There are lots of great resources for supporting productive classroom talk during science instruction…
But when it comes to engineering design I think we need some different questions and talk moves to guide students as they are collaborating to solve problems. I haven’t found a resource on “engineering talk”… so I created this engineering talk moves document.
This is very drafty and I would love some feedback. What is missing? What is redundant? Does this document even make sense? What needs to be improved to make this document useful for K-12 teachers?
The idea is that this 1 pager would be used by a teacher to guide students’ thinking as they are in the middle of collaborative work to solve an engineering problem.
I look forward to your feedback. Click HERE to download the document.
Science for All 
Love the approach, Kirk! This is a great idea.
Could you include some questions about measurement and mathematics concepts to go along with testing? Also, while most of the questions prompt open-ended responses, there are a few that could be answered “yes” or “no”.
Could these be followed up with a “Why?” or be re-worded to elicit a more elaborated response?
Keep sharing your innovations 🙂
Loren Willson Secondary Curriculum and Professional Development Sumner School District 253.891.6078
“The quality of our schools is a function of the quality of the conversations within our schools.”
Thanks Loren,
This is great feedback. I’ll use then when I create version 2.0 of this tool.
Kirk
Great stuff Kirk,
This reminded me of a student talk workshop our district office facilitated.
We took a set of potential of teacher questions for students and identified them as questions that fell into one of 3 categories: 1)norms and routines, 2)engagement strategies, or 3)deepening thinking, recognizing that all 3 are appropriate depending on the goal and place in the lesson.
Our conversation was around our thinking around recognizing the strategic and appropriate places in a lesson to ask the 1, 2, or 3 category of questions.
I am wondering if there is a place in this document for this? Color coding questions based on their category? It might help teachers differentiate between the types of questions to choose from.
I am also wondering if some of these questions can also be visually connected to the engineering design process diagram to give a different sense of the appropriate timing of questions.
Thanks for all your work Kirk:)
Thanks for the feedback Bill. I’m hoping to make some revisions to this document by the end of the month.