Rejoining the Learning Circle: When Inservice Providers Conduct Research

In this article, a group of inservice providers and beginning researchers describe their experiences in learning to conduct evaluation research on a long-term school-university partnership program. We offer the practical lessons we learned in how to undertake such a study, and we share the immediate and powerful effects that the process of conducting the research had on the way we envisionand enact our inservice work. As the director of the inservice program noted, the problem we were addressing changed from “How can we convince others that we do good work?” to “How canwe make our work better?” This is a question at the heart of professional learning communities.