The field of teacher preparation is falling short of its most important responsibility: ensuring that the teachers we train are ready to do the job. For more than a decade,TNTP preparation programs produced teachers who were no more or less effective than teachers from any other program-- some were great, some were poor, most were about average. Over the course of several years TNTP has worked to develop a new approach to teacher preparation. They began by clarifying higher expectations teachers need to meet in their first year in order to earn certification. TNTP also recognized the needed to help teachers meet those expectations and thus decided to rebuild their pre-service training program from the ground up based on the latest research and their own experience with tens of thousands of new teachers. This new approach to teacher preparation is called Fast Start. Radically different from typical pre-service training programs, Fast Start places a singular focus on helping novice teachers master basic, essential teaching skills instead of racing to cover every aspect of good teaching. Fast Start focuses on four skills teachers must master to be effective right away, and lays the foundation for learning more advanced skills down the road. Unlike most programs, Fast Start is grounded in intensive practice of skills teachers are called upon to use every day because what teachers can actually accomplish in their own classrooms today matters more than what they have read about in a textbook. Instead of expecting prospective teachers to improve on their own, Fast Start gives teachers specific feedback on what they should do differently in their very next lesson. This paper tells the story of Fast Start, and explains exactly how TNTP transformed their approach to pre-service training. What they have learned along the way is also shared in the hope that their experience and failures can serve as a road map for other preparation programs that wish to explore new ways to help novice teachers succeed.