This SSCF (Self Study Critical Friend) project was imagined and implemented to provide a sustained and experiential educational development collaboration for two senior faculty members who teach in the same academic department at a regional comprehensive public university in the southeastern United States.

The university has a CTL with only one full-time staff member/director. The university has, therefore, been experimenting with a distributed model of educational development with a goal to identify a “faculty development fellow” in each of its eight academic colleges/schools. These fellows work with faculty, department chairs, and deans to identify educational development needs of faculty and to plan and curate appropriate, responsive programming. Not only is the university working, as most are, to do more with less, but it is also attempting to situate educational development within the specific context of faculty members’ work. Tracy (one of the authors) was the first faculty member on campus to begin working as a faculty fellow. As the “pilot” and now veteran fellow, Tracy was given the freedom and support to explore possible and promising models of educational development that might be replicated in other colleges and units. The model described here is one such exploratory effort.

Critically reflective teaching happens when we identify and scrutinize the assumptions that shape our practice. The way we become aware of these is by seeing our actions through four complementary lenses. The first of these lenses is the lens of students’ eyes, most often represented by classroom research and classroom‐assessment activities that give us reliable information on how students experience our classrooms. The second is colleagues’ perceptions, most commonly present when we team teach but also available in support and reflection groups. Third is the lens of theory, comprising research, philosophy, and narrative descriptions of teaching in higher education. This literature can open up entirely new ways of thinking about familiar problems and dilemmas. And finally the lens of personal experience provides a rich vein of material for us to probe. Reflecting on good and bad experiences as learners gives us a very different perspective on power dynamics and the responsible exercise of authority.

The teaching dossier/portfolio is a compendium of documentation related to your experience as an instructor. Your experience may include work as a teaching assistant (TA), guest lecturer, or other instructional roles, whether at the post-secondary level or other spaces where you have taught adults. It is crucial for academic job applications. A comprehensive and effective teaching dossier/portfolio is no longer a nice to have but a must have to be competitive in today’s academic job market.

A well-crafted teaching dossier/portfolio clearly and succinctly showcases how your teaching skills are aligned with your values and philosophy related to teaching and learning.

The author analyzes self-study research in Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE). An introduction to self-study of professional practice as scholarship and methodology is followed by descriptions of 10 selected articles. Next is a presentation of 10 self-study characteristics identified in the articles. The final analysis shows three broad self-study research contributions: a) teachers and teacher educators advance the education field by becoming accomplished practitioner-researchers, b) a self-directed professional learning paradigm is advantageous for teachers' and teacher educators' professional development, and c) when teachers and teacher educators commit to their professional growth in supportive environments, they benefit themselves and others.