This article considers the ways in which 17 novice teachers define and describe effective urban teaching and the stark contrasts that these teachers draw between effective urban teaching and effective teaching. The authors find that descriptions of students played a considerable role when participants made distinctions between effective teaching and effective urban teaching. These teachers defined the two types of teaching largely in terms of perceived behaviors, beliefs, and characteristics of urban and suburban students that were chiefly based on monolithic group stereotypes and in the case of students of color, were deficit laden. (Contains 5 notes.)