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The materials and artefacts utilized by teachers and students play a crucial role in education. In a subject like technology, where many teachers feel they do not have sufficient competence, curriculum materials such as textbooks and teacher guides provide important support for teachers.  Teacher guides, in particular, have the potential to support teachers in different ways. The guidance provided in a teacher's guide can be either directive and talk through the teacher, i.e. telling the teacher what to do, or educative and talk to the teacher, i.e. telling the teacher how to do it and why to do it this way, thereby providing the teacher with knowledge to better understand the teaching of the subject. In this study, we analyze a teacher's guide for grades 7-9 to find out what kind of support it provides the teacher. An adapted framework for the design principles of educative curriculum materials was used. The analysis shows that this particular teacher's guide mostly talks through the teacher, giving the teacher directives on how to teach but without explaining why or suggesting other possible ways. The few educative features found are short and not very detailed. The support an educative teacher's guide could provide would give the teacher agency over their teaching and a better possibility to adapt teaching to situations and students. However, we see little of that kind of guidance in the teacher's guide analyzed in this study and conclude by outlining the possible consequences for technology education.

In this chapter we report and discuss inquiry-based science teaching/learning and more specifically dialogic inquiry, as a basis for a professional development programme for teachers. The pilot programme aimed at (1) considering teachers’ experience, (2) letting teachers develop their current lessons and (3) prompting teachers’ reflections on generic competencies coming from the theory about communicative approaches and writing in dialog. The intention was to make a long-term difference for science in schools due to teachers’ enhanced awareness of dialogic inquiry. We focus on the teachers’ experience of the research-informed professional development programme. The programme was designed with six meetings, when teachers met and reflected on different aspects of dialogic inquiry, based on video clips of good practice episodes from science lessons. Between the meetings, the teachers developed and analysed their own teaching by using instruments, developed by the researchers, to find out how they used their lesson time on different lesson activities, different communicative approaches and writing. We argue that the balance between dialogic inquiry as a deep meaning-making process and dialogic inquiry as a way to organise the lesson depends on the teacher’s experience, subject knowledge and their students’ interests and creativity. Findings show that teachers observed that too much time was spent on giving instructions, that the writing of hypotheses could be improved and that the teachers’ choice of lesson activities had an impact on learning opportunities. The difference between dialogic inquiry and inquiry is discussed.