Is dialogue a productive normative ideal for facilitating engaged classroom discussion? Using the theoretical discourse of dialogue as a lens through which to reflexively examine and reconstruct three cases of IFCCD (instructor facilitated collegiate classroom discussion), two classrooms are analyzed as being constructed through two different versions of dialogic discussion while the third is analyzed as being constructed through the talk of the expert-novice dialectic. Dialogue is found to be an informative lens through which to theorize IFCCD and both dialogue and dialectic are considered as practically useful ideals for instructors to enact in talk as a means of managing the experienced dilemmas of the communication practice of IFCCD. Emergent findings and instructional implications of the study are also addressed.