Chapter 3: Narrative Inquiry of Teacher Educators’ Selfdirected Professional Learning Spaces: Three Pillars and a Five-Phase Cycle Model

Teacher educators (TEs) in university-based teacher education programs often wear many hats with lofty expectations for excellence in their varied professional responsibilities. In addition to maintaining productive, creative and scholarly outputs, they are charged with sustaining the quality of their teacher preparation programs and serving as exemplars of outstanding teaching. TEs also pursue goals for self-improvement as a component of their annual review process.

Self-directed professional learning spaces (SDPLSs) provide TEs a space through which they may address introspection, management, monitoring, and motivation toward professional growth (Garrison, 1997; Shurr et al., 2014). In this paper, SDPLSs refer to the three fundamental pillars where TEs develop an intentional and well-rounded personal professional development plan to support their ongoing growth in the areas of teaching, research, and service. The purpose of one’s self-directed professional development plan is to improve an educator’s own practice, “accompanied by the hope that what [the educator learns] could also be potentially beneficial to other teacher educators” (Monroe, 2013, p. 96) and their students at large. As we reflected on our professional growth over our careers as teacher educators, we attributed our achievements and successes to three fundamental pillars of professional learning spaces (PLSs). Our three pillars are professional organizations (Pillar 1), institutional assets (Pillar 2), and virtual online resources (Pillar 3) as illustrated in Figure 3.1. We narrate the rich and varied scopes of the three pillars generated from our experiences exploring resources and pursuing excellence in SDPLSs.