An adaptation of a presentation made to the Association of Gerontology in Higher Education's 25th Annual Meeting in 1999. A geriatric interdisciplinary team training program has been preparing professionals from different disciplines for geriatric interdisciplinary teamwork. Funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, Inc. and developed at eight sites, the national initiative has found that the most obvious of the several benefits of educating professionals from different disciplines together has been the immediate opportunities provided to practice and model interdisciplinary teamwork. However, the program has also faced challenges relating to health care experience, geriatric knowledge, discipline-specific languages, philosophies and cultures, and educational schedules. It has used techniques to educate practitioners and to meet these challenges that have included case studies, standardized patients, glossaries, cross-discipline role playing, and the DISC personality profile model of human behavior. Benefits and pitfalls of and guidelines for using these techniques are outlined.