Teacher educators are increasingly experiencing conflicts between external demands and their ideas about preparing students to teach. This paper reports on ways in which such educators promote learning in their students, and how their practical teaching methods relate to their professional views on teaching. This paper argues that the teaching realities of a teacher educator's teaching techniques can best be interpreted through the dilemmas they encounter. The construct of "dilemma" is advanced as a way to link conceptual reflection, deliberate choice and professional action. The study on which this paper is based investigated how teacher educators in the Dutch teacher education context conceptualize their teaching and how they use these concepts to help their students learn to teach. The paper notes several professional dilemmas these educators faced in their classroom teaching. It shows that while dilemmas can coherently describe how teacher educators actually think about teaching, teaching and action are often disconnected. Thus, teacher educators wrestle with how to put into practice their educational concepts as well as how to extrapolate educational concepts from practice. (Contains 1 table.)