Abstract. In this study, we describe student teacher behaviour in response to daily hassles in the classroom from three perspectives: the coping perspective, representing the meaning of the behaviour in the light of the situations in which it is shown; the pedagogical-methodological perspective, evident in an analysis of the instructional meaning of student teacher behaviour,, and the interpersonal perspective, meaning behaviour perceived as part of the teacher-pupil relationship.Observation of lessons of student teachers yields descriptions of student teacher behaviour in four types of classroom events. Two dimensions of student teacher behaviour have been extracted: the active-passive-dimension, describing the degree of intensity of a student teacher's actions when transferring (verbal) messages to the pupils; and the agitation-harmony-dimension, defining the degree of tension the student teacher arouses in the relationship between teacher and pupils.Two conclusions are developed. Firstly, in responding to pupils' off-task behaviour, student teachers generally show communication similar to the pupils' behaviour. This means that they are engaged in the same oppositional behaviour as the pupils, which can result in an aggressive symmetrically escalating relationship. Secondly, the newly developed descriptive framework with the two dimensions can be used in future research and in helping supervisors to reveal student teachers' blind spots for what is going on in the classroom during hassling events.