An Associate Professor and A Doctoral Student Learn From Each Other: Critical Friendship

Teaching evaluation mechanisms are often a process of isolated reflection on teaching. In some cases, university lecturers also do not have support systems for their teaching development. Feelings of isolation and the absence of support systems, when taken together, hinder positive teaching-related changes in university instructors’ future classrooms. In this paper, the authors promote the idea of forming a critical friendship (CF) through the successful building of trust. This qualitative case study reports on a CF between an associate professor (as an observed lecturer) and a doctoral student (as a critical friend) at a state university in the USA. More specifically, the paper explores teaching lessons that both participants can gain from the CF. Data were garnered from video recordings of teaching practices from a course on methods for teaching English language learners, observation notes, and semi-structured interviews. This study reports on the CF’s success based on explicit principles around trust, reflection, peer observation, and interaction between the observed lecturer and the critical friend. Limitations of the current study and directions for further research are discussed.