Being a teacher educator and teaching about teaching is a special challenge. The teacher educator needs not only to talk about teaching but also to ’walk the talk’, while the teacher educator inevitably is a role model for the teacher students. Thus the invisible and visible processes of teacher education is interesting to document and analyse, while these even might be more important than the actual knowledge that the courses are intended to provide. (Lunenberg, Korthagen & Swennen, 2007.)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential of collaborative and reflective learning and teaching in teacher education, with a special focus on experiences from a particular course in the teacher education programme at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. There is no detailed single curriculum of teacher education in Finland, rather some principles and general outlines (Malinen, Väisänen & Savolainen, 2012). The current process of renewing Finnish education in line with the new core curriculum for basic education is involving teacher educators, teacher students and teachers in schools to reflect on and reframe learning and teaching.

One of the characteristics of the Finnish teacher education is that all courses should be integrated with research. The so called ‘research-based teacher education’ has got deep roots in the Finnish education system (see for instance Uljens & Nyman 2015). The ideal is to educate reflective practitioners (Schön 1983) who have the competence to analyse and develop their teaching (Hansén, Eklund & Sjöberg, 2015; Kansanen, 2011; Korpinen, 2003; Tirri, 2014; Toom, Kynäslahti, Krokfors, Jyrhämä, Byman, Stenberg, Maaranen & Kansanen 2010; Westbury, Hansén, Kansanen & Björkqvist, 2005). In times of reform and renewal it is essential to recapture the ideals, values and visions of teacher education as well as of teaching and learning, by collective exploration of the constraints and enablers of active learning in different contexts, and especially in teacher education.

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