Collaboration has been found to be a powerful tool for professional development and central for further opportunities for teachers to reflect on their practice. However, school districts continue to have difficulty both implementing and sustaining collaboration. The purpose of this research was to investigate the experience of the teacher in a creative, instructional collaboration. This study provided several observations. The first was that teachers can experience successful, high-level collaboration in which they perceive a sense of satisfaction, mutuality, trust and growth. For the five middle school teachers in this Jewish school of faith, their satisfactory experience with collaboration was teacher-initiated. When the participating teachers felt that they had power over their collaboration, they perceived the collaborative experience to be productive, in that they were able to engage in collegial learning (Darling-Hammond, 2000; John-Steiner, 2000). The teachers in this study found that teacher-initiated collaboration offered them trust and they were more comfortable, transparent, and open with their partners. They were also more willing to question their existing approaches and try new ones (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). The results also supported the claim that teacher collaboration can facilitate school reform. Participating teachers felt less isolation and developed more teacher knowledge. It found that more scholarly dialogue and study of the phenomenon of teacher collaboration, as a means of promoting teacher learning and building achievement, is necessary to the betterment of education. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]