This paper reports on a project where three schools in one municipality are involved in a 2-years preparation process of merging three existing schools into one greater newly built school. In each of these schools, training arenas has been set up based on the architecture of the new school building (e.g. principles of room-in-the-room, small amphitheaters, varying furniture and rich access to ICTs). The new school highlights an organizational shift where teachers will move from individual work in classes of 23-30 students to team-based teaching. Each team teaches one whole grade with approx. 100 students in home arenas. This paper focuses on how the three existing schools prepare teachers for such a shift. The aim is to increase the understanding of what skills teachers need and develop for team-based teaching. The research question addressed: what characterizes the pedagogical practice in the training arenas in terms of how the arena is used and teacher-student communication and interaction? A participatory design-based research methodology (Holmgren, 2019) was applied where this paper focus on the initial phase of teachers’ work in the training arenas. The analysis draws on a) classroom observations based on audio recordings from the teachers’ communication, notes, and photographs, and b) teacher and principal interviews. The data were analyzed with support of a typology where Bernstein’s (2000) theory of classification and framing were operationalized into a two-dimensional typology based on the physical organization of space (classification), and teachers’ communication in practice (framing) (Bergström et al., 2017). Preliminary results indicate possibilities and challenges in the pedagogical practice. Possibilities concern a richer environment which provides variation in students’ learning, while challenges concern increase demands on students’ self-regulation when power and control was distributed to the students.