This article contributes to understanding of the professional learning of expert school teachers when they are appointed as university-based teacher educators. A qualitative analysis is used to interpret the transcripts of 16 semi-structured interviews with newly appointed lecturers, in a large UK teacher education department, who have moved from school-based teacher roles and have less than five years' experience working in higher education. The new teacher educators experience tensions within the educational partnership and professional field about the value of abstract knowledge compared with work-based practice and about what a lecturer in teacher education should be.