Unpacking Moments of Success in Teacher Education: Discovery of Nuance Through Collaborative Self-Study

As critically reflective teachers, we strive to always be exploring and improving our practices. We have often found ourselves disproportionately focusing on moments of frustration or perceived difficulty in our practices. In this study, we employed collaborative self-study to identify moments of success, and the methods we enacted in those moments, within two sections of an introductory teaching course. Analysis of transcribed debriefing sessions revealed that while we initially believed that we were largely similar in our practices, there were more layers and diversity to our practices than we realized. While we found that we had similar definitions of 'successful' teaching, due to our shared commitments to socially transformative and critical pedagogy, and enacted a similar metaphor for teaching, we also found that we used divergent tools within the classroom and utilized our tacit knowledge in distinctive ways. Within those moments of success, we uncovered convergences and divergences in our practices that were previously hidden. This process of collaborative self-study created opportunities for the continued evolution of our teacher education practices in ways that we could not anticipate. We conclude with a discussion of implications for teacher candidates, in-service teachers, and teacher educators including the value in exploring tacit knowledge and moments of success, the versatility of collaborative self-study methodology, and the complexities of socially transformative pedagogy.