Learning to teach is a complex intellectual and adaptive performance act. Student engagement is the cornerstone of effective instruction. Current education reform policies, such as Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and Teacher Effectiveness (Rothstein & Mathis, 2013) prioritize the importance of educators developing K-12 students' intellectual capacities through cognitively engaging tasks. To prepare effective teachers, teacher educators must foster pre-service teachers' abilities to cognitively engage students and increase students' academic achievement. In this article, the authors highlight the importance of student engagement by describing promising practices in one teacher education program: (1) clearly identifying the role that student engagement plays in the classroom; (2) creating structures for teacher educators to observe and support student engagement; and (3) exploring what student engagement looks like from a pre-service teacher's perspective.