There is a strong international trend for governments to move teacher training away from the universities into the schools. In effect, this is a challenge to the expertise and effectiveness of university-based teacher educators. This paper examines the role of fashions in research in the destruction of teacher educator credibility. Reflective teaching, the quantitative-qualitative debate, and challenges to a notion of commonsense reality springing from a range of sociological and philosophical theories are considered as more recent examples of fashionable research issues in teacher education. Reasons for fashions in education research considered include: pressures generated by the scaling down and closure of teacher education facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom; the advent of more journals, all competing for a buying and reading audience; attempts to judge academic worth through volume; and a tendency for academics to avoid lengthy research projects. The need for a more rigorous approach to research involving replication and transfer to natural classrooms is highlighted as well as the need for extensive trialling before new approaches are widely implemented. (Contains approximately 40 references.) (Author/LL)