Eliciting student thinking as resources for learning is central to productive sense making. Educators use pedagogical tools such as talk moves to direct classroom conversations toward and sometimes away from student learning. This mixed methods study describes how teaching assistants (TAs) use talk moves as pedagogical tools to elicit and work with student ideas in an undergraduate general biology laboratory course. We combined mixed‐effects modeling with micro‐level analyses of discourse using conversation analysis to describe quantitative relationships and qualitative sequencing in how TAs used ambitious and conservative talk moves to meet the pedagogical goals of a planned elicitation discussion. The two major contributions of this study are: (1) the specification of the relationship between the two parts of the TA talk move/student contribution adjacency pair in the context of elicitation discussions and (2) describing sequences of talk moves and other factors that provide insight to features of more or less rigorous elicitation discussions. These contributions have implications for future research to test hypotheses based on the qualitative findings and for informing TA professional development focused on elicitation discussions. We conclude with a discussion around common considerations in instructional decision making in light of the findings.