Inquiry into teaching increasingly focuses on how teachers examine and subsequently inform and transform their instructional practice. While we are beginning to see reports from public school teachers who are examining their own teaching, we have very little information about self-reflection among teacher educators. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine the influence of conducting inquiry into my instructional practice while I taught an introductory Language Arts course. The course contained two main components: a reflective teaching seminar and an on-site tutorial experience. Three questions guided this inquiry: 1) How did I, as the seminar leader, interact with the preservice teachers? 2) How did the preservice teachers interact within the seminar? 3) What personal experiences and attitudes were salient for one preservice teacher as she initiated a tutorial experience within the context of the course?

To conduct this study, I used narrative inquiry as the research method because it is a viable means both for understanding an experience in which the researcher is an active participant and for capturing the complexity of schooling. Narrative inquiry is a form of empirical research in which living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories is the basis for understanding lived experience. A variety of experiential materials were gathered to document the instructional behaviors of myself and the preservice teachers. Experiential materials included transcripts of interviews, stimulated recall interviews, and the seminar sessions; field notes; course documents; tutorial session documents; and my journal. In response to my research questions, I expressed my interpretations as a series of essays. Through these essays, I conveyed my understandings about the value-ladenness of teaching, the ways in which a person’s words and actions are representations of one’s personal knowledge, and how an individual’s personal knowledge shapes and informs instructional practice. By engaging in reflective inquiry, I learned more about my roles and responsibilities as a teacher educator and the potential promise and possible pitfalls of helping others engage in the study of one’s assumptions about teaching. Furthermore, I came to understand better that engaging in reflective teaching requires a social network of support, involves modeling and practice, and that such learning is a long-term process.