One of the greatest challenges for student teachers and then for novice teachers is the classroom management. The teacher’s ability to perceive the current state of the class climate and the specific setting of individual students is an essential requirement to complete didactic aims in order to be able to teach in the class. Our research was focused on student teachers from Faculty of Education, who have gained one of their first school reality experience in their teaching practice. At the same time, this experience was thematised by the concept of power in a school class. Power can be defined as a potential to affect attitudes and acts of others (McCroskey, 2006) and as such it presents a core area of the teaching process to a considerable extent. Simultaneously, the phenomenon of power is characterised by its reciprocity, which means that a teacher has the power only when their students really attribute it to them. This is the reason why power responds to the interactive character of the teaching process and taking this into account, the process between teachers and students in a class could be better understood. The most influential, traditional typology of power as a relational phenomenon comes from French & Raven (1959). They distinguish teacher's power in relation to a principle on which it is based on: legitimate, coercive, reward, expert, and referent power.

French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander. Group Dynamics (pp. 259–269). New York: Harper & Row. Mainhard, M., Brekelmans, M., & Wubbels, T. (2011). Coercive and supportive teacher behaviour: Within- and across-lesson associations with the classroom social climate. Learning and Instruction, vol. 21(issue 3), pp. 345–354. McCroskey et al. (2006). An Introduction to Communication in the Classroom. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Molm, L. (1997). Coercive Power in Social Exchange. (xii, 316 p.) New York: Cambridge University Press. Payne, R. (2015). Using rewards and sanctions in the classroom: pupils' perceptions of their own responses to current behaviour management strategies. Educational Review, 67(4), 483–504. Schrodt, P., Witt, P. L, & Turman, P. D. (2007). Reconsidering the measurement of teacher power use in the college classroom. Communication Education, 56(3), 308–323. Vlčková, K., Mareš, J., & Ježek, S. (2015, in print). Adaptation of Teacher Power Use Scale to lower secondary students and student teachers. Pedagogická orientace, 25(6). URL: https://journals.muni.cz/pedor/issue/archive Czech Science Foundation, project GA16-02177S.