Insight Gleaned from Our Participation in a Faculty Self-Study Learning Group

The first chapter in this section, written by the department chair who oversaw the formation of the Department of Instruction and Leadership in Education (DILE) self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) group, explored some of the challenges and opportunities in creating a place for self-study research within a school of education in the United States that, like so many others, desires to offer quality courses taught by faculty who are experts in their field and productive as educational researchers. The second chapter in this section reported on the experiences of the facilitator of the self-study group as he tried to plan and execute learning opportunities for his colleagues to help them better understand and use S-STEP methodology to advance their teaching, research, or both. The chapters immediately thereafter consisted of individual accounts from each member of the group addressing issues related to their learning of self-study and its application to their work. For this final chapter, we present the findings of a collaborative self-study focused on our experiences in the group and our collective learning of self-study research. Specifically we explore issues related to who we are as teacher educators that made us interested in self-study, what we wanted to get from our participation in the group, our collective understandings of self-study methodology, and our perceptions of the usefulness of the group in relation to facilitating such understandings of self-study.