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It is complicated and nuanced work to find ways to positively challenge the growth of a developing teacher and help them identify whether or not they have the dispositions to become an effective and professional educator. While rejecting the simplistic notion that teachers are “born not made,” we also acknowledge that there are key dispositions necessary to and shared by dynamic educators. Good teaching is easy to talk about and hard to define. It is recognizable when we see It. We recognize the It factor when we observe a teacher who has It, but how do we help teacher candidates recognize their own dispositional strengths and weaknesses? What are the most salient dispositions? How do we measure them? Can they be nurtured or taught? Although caring alone is not enough to constitute competent educational practice, it is an essential element of teacher effectiveness. Exposing teacher candidates to teaching dispositions and asking them to engage in reflective practice by self-assessing their own capacity for caring, engaging in authentic teacher-student relationships, committing to a culturally responsive and nurturing pedagogy, bringing their best professional self into the learning community, and so forth, may lead them one step closer to forming a critically compassionate intellectualism that will have substantive implications for their practice.