This paper focuses on freshman-level students expecting to major in teacher education. In their long apprenticeship of observation as students, preservice teachers have acquired both a mass of information about schoolteaching and a subjective warrant to teach. In the introductory teacher education course, "Exploring Teaching," the students' experiences appear as conceptions of school lessons which complicate their learning. In an attempt to cope with the situation, students have been assigned to write "conversations" about school lessons shown on videotape. In those conversations, the students cultivate several distinct voices: themselves as inexperienced teachers, as experienced students, and as each of several authors of their required readings. The writing assignments both organize and reveal interaction between students' prior conceptions of teaching, the videotaped teaching that they analyze and the arguments they encountered in their readings. Several ways are described in which the conversational procedure helps cope with the students' subjective warrant to teach. (LL)