Part 2 of reply cause forum was being weird
The idea being the teacher needs to be hands on enough to direct the class to discovery but hands off enough to allow the discovery to be found on it's own to aid understanding of it and the reasoning for it. The issue being just how hands off the process goes. In the long gone past my Uncle for a while was taught under a Science Syllabus based on self directed learning where the teacher wasn't meant to tell the class anything. It was a resounding failure because there need to be some level of input for things to work and pupils to know what they're looking for and be given more direction. The issue being there's still some in teaching who very much beleiev in another part of Vygotsky's theory that people learn from peers far better than authority figures thus some people wanting to greatly lessen the actual teaching and direction done by teachers and instead pushing for Pupils to discover and reason things out among themselves. Now on the off chance that the huge flaw in thishas passed anyone by it basically has the issue that if no-one or not enough people in the class realising it and reasoning out the discovery then things grind to a halt and this is where the teacher would normally help things along more.
So yeh in terms of giving pupils some level of control there is that but from my own experiences it's mostly fake, you make them think they have some level of control over some stuff but have them basically agreeing to stuff you already wanted while giving allowances for things you already had planned to give allowances for or have not choice but to give allowances for.
The rest though well class behaviour and controlling it was something they never properly teach and push this "You'll develop your own style" or the hippy dippy idea of "Well bad behaviour will never happen if your lessons are interesting enough" which BTW is total bullshit. The big secret in teaching that people don't tell you in training and you'll only find out from actual teachers is psychological warfare tactics. I wish I was joking, I mean full on like military recruit control and breaking ideas adapted for use in schools. The books that tell you how to do this are the "Getting the Buggers to Behave" series and trust me Agema would be shocked and just how much the reinforce the societal expectations and positions.
I went into teaching as "I'll be the teacher who is different, who helps their pupils and makes things easy for them" as an example I used to hate teachers forcing other pupils to do this long walk to the bin to spit out gum, when I started out if I caught some-one chewing I took the bin over to them, it was quicker and in my mind easier that wasting time with a sulking pupil dragging themselves over to the bin. Only then I noticed it wasn't causing people to change their ways and I kept catching the same people chewing and others were starting it too. Eventually I tried one of the techniques from the book of forcing the pupil to walk over to the bin and standing imposingly near them as they lower their head slightly to spit out the gum. It worked. Within less then 2 weeks basically everyone was spitting their gum out at the start of lessons without prompting or not coming with gum in their mouth to the lesson. I tried similar techniques and I turned a trouble maker into a well behaved pupil so much so I even got a written apology from him (unprompted too). There's a lot of showing what you can do and reinforcing the societal structure in the classroom in terms of actually controlling a class and being an effective teacher.
In terms of Agema's suggestion about finding out what the class is into this is something that's suggested but It's more a case of getting lucky and hoping you're not that out of touch and that the class has enough of a homogenous make up of interest that there are some common ones. I taught 4 very different classes and I managed to appeal to 1 class for 1 lesson and 1 class I managed to appeal to (in my opinion) regularly with good success. Though teachers mostly have to rely on getting lucky. I did because somehow in a class that was 60-70% teenage girls I was able to explain things using things they were interested in which I oddly was also into or knew enough about. For the record those things were Grand Theft Auto and Grant Theft Auto Online, Game of Thrones, Supernatural, My Chemical Romance and Greenday.......... yes really and I don't know who was more shocked me finding I was somehow really not out of touch or them having their teacher reference the lead Singer of My Chemical Romance to explain the mechanics of chemical reactions.
The problem being unless you get lucky and get big well known things that endure the test of time or things you're into or can have learned about by "cultural Osmosis" e.g. The Cake is a Lie, Vote Pedro (though I think that's falling off a lot), Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, Sweep the Leg, etc etc then you end up stuck as tastes and things people enjoy are constantly changing and keeping up for a teacher would be impossible realistically. I mean one class I taught had groups of people into the following: Football, old G.I.Joe comics (apparently a local trend due to some shop in town having / finding it had a stock of them), The Only way is Essex and the works of Jane Austin and there was no cross over between the groups not even the a little bit with the Towie and Jane Austin groups. I couldn't find a universal "Touchstone" to use that all of them would know or at least be aware of enough through cultural osmois to be able to adapt lessons to reference said things. You don't really have the time to learn a new trend every year or so just to keep the classes interest as they will know if you're not really into it and have just done some surface level looking into it. They can smell it a mile away and if they ask you questions when class is over about the thing and you won't be able to fake your way out through pretending to know.
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