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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.
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Is the medium the message? Video-recording and writing for approximations of practice.
Paper presented at the 2021 Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, as part of the symposium Opportunities and Challenges Associated with Approximations of Practice in Teacher Education Programs In 1964, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan proposed a then-radical idea in media theory: We should study not only content of messages, but also the impact of the medium itself, on society. He captured this idea in the phrase: The medium is the message. We take this idea into the study of teachers’ approximations of practice. We ask: Can the creation medium impact teachers’ approximation of practice, especially their recomposition of practice? The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to investigate differences in how prospective teachers may decompose and recompose practice during video and written approximations of practice. By written approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as producing (parts of) a lesson plan; by video approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as video recording oneself responding to a (hypothetical) student.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1726744
- PAR ID:
- 10294552
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association
- ISSN:
- 0163-9676
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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