The teacher's guide, Microscopic Explorations: A GEMS Festival Guide (Brady and Willard, 1998), is the result of a partnership between Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS), a program of the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), the public science and curriculum development center of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Microscopy Society of America (MSA). Microscopic Exploration supports the MSA's low-cost national outreach program and, also, reaches a very large educational community as part of the GEMS series. Some of the lessons learned through the extremely successful MSA/LHS collaboration are summarized here in hopes that they may be instructive to other scientists and educators as they launch their own partnerships and collaborations.