Because we are specialists in teacher education, because we are practitioners pragmatically testing our decisions from day to day, we are not only required to understand new ideas relevant to our activities and to test them in practice, we are responsible too for making ourselves felt in important places on critical matters. There are influential forces in our rich environment which can be used productively but which can also be detrimental: status seeking in higher education institutions where graduate teaching, research, and plain size are admired; competition within our institutions among demands on our time and energy for research, writing, teaching, and service; the prestige of scientific research; the increasing separation of foundational disciplines from study of educational problems; and the availability of new knowledge and methods in the disciplines of teaching fields. It is our responsibility to capitalize on the potential for good in these forces. In moving into centrally influential roles, it behooves us to guard against behavior that is inconsistent with our principles lest we become amoral status seekers. We must place central emphasis on our teaching while performing other functions as they relate to it, and we must use our influence to direct research activity into productive channels. (JS)