Description: This paper is an extension and a methodological reflection on the contribution presented at the ECER in Dublin (Caruso, Sorzio, 2005). It relies on connecting the findings of a year-long teacher education programme in a primary school with an in-depth analysis on the development of ethnographic protocols in teachers' reflection upon their practice.The theoretical framework is based on the Activity Theory (Engeström, 1991), which considers learning as an increasing participation in the activities of a micro-cultural system, characterized by modes of interacting, ways to use artifacts, and meanings that each subject takes as shared with the others.If the classroom is assumed as a micro-system of activity, what are the relevant methods to describe it?This perspective requires the integration of different levels of analysis, in order to make teachers' dilemmas and strategies inspectionable as object of critical reflection and change.In the central part of the argumentation, I mean to focus on the relationship between ethnography (Carspecken, 1996) and discourse analysis (Wells, 1999), and therefore between an institutional dimension in which the educational practice is structured and a more specific unit of classroom-interaction analysis. The former is effective to recognize the elements that build up the classroom activity, the latter is relevant in order to reconstruct the implications between the interactional organization and some specific objects, such as the meaning-negotiation by the teacher and the classroom, the scaffolding strategies and the children's participation in carrying out school tasks. Methodology: A meta-analysis is conducted on the ECER 2005 paper research structure. In the conclusive section of the paper, I isolate two excerpts in order to reconstruct how the ethnographic protocols were worked out, presented and utilized during the "Laboratory Discussions" among teachers and researchers.The paper presents a reflection upon the methodology used in the 2005 research, which is the combination of ethnography and discourse analysis, as it enables, on the one hand, to isolate classroom's routines and microcultural elements, and on the other, to modify that taken-for-granted situation (that is, implementing the curriculum, pacing the lesson towards the achievement of instructional objectives) through the exploration of different strategies. Conclusions: I highlight the function of the ethnography and the discourse analysis as two complementary tools:- to promote teachers' reflexivity (Cochran-Smith, Lytle, 1999) on their didactical options;- to transform the structure of classroom activities by enacting changes in the elements of the system such as interactional rules, social roles, division of tasks and artifacts.Nonetheless, I would like to stress the difficulty to develop common knowledge (Edwards, Mercer, 1987) among the researchers and the teachers because of the risk in pointing out the tension between divergent lesson models.