Teachers' interactional practices shape children's displays of knowledge. Teachers often rely on direct interactional devices, such as questions, to call for knowledge displays from children. However, case examples suggest that interactional strategies that downgrade teachers' expert status, such as 'I wonder…' formulations may enhance child agentic participation. From 170 h of video-recorded classroom interactions across nine sites, 81 h were of teachers interacting with children (aged 3.5-5 years). This corpus of interactions was examined to explicate how teachers use 'I wonder…' formulations in their interactions with children. Drawing on the analytic resources of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we found that this formulation worked to disrupt teachers' institutionally ascribed expert status and provided children with interactional spaces to display their own knowledge. The 'I wonder…' strategy is presented as an interactional tool for teachers to draw upon to (i) elicit children's displays of knowledge and (ii) follow-up when children have stayed silent or shown hesitancy during earlier talk. Fine-grained investigations of teacher-child talk enable the explication of interactional strategies that enrich communication and learning strategies in classrooms.