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The UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) documents for religious education indicate two distinct areas for study that may be characterised as teaching about the main faith traditions and tackling puzzling problems. This paper presents a detailed analysis of whole‐class interactive teaching and learning in one session in each of four classrooms. The analysis will present two sessions with younger pupils and two with older pupils. The sessions analysed will reflect the QCA distinctions. The mode of analysis employed focuses at the level of utterance on categories of utterance derived from studies of classroom talk in relation to learning intentions. In discussion we will describe the topography of the lessons and address two key issues, the distinctive features to these religious education sessions and the distinctions between types of lesson.