The Truth About
Student Behaviour
If you’ve ever closed your classroom door and wondered whether you can keep going, this book will feel like a hand on your shoulder.
Simple shifts to transform classroom chaos into calm.
By Adam Voigt
Adam speaks directly to the humans who teach, lead and care for our young people every day. With honesty, clarity and a healthy dose of humour, he strips away the guilt and fear that so often sit beneath behaviour challenges, replacing them with practical, hopeful guidance you can use straight away.
Alongside sharp, simple Dos and Don’ts, teachers will find something far more powerful: real stories from real schools.
These stories are the heartbeat of the book, showing what’s possible when we choose connection over control and progress over perfection.
The Truth About Student Behaviour won’t just shift your practice – it will remind you why your work matters.
“The Truth About Student Behaviour cuts through noise, nostalgia and distraction. It names the truths schools, and indeed systems, have avoided for too long and offers a clear, practical pathway grounded in relationships, responsibility and culture.
Warm, honest and courageous, this is a book I would recommend to any educator and leader committed to building strong schools where behaviour and belonging truly align.”
Martine Gill, Principal, Clover Hill State School
Order a hard copy
We get it – you want a hard copy so you can make notes, bookmark pages and highlight the best bits!
The Truth About Student Behaviour is a landmark contribution precisely because it does what so few books in this space dare to do: it tells the truth and then hands you the tools.
It exposes the dead-end logic of compliance and control, and replaces it with a clear, evidence-informed model of cooperation, responsibility, and restorative practice. Voigt seamlessly weaves research, neuroscience, and lived classroom experience into a guide that feels both provocative and profoundly practical.
He makes behaviour understandable. He makes culture buildable. And he empowers every teacher — regardless of experience — to shift from reaction to influence, from firefighting to shaping something better. This book is brave, timely, and deeply useful. Every educator who wants calmer classrooms, stronger relationships, and a more sustainable profession should read it.
Adam’s advocacy for our teachers and students to have schools where learning is the focus is what we need right now.
The quality of learning is being impacted by student behaviour and rising disengagement. This book provides much needed food for thought and a practical framework teachers can use to address these challenges. No matter if your school is primary secondary, private, public, independent, city, regional, remote…these strategies apply.
No matter if you’ve been teaching for one year or 25 years, have never taught anywhere else or have taught in 10 schools; are a classroom teacher or a school leader…these strategies apply. Every teacher will get something out of reading this book.
The Truth About Student Behaviour cuts through noise, nostalgia and distraction. It names the truths schools, and indeed systems, have avoided for too long and offers a clear, practical pathway grounded in relationships, responsibility and culture.
Adam is real in putting out this challenge, inviting teachers, leaders, systems, and policy makers to be willing to push back, because understanding student behaviour and knowing what actually matters cannot be left to chance.
Warm, honest and courageous, this is a book I would recommend to any educator and leader committed to building strong schools where behaviour and belonging truly align. Read The Truth About Student Behaviour, and turn these instructions into daily practices – JUST DO THIS!
With this book Adam finds the ‘sweet spot’. His down-to-earth words tell us he knows about the hardships we face in schools today and how it feels in dealing with increasingly challenging student behaviour.
Yet he talks us through a way forward. A way forward that, in the words of one of my staff members, “Is an approach that enables us to follow up issues, without sacrificing relationships”. A way forward that builds and maintains a whole school approach to positive school and classroom culture, that is focused on building and supporting responsible and accountable young people who know how to face mistakes they have made and how to repair them, learn and take their next steps forward positively.
This book shouldn’t ‘piss people off’. It’s the book we need to reach for when we truly wish to make a difference today as we work with our young people for tomorrow.
Listen to the stories behind the book
This book is punctuated with real stories from real schools. These stories are the heartbeat of the book, showing what’s possible when we choose connection over control and progress over perfection.