This article examines the challenges and limitations of a research alliance—between a university research center, a high school, and one of its feeder K–8 school districts—focused on improving school climate.

This article presents three versions of what may happen in post-1989 research on teaching. In the first version, the quantitative approach dies of wounds inflicted by its critics. In the second, different approaches work in harmony, and in the third, the wars continue among competing approaches to educational research.

The concepts of metaphor, model, and theory are defined and used to show how social science research in general, and education research in particular, has differed from Popper's description of natural science research.

The history of New York City's Bank Street College (established in 1916 as the Bureau of Educational Experiments) is traced. The school was a laboratory for innovative teaching and fostered progressive educational practices and psychological child development research.

The author reviews studies to date and concludes achievement motivation training courses improve school learning by improving classroom and life management skills rather than by changing achievement levels directly.'

The author reports on one of the more positive projects of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University, he has firsthand knowledge of the Ahfachkee Day School, an elementary school serving Seminole Indian children.

The author examines some of the paradigms which have emerged in the development of a science of learning. The behaviorists, he believes, have never moved far enough beyond the S-R approach with its presumption of a passive, reactive learner. Drawing his conception of reflective teaching from Deweyan experimentalism, the author concludes that cognitive-field learning theory provides a paradigm most suggestive for "problem-centered, exploratory teaching."

This chapter is being written from the point of view of a practicing principal for several reasons. Practicing educators have fallen short of their responsibilities to experiment with new ideas and to search for better ways of operating their schools. While there is a shred of truth in the assertion that "ivory tower" researchers fail to communicate with teachers and principals, there is a concomitant and perhaps even more valid assertion that principals and teachers make little or no effort to become knowledgeable about the work of the researcher.

I SHALL not take the reader's time with evidence that research has been of value in education. Probably no well-informed student of education has any doubt on the matter.