Teacher educators must embody an equity-focused orientation when working with preservice teachers. The article shares insights gained from a quantitative exercise as part of a critical autoethnography project. We situate this project as professional development for two teacher education researchers. The goals were to deepen knowledge of and adeptness with equity focused, culturally responsive teaching practices in teacher education and to investigate the usefulness of quantitative data for studying equity pedagogies in teacher education. Findings are shared as learning examples that spurred us to affirm the need for critical mixed methods and to inform next steps in our own teacher education research. We also describe the messiness and unease we grappled with throughout the exercise. This work contributes to the on-going call for purposeful and systematic teacher preparation programming informed by teacher educators' deep knowledge of culturally responsive teaching practices as a pathway to realizing equity in education.