Preparing teachers who want to "listen to their students' lives"requires creating opportunities for prospective teachers to perceive and learn about their students' lives and how those unfold within and as part of complex systems. That means supporting prospective teachers not only in understanding students as complex beings who have to navigate different contexts (e.g., home, school, community) but actually seeing students in those contexts and understanding the contexts as multiple and intersecting ecologies. An ecological perspective challenges the separation of theory from practice, the university classroom from the secondary classroom, and the world of schooling from the home and community worlds among which secondary students move. Such a challenge, the authors argue, prepares teachers who are attentive and responsive to students as complex beings situated in multiple structures and sets of relationships. This article provides a theoretical framework that outlines the notion of ecology with which they are working and a description of a project called Teaching and Learning Together (TLT) that supports the development of an ecological perspective. Taking a collaborative approach to teacher education, this nearly 20-year-old project positions secondary students enrolled in urban and suburban public schools as partners to prospective teachers, offering glimpses into students' lived realities and advice about creating classrooms that support diverse learners.