This paper examines the impact that creating opportunities for pre-service teachers to engage in mentoring conversations (Timperley, 2001) with teacher mentors in classrooms, has on pre-service teachers’ awareness of the complexity of teaching and its contribution to their ability to (1) interact with students in classrooms (after observing and participating in classroom interactions), and (2) base their interpretations on developing theoretical perspectives which interpret teaching and learning as social practice. In this action research, mentoring sessions followed in-classroom sessions whereby pre-service teachers observed teaching-in-action and ‘practised interacting’ with small groups of students. Mentoring conversations (guided by Churchill’s (2010) description of dialogic pedagogy) focused on how lessons unfolded interactively and on ‘practice architectures’ (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008), rather than on assessment as typical in practicums. It was found mentoring conversations enabled participants to build a strong practical and theoretical base around the classroom exchanges experienced, observed and critiqued, and that locating these directly in the classroom as a site of practice was crucial. Theoretically, the presentation draws on a theory of practice derived from Schatzki (2002, 2010) which seeks to understand practice and learning practice as the existential and ontological given in site-based education development (Kemmis, Edwards-Groves, Wilkinson & Bristol, 2012).