The relationship between research and pedagogy in schools has been stimulated by a pressure on teachers to account for their professional development and a pressure on policy-makers to account for their policies. This has been framed, in some accounts, by principles of action research as practice (Whitehead and McNiff 2006). Learning communities theories (notably Lave and Wenger 1991), themselves built on social constructivist psychology, have been used to underpin policy changes in pedagogy. They refer to 'apprenticeship' models of learning, and such models are investigated here, with a particular focus on what the 'apprenticeship' is in: in history, science, and mathematics, or in humanity (as in Stern 2007). The paper is based on the Spirit of the School project (as in Stern 2009), involving research in schools in the UK, Hong Kong and more recently the US, investigating the nature of schools as learning communities. The project attempts to investigate the spirit of the school, developing a model of school-based research as a form of school development (in the tradition of Per Dalin, e.g. 1983, 1993, or John MacBeath, e.g. 1999), and as a form of pedagogy itself.