This presentation is based on the evaluation data of Paedeia Cafés which has been collected analyzed by the Danish and Portuguese partners of the PAEDEIA project. The students and novice teachers who had participated in the Cafés set up in Finland, Sweden, and Turkey reported that participating in the Cafés had been a valuable experience that had been helpful in their transition from being a student to becoming a teacher. Something, so they reported, had changed in and through the Café. One had become ”confident” and ”more ready to go to work”. Another had entered the ”Cafe” in a bad mood (”you just feel like you want ‘to aaarrhg’”) and left it smiling. Yet another was “lost”, when she came, but had left with something she could use. The stories told by the participants revert around a common theme of positive transformations, brought about by taking part in the activities of the cafés. The context of the cafés, or the kind of ethos established in the peer-group settings of the Cafés, seems to have been crucial for facilitating the reported positive transformations. In the presentation the characteristics of this facilitating ethos and its constituting values will be identified and described, and the reported positive transformation will be interpreted as examples of professional empowerment through multiple transformations, involving cognitive, operational and emotive transformations, which can be seen as central aspects of the development of a professional teacher identity. Finally the question of how to organize a setting which supports the establishment of such a facilitating ethos will be addressed.

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