Recent reports from professional associations and accreditation agencies have highlighted a need for a rigorous, common set of expectations for clinical preparation experiences--a hallmark of educator preparation programs that are embedded in school/university partnerships and Professional Development Schools (PDSs). Missing in the movement toward consistent clinical practice guidelines is a shared language to describe these experiences and the roles they encompass. In this conceptual paper, we propose that without a unified vision of clinical practice and school/university partnerships--represented by a common lexicon--teacher education structures and policies will continue to develop for rather than by our field's growing number of boundary-spanning practitioners, collaborating across PK-12 school and university contexts. In support of this proposal, we summarize two national studies of the lexicon used by constituents of award-winning and PDS-based teacher preparation programs, revealing how the range of terms employed across programs can be perplexingly large, even to constituents in the same school or university setting. A shared lexicon drawn from the experiences of these educators--many of whom are leading members of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS)--could have significant impacts on the practices and policies of teacher education.