MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION Volume 3—Number 1 © 2009 the Authors Journal Compilation © 2009 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 34 ABSTRACT —In a previous issue of Mind, Brain, and Education, Hinton and Fischer (2008) argue that educational research needs to be grounded in the lived realities of school life. They advocate for research schools as a venue for accomplishing this. The Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives repre- sents an alternative model—a research collaborative among independent schools and university-based scholars. This article describes the Center’s experience with democratic, participa- tory action research. It discusses major roadblocks encoun- tered doing such work, including difficulties selecting research topics collaboratively, epistemological differences in methods and design, the scarcity of time, and resistance to results when they challenge gender stereotypes or the status quo or involve student researchers. The article concludes with strat- egies for overcoming these roadblocks, including clearer, up- front negotiations with schools and a compact that specifies roles and responsibilities for both school and Center personnel. THE NEED FOR COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH In their article in the most recent issue of Mind, Brain, and Education, Hinton and Fischer (2008) argue cogently for the need to ground scholarly research in practice and practice in scholarly research. Without such rootedness, they claim, researchers often misconstrue schools’ pedagogical goals and fail to appreciate the nuances of practice, whereas educators often misunderstand scientific findings and are subject to the latest pseudoscientific claims of popular literature; what Hinton and Fischer term “brain scams.” The solution they call for is research schools, in which scientists and teachers work together to overcome the differences in language and methods, in understandings about the nature of evidence, and even in epistemologies that have kept them apart at grave cost to both. In such schools, they envision scientists educating teachers to conduct research and educators helping scientists to discern what kinds of inquiries can result in findings relevant to their educational practice. Hinton and Fischer see scientists gain- ing deeper understanding of the cultures of schools, which would enable them to shape more appropriate and effective investigations, and they see them linking schools together in order to create richly textured databases that help both them and educators assess what results are unique to the ecology of particular schools and what are generalizable across them. The very reasons that make school–university collabora- tions necessary also suggest potential roadblocks to establish- ing and sustaining them. The Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives (CSBGL) was founded as a research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and what has now become nine independent, pri- vate schools (www.csbgl.org). Its member schools 1 each con- tribute to its financial maintenance. Together with Center staff, schools define the research areas they are interested in and are supported by the staff in framing research questions, developing appropriate methods, conducting the research, identifying the actions or interventions that are suggested by the data and then iteratively evaluating those efforts, making appropriate alterations and identifying the next set of ques- tions to explore. Historically, the Center was created to help schools address concerns related to boys. Amidst a politically charged discourse about boys’ and girls’ relative school performance, schools acknowledged problems—moral, behavioral, academic—with boys and wished to develop evidence-based improvements in their educational prac- tice. They found unusual cross-school common ground in a search for better understanding of how the force of gender influenced the development of their male students. In the course of this work, it became evident that to consider boys 1 University of Pennsylvania’s, Graduate School of Education 2 Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives 3 Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Address correspondence to Peter Kuriloff, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216; e-mail: kuriloff@gse.upenn.edu Building Research Collaboratives Among Schools and Universities: Lessons From the Field Peter Kuriloff 1,2 , Michael Reichert 2 , Brett Stoudt 2,3 , and Sharon Ravitch 1,2