General description of the research questions, objectives and theoretical framework Higher education in Norway is currently meeting new demands for educators across disciplines to collaborate and develop innovative teaching and training for future professionals. This paper reports on a study of teacher support teams (TST) that were introduced in order to generate peer support among 16 teacher and nurse educators at a Norwegian university college. TST meetings were videotaped to enable the researchers to study patterns of collaboration and joint problem solving. The study was guided by the following research question: • How are TST groups constituted as tools for professional development and what potentiality do they have to generate creative problem-solving processes? Inspired by sociocultural perspectives on professional work (Edwards, 2010), the project was designed to foster creative collaboration and joint problem solving. In this regard, we view creativity as the emergence of new perspectives or ways of seeing a problem (Wegerif et al., 2010). A basic assumption in the project is that expansion of understanding typically emerges in collaborative teams with the ability of continual openness and recognition of multiple perspectives. There is a working hypothesis that open-ended dialogue between peers in TST groups forms a productive starting point for educators to share experiences and solve problems related to episodes from their teaching practice (Daniels, 2001; Bedward & Daniels, 2005). Methods/methodology The project is inspired by design experiments (Brown, 1992; Roth, 2005) and the presented findings are part of an ongoing development of the project. The presented video data was subjected to interaction analysis, which is a method for analysing social interaction and naturally occurring talk within joint activity (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). This analytical framework is well-suited for analysing in detail how the participants co-produce knowledge collaboratively and how creativity is developed and performed as part of the TST practices. Expected outcomes/results The findings show that the positioning of participants as ‘peers’ rather than ‘experts’ is an important driver for creative problem-solving processes. Setting up a collaborative sphere for lecturers from different professional domains was perceived as being useful; furthermore, their differing positions were a continuous creative resource in TST meetings. The manner in which the groups engage in creative knowledge production are examined in detail. The overall aim of the project is to generate a deeper understanding of the social practices of collaboration between the highly skilled professionals who teach at the university level.

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