2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is a growing body of work to characterize elementary engineering classroom talk and its influence on students’ learning. One form of classroom talk is the whole-class conversation, which can be an important site for growth in students’ ideas and ways of thinking about engineering design problems and solutions. With intentional teacher facilitation, whole-class conversations can help students refine their engineering reasoning, consider new ideas, and make new connections between different ways of defining or solving a problem. Participating in these conversations can also help students expand their engineering thinking to include perspectives of care and socio-ethical deliberations.

In a multi-year collaboration of classroom teachers and university researchers, we have been enacting and studying five different genres of whole-class engineering Design Talks in first-grade through sixth-grade classrooms: problem scoping talks, idea generation talks, design-in-progress talks, design synthesis talks, and impact talks. As a teacher-researcher community of practice, we have video recorded these “Design Talks” in teachers’ classrooms. These classroom video clips have helped us explore a range of questions about how to structure Design Talks.

This paper reports on a qualitative study focused on teacher perceptions of their experiences with Design Talks in their classrooms. Specifically, we ask: How do elementary teachers perceive the benefits and challenges of intentionally facilitated whole-class conversations during engineering design units? Study participants were the six classroom teachers in our Design Talks community of practice. Data sources include field notes from teacher-researcher meetings over three years and teachers’ written responses to open-ended reflection questions. We applied thematic analysis techniques (Braun & Clarke, 2006), including initial coding followed by thematic mapping.

We found four themes that characterize how teachers perceive the benefits and challenges of whole-class engineering design conversations. Teachers find that these conversations help them employ asset-based pedagogies while at the same time helping their students synthesize designs and their underlying concepts, take a perspective of care in engineering design, and learn to listen, empathize, and communicate.