This article suggests that failure of progressivist school reforms is due in part to inadequate treatment of the relationship between pedagogy and classroom control. Traditional teaching techniques and disciplinary technologies coincided. Progressivist teaching methods undermined traditional disciplinary structures, without proposing an alternative classroom supervision theory. This study examines the way schools in a current, Israeli progressivist school reform initiative cope with classroom control, both conceptually and practically. Teachers’ thinking and discourse is partitioned, such that teaching and control issues are kept distinct. Numerous school structures and other practices reinforce this partition. A number of questions are posed for the creation of a progressivist theory of classroom control.
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