For the past year, the Education Department has been working on increasing the coherency of its curriculum, and using a process similar to curriculum mapping to do so. We have engaged in departmental “conversations” on the first Friday of each month to discuss course goals, content, and assignments. It has been an eye-opening exercise and, yes, hard work, as we have tried to articulate the essential knowledge and skills of teacher education and our own assumptions and values that frame them. We have examined our course content, our required assignments, and our class activities to consider the alignment of courses typically taken during the same semester (horizontal alignment) and those taken in sequence (vertical alignment). We have drawn diagrams and made charts; we have listed and sorted; we have agreed and disagreed. Progress clearly has been made in reducing redundancy and discarding topics that do not contribute to what we have determined to be our essential knowledge and skills, but after a year, we are still not finished. We look forward to the university-wide discussion of academic challenge as a way of extending and informing our continued conversations.