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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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Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom
We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1660948
- PAR ID:
- 10358824
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0162-3737
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 29 to 49
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737211025306
