This paper describes an introductory teacher education course designed to challenge prospective teachers' beliefs about schooling, teaching, and learning, formed as a result of personal experience. The instructor encountered problems in attempting both to engage his students' existing beliefs about teaching and learning and to encourage their consideration of alternative beliefs taken from educational literature. It proved challenging to establish a satisfactory working relationship with the students, to organize productive interaction between their current beliefs and potential alternatives, to aid them to do the intellectual work involved in such interaction, and to manage the ambiguities and risks that the course presented. A concluding commentary suggests that teacher education courses involve not only encounters between old and new ideas and between students and instructors, but also between different communities of knowledge, commitment, and practice, one based in schools and the other in the university. To make the connections good, the instructor had to learn how to manage a corresponding set of pedagogical balancing acts that took into account students' conceptions of teaching and learning to teach. (LL)