This qualitative, interpretive and naturalistic classroom research was oriented by the principles of Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Miller, 2001; Allwright, 2003) and conceptualized as work for understanding. Such collective work was performed by a teacher and his students from the 7th grade, as a way of promoting practitioner reflection on the use of the English language textbook in their classroom. Achieving better understanding – and following from that, an improvement of the quality of classroom life – by fostering that reflection through potentially exploitable pedagogic activities and improving the quality of classroom life is the purpose of this study. The results of the activities performed by the students were analyzed based on notions related to classroom interaction (van Lier, 1988; Vygotsky, 1978; Allwright and Bailey, 2004), quality of classroom life (Gieve & Miller, 2006), the textbook (Souza, 1999) and beliefs (Araújo, 2006; Barcelos, 2004; Richards & Lockhart, 1994). The understandings reached by the teacher-researcher show that the students see the book as a learning opportunity only if there is an appropriate working atmosphere in the classroom. The students’ discourse uncovers an explicit concern with the teacher and has helped us become more aware of the classroom lives that we lead together and of our pedagogic work with the book. The principles of Exploratory Practice resonate in the students’ productions.