<p>Cultures of talk in classroom are significant because they have direct bearing on children’s participation, interactions, engagement, and opportunities for interpretative learning. Moreover, culturally specific worldviews underpin how talk is expressed within and across cultures. In this paper, we use the Pacific lens of reciprocity to focus on Pacific children’s perceptions of the role of talk for learning, the rules of talk, and their participation in classroom talk. We draw on findings from a Design Based Research study, where researchers gathered and analysed student interviews about the role of talk for learning, the classroom practices for talk and barriers to talk. We report on a process wherein teachers, positioned as researchers, engaged in collective data analysis, sorting and summarising to interpret the children’s responses. The teachers went on to honour those contributions by refining their teaching approaches to align more closely with the students’ views of talk as an enactment of the reciprocity involved in learning together. We argue here that children’s insights offer teachers new ways of understanding the potential of talk for learning as well as the barriers to learning that children identify within their current classroom participatory structures.</p>