A study was conducted to determine the degree to which teachers and students share perceptions of the use of power in the classroom. The study defined five bases of power: coercive (implied or explicit punishment), reward, legitimate (assigned), referent (identification with the person in power), and expert (perceived competence). A total of 156 teachers and 2,698 of their students from grade seven through college filled out a perceived power measure, in which the teachers completed the statement "I use (blank) power" and the students completed the statement "My teacher uses (blank) power" with one of the five defined power bases. A second measure asked the subjects to rate the percentage of each of the five power bases they or their teachers used. The resulting data indicated that both the students and the teachers felt that coercive power was less likely to be used than power from other bases. The teachers and students did not differ in their perceptions of how likely either coercive or legitimate power are to be employed; however, teachers saw themselves as more likely to use more reward, referent, and expert power than did the students. In relative terms, both teachers and students reported greater use of expert, referent, and reward power than coercive power. Students saw coercive power as accounting for a higher proportion of power use than did teachers, while teachers saw a significantly higher proportion of expert power than did the students. (HTH)