In 2014, the Ministry of Education in New Zealand funded innovative initial teacher education programmes using school/university partnerships to improve achievement for priority learners. My 'being' as a teacher educator would need to become a member of a professional learning community with student teachers and teachers in schools rather than solely a lecturer in a university classroom. Using a phenomenological theoretical foundation for a practitioner-based research methodology, I reveal my their lived experiences of this new role trialling a range of strategies for enhancing school/university partnerships to support student teachers' confidence to meet the needs of diverse learners as preparation for their first year of teaching. Through a personal/professional reflective process, new strategies emerged: lesson study, an evolving list of teaching practices to unpack and the use of practitioner-based inquiry for student teachers. In the discussion, observations are made about the partnership and particularly the role of the university lecturer. A significant finding was that as an initial teacher educator, I needed to adopt the dispositions for student teachers, such as adaptability and flexibility, articulated in the graduate profile for the programme to enhance the professional learning community partnership. All members of the professional learning community partnership valued the three-way partnership between the student teacher, school and university in which every contribution was valued, new strategies could be trialled and reviewed, resulting in opportunities to learn from the different perspectives to engage children in their learning.