Teacher education, and academic teacher education in particular, requires collaboration between a multitude of disciplines and institutions in order to be effective. However, different professions, biographies, concepts regarding teacher education, and missing resources lead to a rather fragmented reality, which makes a coherent, competence-based curriculum difficult. The connection between the courses provided by scientific content disciplines, subject-matter didactics, and educational sciences is regularly made by the students themselves reducing student motivation and learning progress. In our contribution, we present recent advances at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, at different levels of establishing collaborations in academic teacher education. The module “Applications in physics and their didactics” is discussed as a best practice entangling concepts from physics education and insights into current physics research to create a holistic learning environment for advanced teacher students. The high level of student satisfaction demonstrates the opportunities of synergetic teacher education. Structural support for strengthening such collaborations is discussed in terms of a multiplier program as a bottom-up approach and a cross-faculty project supervised by the local center for teacher education as a top-down strategy. The experiences made and lessons learned provide inspiration and guidance for institutions to promote interdisciplinary collaborations in their academic teacher education programs.