This paper provides an overview of the project’s aim to identify features of powerful teacher education and shares the set of research questions regarding program vision, coherence and opportunities to learn, which frame the overall CATE project. It describes participating programs, and our rationale for selection. This paper focuses, however, on the particular methods, data collection and analysis of program coherence. Each of our data sources has been selected and designed to provide information about the relationship between ideas in programs, the degree of the connection between theory and practice, and the sequence and alignment of coursework and clinical work. For instance, for the purposes of this study we have designed a new student survey that asks students to report the degree to which they had opportunities to learn about theory, about practice, and about the links between the two. It also asks students about their opportunities to connect ideas across classes and across the program. In this paper we reflect upon what we can learn about coherence from these variety of measures, the strengths and weaknesses of the measures, and the implications for programs that seek to become more coherent.