The objective of this article was to describe collaboration of the collaborative action research participants in detail and describe what they have learned. The participants were fourteen secondary teachers who came from different regions of the Netherlands, three facilitators and an academic researcher. The findings suggest that participants contributed to the collaboration by investing time and effort (contextual conditions) and by staying open, taking each others’ opinions seriously and learning how to be critical without passing judgment (communicative conditions). The authors argue that successful collaboration that includes the knowledge and questions of the participants offers an open space for authentic learning through dialogue.