What defines a strong connection between university and school-based experiences for a small teacher education program? This paper explores the creation of "intentional partnerships," which involves the systematic crossing of multiple voices (preservice, mentor, university professor, principal, supervisor) to build mutual understandings across institutions, to generate new thinking about teacher development, and to better support the transition preservice teachers must make into schools. In this paper, we document our early efforts to create intentional partnerships--describing our conceptual model and aims, identifying the complications of selected partnership features, and describing a recent partnership meeting. Our purpose is to spark discussion about the ways in which small teacher education programs like ours might enact capacity-building relationships with schools--in ways that support mutual growth and programmatic re-thinking about the learning needs of preservice teachers. (Contains 4 figures.)