In this article the authors seek to bring together the literature on college student development with best practice research on multicultural teacher education. In doing so, they assert the need for teacher educators to cultivate a more sophisticated understanding of their preservice teachers' development with respect to critical thinking, self-authorship, and social relationships. Just as preservice teachers fall back into deficit models of culture and context when describing their students, so too do teacher educators unknowingly draw on deficit discourses as they evaluate teacher candidates. This article provides an overview of the stages from three models of college student development that best inform the authors' findings, highlights the data drawn from their case studies, and maps their students' reflections to the three models. While acknowledging that their students will be leaving their programs "unfinished" and that significant developmental leaps may occur post-certification, the authors conclude by considering ways in which teacher education programs can endeavor to make these leaps possible. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)