Using Kegan's (1982, 1994) theory of constructive developmentalism, this study focused on the way in which the teacher candidates defined success in student teaching. The candidates differed in their personal epistemologies or what Kegan (1982) called orders of consciousness, which referred to the different ways an individual made meaning of everyday events and relationships. One of the teacher candidates defined "success" through the lens of external opinions and feedback from her cooperating teachers and university supervisors, whereas the other drew upon her own internal beliefs. The difference in their constructions of success reflected the variance in these candidates' orders of consciousness: one student operated from a perspective in which external feedback and relationships defined the self, and the other was evolving toward an epistemology based on her self-authored interpretation of events and relationships. The findings of this study have implications for the way teacher educators supervise and support student teachers and also for the way teacher education programs encourage and challenge candidates to think about teaching before they enter student teaching.