This study examines teacher education with a multi-site, longitudinal ethnography of entering teachers’ professional socialization. For over a year, I followed a sample of teacher candidates through their last year of training. The data include: approximately 200 hours of participant observation; and multiple interviews with teacher candidates as well as one-time interviews with education faculty, administrators, and mentor teachers for a total of 47 in-depth interviews. I find that teacher candidates develop perspectives on the work of teaching through interaction in their peer cultures, which are shaped by organizational conditions of their training. Through collective routines, they construct perspectives which emphasize the need to adapt teaching strategies to specific classroom contexts, and to prioritize general goals of positively influencing students. Such perspectives reflect the organizational conditions of their training and transitions into the work environment of schools. They are taught by faculty that they must choose from a wide range of options for teaching strategies, and adapt their own classroom practices to effectively manage different groups of students. Teacher candidates actively interpret these conditions through collective routines, and come to view teaching as necessarily unpredictable and dynamic work. The perspectives they develop through their peer cultures are often reaffirmed in their interactions with students when they enter into the classroom at the point of student teaching. I find that the ways incoming teachers make sense of their training serves to reproduce the organizational functioning of schools, the occupational status of teaching, and traditional gender roles in a female dominated occupation.