Partnering with families in ways that support children's learning is a skill that is central to high-quality teaching. Parent-teacher conferences are a key site for teachers to learn how to leverage family resources in service of instruction. To know how to support the development of well-started beginners, teacher education (TE) programs must design substantive opportunities for interns to learn to bridge students' work in schools on academic content with their home and community-based experiences; they must also be able to assess teacher candidates' capacities to enact this learning. The authors report on their efforts to design a simulated parent-teacher conference, used here as a pre-assessment, as a means for assessing interns' capacities to interact with and learn from diverse families to better support the needs of students. They refer to these skills as "partnering practices."