Purpose: The paper aims to examine how a professional development school-district (PDS-D) partnership, enacting an improvement science stance, collectively explored social-emotional learning (SEL) during collaboratively designed professional learning experiences. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative study, guided by an improvement science orientation, enacted an iterative research design. Data sources consisted of anecdotal field notes and artifacts from 12 professional learning sessions. Using a constant comparative method, the authors applied an inductive thematic analysis to identify salient themes across data related to teacher wonderings and identified goals. Findings: The paper illuminates teachers' voices while highlighting information gleaned from participant wonderings, their identified goals and how this information informed the iterative development of future professional learning experiences within a district-university partnership. Research limitations/implications: Due to the chosen research approaches and limited number of participants, the research results may lack generalizability. Originality/value: This paper provides original insight into collaborative development of recursive professional learning experiences within partnership spaces.