The Role of Critical Friendship in Technology‐Enhanced Supervision During COVID‐19: Lessons From Self‐Study Practice

This paper discusses our online critical friendship (CF) and its influence on our technology‐enhanced supervision in an MA in English Language Teaching (ELT) practicum amid the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our supervision approach fostered online engagement and reflection among student‐teachers through interactive tasks and technologies. As new supervisors, we reflected on our practices through Zoom conversations and WhatsApp debriefings, eliciting qualitative data for this study. To frame this friendship, we drew on two theoretical lenses: one outlining the developmental stages of CF and the other involving the practice of critical reflection through colleague's perspectives. Adopting a self‐study methodology comprising reflexive thematic analysis of data, we observed that our CFs worked as a co‐constructed space for collaborative meaning‐making, surpassing the benefits of isolated reflection in numerous ways. Through mindful listening, perspective sharing, and critiquing each other's practice, we learned, unlearned, and navigated nuanced dimensions of technology‐enhanced supervision. The study accentuates that informal CF, driven by trusted colleagues' self‐initiatives, can empower practitioners to explore new pedagogical ideas during crises, provided they share a commitment to critical reflection and mutual practice evaluation. We conclude that similar context‐specific self‐studies may validate CF as a valuable mechanism for professional learning, particularly in settings where engagement with and appreciation for CF remain scarce.