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Increasingly, schools are embracing action research as an innovative strategy to develop collective teacher efficacy and expertise in a bid to improve learner outcomes. In this chapter, what follows is an exploration of the challenges frequently faced by middle leaders implementing and facilitating action research in schools. These include low levels of collective autonomy, clouded evaluative thinking, and the siloing of success. To support middle leaders in overcoming these challenges, Sarah and Pamela offer an array of practical solutions they have witnessed working successfully in varying contexts. In doing so, they spotlight the work of educational thought leaders, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus Helen Timperley, Dr Kaye Twyford, and Simon Breakspear.

Global governance has granted international organizations a political role of utmost importance. As the search for research-based best practices is the spearhead of these nongovernmental organizations, national decision-makers tend to accept their recommendations willingly. The way decision-makers use research-based evidence has been amply investigated, but few researchers have interrogated how the same international organizations, that claim to establish a bridge between research and policy, use such evidence. This prompted us to analyze the pedagogical discourse of UNESCO, an organization that recently reminded the international community that improving teacher quality is now a major issue for all those who are preoccupied with improving the quality of education (UNESCO, 2014). Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. EFA global monitoring report. Paris, France: UNESCO). How does UNESCO deal with the issue of teaching practices? What is the content of its pedagogical discourse? To answer these questions, we analyzed the Organization’s publications on teachers in the past 15 years (N = 45) and conducted interviews with a number of its strategic members (N = 5). The results of our analyses of this dataset indicate a tension between the content of the publications and what the interviewees had to say. While the publications timidly but recurrently promote learner-centered constructivist approaches, the interviewees argued that pedagogical orientations are a matter of national sovereignty; that UNESCO should not cross this line. As an intermediary between research and policy and a think tank, UNESCO seems caught in this contradiction. In matters of pedagogy, shouldn’t the Organization be more forceful in counseling its member States by referring to research-based evidence on teaching effectiveness?