Online teacher education is experiencing significant growth worldwide. One of the major challenges accompanying this growth is that many teacher educators find themselves underprepared and under pressure to design online teacher education courses that reflect their beliefs about what constitutes high-quality teacher preparation practice. Further, teacher educators in disciplines such as special education face additional challenges in developing understandings about the legalities of writing and implementing disability service plans and performing additional testing. In this self-study of online special education teacher education practice, two collaborators worked to identify strategies and practices for professional community building in a class about teaching reading to students with disabilities. The findings highlight issues of teacher educator authority and presence online against other needs to model collegiality and promote scholarly thinking. Researchers in online teaching may find insight into both the cognitive and contextual concerns as they work to enhance online teacher education while they plan their own investigations.