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Imagine: An email pops up in your inbox inviting you to apply to be MTE's next editor. How would you react? Would you jump at the opportunity? Need to think more about it? Respond with a definite “no”? What information would you need in order to help you decide? In my first editorial, I share a bit of why I chose to jump at the opportunity to become MTE editor and what I have learned in the last year as Editor Designate, processing manuscripts alongside the founding and former MTE editor Peg Smith. In addition to providing insight into the MTE review process, I hope this editorial convinces many of you to seriously consider jumping on the opportunity to become MTE's next editor when it comes around again in 3 years.

Given a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest point and 10 is the highest, how do you rate yourself as a writer? I recently asked this question of a group of doctoral students. What do you suppose their answers were? How would you answer that question? Predictably, their ratings ranged from 3 to 6, with several explaining that writing has always been a struggle and a few sharing that they thought they were decent writers until they began grad school. It is noteworthy that no one, including the faculty members in the room, rated themselves a 10. All of us considered academic writing as something we are still trying to master. I shared that as a graduate student I too would have likely rated myself on the low end of the scale and that it has been a long journey to developing a productive relationship with the process of writing academic papers.

When describing MTE, we often hear things like, “It is a practitioner journal,” “It is not like JRME,” and “It is more rigorous than MT, MTMS, or TCM journals.” All these things are true but do not quite capture what it is that makes MTE a journal dedicated to growing the knowledge base of mathematics teacher educators. What this says is that it is easier to state what MTE is not, and much more difficult to provide a clear-cut description of what the journal publishes. MTE is a journal attempting to do something that no other journal, not even those in other disciplines, has done. Although it may be convenient to try to understand the journal and the kinds of articles it publishes by comparing it with other journals we are familiar with, these comparisons ultimately fall short of providing the support needed to generate a manuscript that is a good “fit” for MTE. In this editorial, we offer a tool that could help prospective authors conceptualize and write manuscripts for this journal.

This editorial closes our 4-year tenure as editors of the MTE journal. Although time has surely flown, we have much to celebrate and to reflect on as we bid farewell to our editorial office. We have had the privilege and responsibility to continue the legacy of the founding editors (Peg Smith and Melissa Boston) and develop our vision for increasing the visibility and impact of this journal as well as to grow the diversity of perspectives, authors, and reviewers of the journal. With this editorial, we celebrate our journey, highlighting our top three accomplishments, and then outline top priorities for the journal as it moves forward under the editorship of the new incoming editors.

At the most recent MTE journal presentation during the NCTM Research Conference in Washington, DC, titled “Could I Publish This in MTE? Advice from Published Manuscripts in the MTE Journal” (Crespo, Chao, & Yow, 2018), we asked the audience the following questions:

• Who is intending to write a manuscript for the MTE journal?

• Who is a reviewer for the journal?

• Who is a reader of the journal?

In this editorial, we focus on the unsuspecting challenge that many prospective authors encounter when writing manuscripts for this journal–that of clearly situating their manuscript as relevant and connected to a significant and compelling shared problem of the practice of mathematics teacher educators. In our previous editorial (Crespo & Bieda, 2017), we introduced a writing tool that organizes and makes visible all five review criteria for this journal into a writing template (reproduced here in Figure 1). This tool is meant to help prospective authors foreground the criteria as they conceive, outline, draft, review, edit, and revise their manuscripts. As prospective authors have begun to try this tool and share their outlined manuscripts with us, the challenge of articulating a shared problem of practice in MTE manuscripts has become more evident.