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This study focuses on three essential concepts -- collaboration, action, and research. It was initiated by three former teacher educators (TEs) at Asmara Community College of Education (ACCE), Eritrea (now defunct), and data was drawn from their written accounts and rigorous reflective discussions. It illuminates the lines of development while attempting to improve practices, the tensions this created among individuals, collective agencies, and institutional transformations. It reveals "realities" about the perpetual and unpredictable challenges the TEs encountered and the outcome of the actions they attempted to execute. Along the way, they uncovered evidence on why and how they could enrich their professional values when they come together and collaborate in exploring the essence of their practices. The findings reveal that TEs who systematize their practices through collaborative action research (CAR) can significantly develop their professional effectiveness. They have established that TEs should "collaborate, act, and engage" in research to develop enduring professional identities which can adapt to changing educational situations.

Engaging prospective teachers in collaborative inquiry into their own processes of learning was the driving intention of the collaborative action research (CAR) course which was part of a teacher education program at a college of education in Eritrea in the academic year of 2018/2019. The course led by the first two authors was collaboratively designed and developed by the authors who were closely and regularly working as passionate learning community of educators who are committed to enact change in their own practices for the past seven years. Embracing the complexity of learning teacher educating we align with the notion of inquiry as a stance in learning to live up to the complexity. Accordingly, we engaged in an intentional collaborative self-study into our own practices of facilitating a course on inquiry. The aim of this paper is to articulate key experiences of committed collaborative learning in facilitating a course of inquiry. Employing a self-study methodology, we were engaged in individual and team reflections documented in our shared diary, regular meetings to discuss and develop the CAR process, and analyzing written feedbacks given by our student teachers (STs). In this article we attempt to explore headway pedagogies while we were collaboratively learning to facilitate and support a senior class of prospective teachers (n-27) carry out their CAR projects into their own processes of learning for four months. We argue that those experiences have critical implications in developing professional identity of prospective teachers, creatively overcome the theory-practice conundrum in teacher education by developing essential experiences that prospective teachers could creatively adapt in their school practices.