A research into the image of the ideal teacher versus the self-image of student teachers was conducted by two groups of preservice teachers. One group was composed of teacher education students, and the other was composed of beginning teachers who were still completing their academic degrees. Interview data was collected from 89 teachers. Finding revealed two major categories of the ideal teacher: personal qualities, and knowledge of the subject taught and didactic knowledge. However, beginning teachers attributed greater importance to knowledge in terms of the ideal teacher, while students who had not begun to teach attributed less importance to knowledge as far as the ideal teacher.