This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic techniques and conversational analysis involved taped recordings and descriptive accounts of six teacher/supervisor conferences, followed by transcriptions and taped debriefing sessions with the supervisors. Conversation analysis showed how discourse and interaction patterns mitigate criticism and demonstrate the conference expectation of supervisory evaluation, the supervisory freedom to use teacher "data" and control the sequences and topics of talk, and the "embedded" nature of the conferences. (36 notes) (LMI)