This paper describes a heuristic framework developed to provide a common vocabulary with which to discuss pedagogy within a collaborative university-school research team studying pedagogical redesign in middle-years classrooms (Years 6-9) serving disadvantaged students. The framework was developed in response to discussions about teaching in such settings, during which teacher talk about pedagogy emphasised "relationships" with students and left the detail of such relationships relatively opaque. In response, the pedagogical processes described in this framework have been developed to provide a vocabulary with which researchers and teachers can talk to each other--with increased conceptual purchase--about pedagogy at the micro-scale of relational interaction between student, teacher and the knowledge they together produce. The use of this framework to analyse teachers' descriptions of their work is suggestive of reasons why difficulties were encountered when trying to talk explicitly about pedagogy with teachers, and of productive pathways for further research about pedagogies as teachers' work. This framework may also be used as a supplement to other pedagogical frames which more strongly emphasise outcomes rather than process. (Contains 3 notes, 2 tables, and 1 figure.)