In this article, the authors present (Lortie's, D. C. (1975) construct of the apprenticeship of observation--what people learn about teaching from having been students in school--as fundamentally conservative. Students, see teachers "front stage and center like an audience viewing a play," thus learning about teaching in a manner that is "intuitive and imitative"--learned implicitly through osmosis--rather than through "explicit and analytical" instruction in teaching methods that are presumably different from those learned through uncritical observation. In contrast to describing their teachers as exclusively authoritarian, the teachers in this study named a variety of teaching models from both the conservative and progressive pedagogical traditions, reflecting on and critiquing teachers from their past and projecting visions of their own teaching according to largely constructivist principles. The authors used in-depth interviews with volunteer participants from two secondary English Education programs and one elementary education program with the focus on Language Arts instruction and described their approach to studying these teachers' apprenticeships of observation.