In the last decades, the evidence-based improvement of schools and of teaching has been established as state of the art in educational research. At the same time, action research has lost importance in school development (Carr & Kemmis 1986; Altrichter & Feindt 2011; Edwards-Groves et al. 2016). On the one hand, action research, that explicitly involves teachers in the evaluation and improvement of their own practice, is dismissed from proper educational research – the argument is that action research does not meet the requirements and standards of empirical research. On the other hand, there is some evidence that teachers do not use feedback data and instruments of new government in the intended ways to change and develop school and their own teaching practice. Concerning the development of school and the improvement of teaching a gap between teachers and researchers or, more precisely, between the self-reference of school-practice and the self-reference of evidence-based research become obvious.

In our presentation we want to focus on this gab as a difference between two communities of practice (Hamza et al. 2018; Lave & Wenger 2007). Theoretically, methodologically, and empirically, we are going to work out how these communities interconnect in processes of school development. How is it possible to cross the border between these communities and their inherent logic of practice, their routines and self-understandings to make collaboration fruitful? In how far a common knowledge production between teachers and researchers is possible?

We present an example of collaboration between school and research that has been established in 2011. Even though, school and educational research in general have different motives and interests to produce and to acquire knowledge (Reh 2004), both agents, school and research understand this collaboration as a win-win-relation. The Collaboration is based on the arrangement that it should be productive and advantageous for both partners. This makes it necessary to encounter each other in a symmetric relation and to recognize each other’s motives and needs.

To make the certain collaborative structures and outcomes more vivid, we are focusing on one current aspect of school development. In an ongoing project, the school is implementing personalized learning and instruments of formative assessment in the classrooms, renouncing the traditional grades. Doing so, the school and the teachers follow an educational belief of supporting the students’ individual learning. The school wishes an evaluation, if these new instruments work in the intended way. As researchers we collected data from various perspectives: We videotaped the classroom interaction to gather the daily practice and routines of teachers and students with these new instruments of formative assessment. We conducted narrative Interviews with the teachers to access their explicit and implicit professional knowledge and we conducted group discussions with the students about their comprehension of the learning culture and their experiences with and attitudes to processes of formative assessment. With the conducted and analyzed data we provide a feedback for the school. The “win” for us researchers is to achieve an access to our research field over a long term, to use the data for our various research questions and last but not least we won a partner for practice related teacher-education.

Theoretically, our collaborative approach is based on the sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1952) and systems theory (Luhmann 1995). Both theories allow relating issues of knowledge production and of social development resp. organizational change. In contrast to a rather abstract and standardized knowledge production in quantitative empirical research, qualitative and collaborative research in the sense of case-studies generates “local knowledge” (Reh 2004, 82). This knowledge is useful to support and to project developmental processes in the educational practice but it does not claim to govern them. In our approach we use the Documentary Method that was elaborated by Bohnsack (2010) as a tool of qualitative research, originally for the analysis of group discussions but recently also for video-analyses (Asbrand & Martens 2018). Methodologically, the method is based on Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and aims to relate persons’ theoretical and implicit knowledge that is habitualized in everyday practices. By multidimensional, comparative analyses of empirical cases it is possible to trace the emergence of this implicit knowledge back to collective (socialization) experiences (Bohnsack, Pfaff & Weller, 2010). Documentary Method is frequently used in evaluations and is further developed as a tool for evaluation research (Bohnsack & Nentwig-Gesemann 2010; Lamprecht 2012). The methodological foundation makes it possible to combine evaluation of innovations in schools and educational research. In this way, evaluation as evaluation research meet with the requirements and standards of qualitative social research. Three principals are leading documentary evaluation research: 1. Difference of explicit and implicit knowledge: The evaluation relates the theoretical knowledge, explicit aims and appraisals with the teachers’ (and students’) implicit knowledge and routines. 2. Differences in knowledge production: Usually teachers focus on developing school or their teaching. They are involved in a certain practice of school development and their knowledge production has a certain function in this practice. Evaluation research that focuses on school development is usually interested in the processes, how teachers change their practice and their organization. In consequence, there is no “knowing better” of researchers. Research does not generate or provide superior knowledge that offers a technological solution of problems in school development, it generates different knowledge than teachers do. This different knowledge originates from a second order observations. 3. Responsivity: Researchers provide results form their observations but they abstain from giving advices. Possible conclusions are discussed commonly with the teachers. They select information that is compatible to their own perspective and knowledge production.

As a result we will discuss our approach with regard to systems theory. As Luhmann (1998) pointed out, organizational change can be described as social evolution. For school development this means that school-improvement results of social evolution. Evolutionary processes of social change include irritations of beliefs and routines, variation in preserving traditional structures and selecting alternative structures as well as a restabilization of new beliefs and routines. In our presentation we will show in how far the improvement of personalized learning and formative assessment in our partner school can be described as social evolution. Furthermore, we will describe the role of evaluative research and feedback based on empirical data in this evolutionary process. Assuming developmental processes in school and evaluative research each as self-referential systems, opportunities and limitations of collaboration and of producing a common knowledge will be worked out more clearly.

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