with a worldview and an understanding that this is our classroom, and that we care about each other and we get on, but there also needs to be boundaries. Children and young people like boundaries, they need them in order to develop. It’s not about shooting love out of your chest like a care-bear, it’s about creating an environment where it’s feasible for you to grow a relationship. In my book I call that the social contract. You need to understand where they’re coming from and what their needs are. There’s a technique in my book called trust mountain: you assess your students and figure out what they need. A great leader knows when a student needs some soft encouragement, and when one needs a (proverbial) kick in the butt.
How to protect your mental health as a teacher
If you’re on an airplane and there’s an emergency, the first thing they tell you is to apply your own oxygen mask first, before you help anyone else. The same thing applies to teachers. If you aren’t getting enough oxygen, you’re going to pass out, which isn’t helpful for anyone. Teachers are guilty of giving a lot of care and consideration to others, but not being caring or considerate towards ourselves. It’s an emotionally draining job and you need to take care of yourself. You need to schedule rest and relaxation: go to the park, spend time with friends or family, take yourself to the cinema or out for dinner. If you do that, you’ll show up differently in your classroom. It’s easy to show up burnt out, especially now with all of the madness that’s going on in the world. It’s okay to say you’re not okay and reach out for help. If I broke my leg, I wouldn’t try to walk on it and be angry with myself when I couldn’t; I would simply say, my leg is injured, it needs time to heal. We need to do the same for our minds.
As teachers we often hear a lot of sad stories and trauma from the students we care so much about. To protect yourself from that sadness, you need to find a way to empty it out. The lifesaver for me has been journalling. It’s a way for me to empty my mind and gain some distance and clarity. Sometimes when I start writing about something from one perspective, I gain clarity of thought, and realize there’s another way of seeing it. All the negativity and all of your problems start to fall into place when you write them down. Journaling allows you to be objective; sometimes you might read back over your own thoughts a few weeks later, and say, oh I can see how I got that wrong. It allows you to get distance. You don’t need to spend hours on it either, bullet journals can also help. You need something like that to stop yourself from being overwhelmed by an emotion. A good support network is also a must.
One of the days that changed my life.
Teaching can be a rollercoaster. There will be times when you feel like you’re on top of the world, like you’re a badass jedi fighter; then there are times when you feel like the gum on the sidewalk. But teaching is so important. I didn’t realize just how important until one day when I was working as a NEETs coordinator.
I was about to teach a class, lesson plan in hand, when the course director, my manager, and one of the youth directors came running towards me looking worried.
They said, “listen Karl, there was an incident last night. A young man was murdered in East London. The students are distressed. We’ve spoken to the police and someone has been boasting about being responsible for it. If the students leave the building there is a chance they’ll retaliate.”
I looked at the lesson plan in my hand and thought, yeah that’s done, and walked into the classroom. There were ten young men there. They were very upset, they had their hoods up and they were showing a lot of anger and frustration. One of them approached me and asked me to move out of his way — with a bit more colourful language — and knew I couldn’t really stop him. If I was going to keep them there I had to key into how they were feeling.
I said, “what’s going on?”
He said, “you know what’s going on. You know John [let’s call him John] got killed.”
“Yeah, and what are you planning to do then?”
“You know what we’re going to do. We’re going to find the guy who did it.”
“And then what?”
“Don’t be stupid. You know what we’re going to do.”
I needed them to see through their anger, and recognize the consequences, so I said, “so you’re going to kill him. Alright, and then what? One of two things will happen. You’ll kill him, and you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life, or you’ll get away with it and someone else will try to kill you.”
They still weren’t having it, so I asked, “is doing this going to bring John back?” I saw a small impact from that question, so I asked them to tell me about him.
They told me, “John was a good guy, he wasn’t involved in the street life, he just wanted to go to school. John was just affiliated, he wasn’t even in the gang.”
They told me he was the only child of a single mother. They told me about his personality and his interests. These guys were really into music and rapping, so I decided we would write a farewell letter to John and perform it.
It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. They wrote lyrics promising to take care of his mum, that they would keep him in their hearts. When we performed it there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Whenever I feel tired, or I wonder what I’m doing, I think of that. I think of the power of connecting with young people and being able to change their lives. It’s about keying in, showing them that you care, and understanding their worldview. You’re not only changing their lives, you can be changing their whole family tree. Think about when a student is the first in his or her family to go to university or to receive training. You’re changing their whole family’s future. It’s magical. Never let go of that.
Systematic changes to education
When I first started teaching in East London I already had an understanding of my students and their backgrounds because I come from that community. Systematically, there isn’t enough representation in schools. When I was writing my book, one of my colleagues told me to forget about it because nobody would take a Black male writer seriously. That shocked me, and when I went to look for other authors on this subject, I only found one other: Dr. Tony Sewell, who is an absolute hero of mine. I thought, this is the problem right here. We need more representation.
We need people who are part of those communities to teach in those communities, and to connect all the way up. Oftentimes the people who run the school are far removed from the communities and students they’re meant to be serving. They don’t live in the area, they don’t understand the lingo or the culture, they don’t know the cultural norms. I’m not saying those leaders don’t deserve to be there, but they need to hire people from those communities and allow them to help set the school culture. I once taught at a place in East London called Whitechapel, where the majority of the students were Bengali. I had to humble myself to learn their language and culture. I had to learn what’s important to them, ask questions, and be open to getting to know their community. That’s what schools need, better representation, and staff who are open to learning about that culture.
We also need to be willing to have conversations in the classroom about systematic racism, classism, and discrimination. After what happened to George Floyd, there is no way we can say we don’t need to, or are unwilling to have these conversations. The Black Lives Matter movement was the biggest civil rights demonstration in world history. You can no longer say, I’m a teacher, I don’t want to touch that. Children need us to acknowledge the world they live in. They need us to have the difficult conversations, to help them navigate systematic oppression and to bridge that disconnect because they see it as clearly as we do. We live in a world where there are no more excuses for being ignorant. George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement put it right in front of us, we can’t ignore it.
The future of education
Mark Zuckerberg built a billion dollar company out of something we can’t touch or feel. That defines the digital age. Content is king, and what we need to understand is that employers are now much more interested in what you can do, rather than how much you’ve memorized. We should move away from making students sit two hour exams. I want to know which projects they can produce, with real-world applications. We need to create an educational system that dovetails skills and experience with the subjects they’re studying. Gen Z is going to be the most educated generation yet, but if their education doesn’t have real-world applications, it’s not going to be useful to them.
Someone said: the machines are becoming more human, and the humans are becoming more like machines. It’s very important for teachers to keep their human side. In the UK we’re obsessed with data, but teaching is all about the connection between the teacher and students. We can’t lose sight of that.
If you want to read more of Karl’s incredible journey, The Action Hero Teacher is available on Amazon and Kindle. To read more of his thoughts about classroom management, teacher wellbeing, and systematic changes to education, check out his website: actionheroteacher.com
Do you have any teaching stories that changed your life? Have thoughts about systematic changes we need to make in education? Get in touch with us at zoe@teacherly.io and tell your story.
