There is a powerful – and growing – body of evidence demonstrating that teachers who root their practices in research are able to make better teaching and learning decisions; use more innovative programmes or creative approaches; and develop outside-the-box thinking for solving educational problems (e.g., Leuverink & Aarts, 2022). Despite such promising benefits, bringing research into classrooms remains challenging. Although these benefits and challenges have been widely studied (e.g., Vanderlinde & Braak, 2010; Kowalczuk-Walędziak et al., 2020; Ion et al., 2021), collectively, they do not amount to a systematic, intentional, or detailed investigation into teachers’ own research engagement trajectories. Indeed, what is crucially missing from these studies are the voices of teachers who are research-engaged as part of their professional development (PD) beyond graduation: the best-placed people to direct teaching communities towards becoming more research-engaged (Leat et al., 2015). Drawing on Evans’s (2014) theoretical framework for PD – encompassing three primary components of change, i.e., behavioural, attitudinal, and intellectual, as well as a further eleven subcomponents – this paper shares the results of an interview-based study carried out 2022-2023 on 36 teachers in Poland and Spain whom we had identified as research-engaged teachers in their communities. In this study we aim to listen to their voices in order to: (1) explore the main research practices they perform as part of their PD; (2) understand how research engagement impacts their PD, and (3) identify the conditions that facilitate their ongoing research engagement. The preliminary results show that (1) the interviewed teachers were research-engaged in diverse ways, including conducting research-based innovations, action research projects, intervention studies – and reading research papers. All teachers viewed their research activities as (2) enhancing their professionalism via: extending knowledge bases; questioning and deepening their own perspectives on education issues; increasing their professional effectiveness and confidence; re-vitalising their teaching work; and experimenting with new educational ideas and practices. These findings correspond with multiple dimensions of Evans’s (2008, 2014) PD model, such as: epistemological (‘the basis of people’s knowledge’), processual (‘processes that people apply to their work’), and evaluative change (‘people’s values’). Lastly, we found that (3) their ongoing research engagement was significantly sustained and enhanced by a number of factors, ranging from their own personality traits, to the support they received from their schools and beyond. These findings will be discussed through the lens of national and international research and policies regarding connecting research to teachers’ PD.

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