For their part, some practitioners are beginning to do their own research. Many schools are employing action research, in which teachers and administrators study problems arising in their practice. Unlike conventional research, action research is directly aimed at immediately improving practice, rather than making broad, abstract generalizations. Meanwhile, school-university partnerships are creating opportunities for teachers to collaborate with researchers. For example, professional development schools offer fertile environments for teachers and researchers to work side by side on meaningful problems.
Education lacks a canon.
Another challenge facing practitioners and researchers alike is education's lack of an established body of knowledge that is accessible to practitioners and widely accepted in its contents. In medicine, when a human body displays a set of symptoms, practitioners can almost always use research-based diagnoses to find the problem and apply the treatment or cure that researchers have demonstrated to be effective for that set of symptoms. This same approach is rarely possible in education. Each set of circumstances in each school building or classroom is inherently unique. Education's need for a more accessible base of research knowledge is precisely what prompted the National Research Council to devise a 15-year strategy for increasing the usefulness of educational research.