Teaching a field experience course during a pandemic resulted in unique challenges because preservice teachers could not visit classrooms like they would in a traditional field experience. This article is a self-study exploration of the tensions experienced by a doctoral student teaching an elementary math and science field experience in a fully online setting during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To substitute for a lack of available elementary school children, preservice teacher acted as substitutes for children during lesson rehearsals. Preservice teachers were usually poor substitutes for actual children when evaluating the extent to which the pandemic field experience mimicked traditional field experience. Instructional videos were frequently used in an attempt to provide meaningful opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in classroom practices. The perceived usefulness of instructional videos by preservice videos varied based on the type of video that was used.

Employing self-study methodology this work examines not only the transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator but also the increased complexity of this experience while teaching online during the pandemic, and the transition back to some sense of normalcy with teaching in person. Data sources include Author One’s reflective journal, recordings of meetings with critical friends providing feedback throughout the process, and student artifacts from different activities applied from year 1 to year 2. From our coding of the journal from year 1, several codes were identified about Author One’s identity as a teacher educator being tied to the types of interactions he fosters in his classroom.  As he transitions to teaching in person in year 2 (Fall 2021) we look to see how he takes what he learned about fostering these interactions in an online environment and applies them to his in-person teaching. Techniques learned from his semester 2 experience of online teaching guide him in this process and critical friend meetings will focus on attending to the transitional moments in his identity as he makes yet another shift in developing who he is as a teacher educator.