Even though science teachers and other stakeholders all want students to be instructed in the most effective way possible, discussions about what that way might be are seldom productive. What the author has found in these conversations is that, despite a number of shared goals for student learning that participants bring to the table and despite the shared understanding that there are as many ways to teach as there are teachers, the dialogue about science education quickly and inevitably reaches a stalemate in a contest between two irreconcilable scripts--"traditional talk" and "reform talk." In this article, the author explores this rhetorical bottleneck and offers modest suggestions in setting the stage for more productive types of conversations. (Contains 5 endnotes.)