It is commonplace that today’s schools need to change, but the educational knowledge developed worldwide (in particular during the second half of the past century and the first decade of the present one) didn’t (and doesn’t) transform  itself usually into sound educational practice. The classical schema, derived from natural sciences, postulates that knowledge,  transferred from universities to teachers, will lead the latter to understand the need to change their way to teach, and therefore to improve their teaching.. By and large, this didn’t (and doesn't) usually happen. Kurt Lewin - and later Donald Schön and Chris Argyris - while criticizing the traditional academic top-down proceeding, showed with their concepts of action-research and action science a different path (Lewin, 1951; 1967; Argyris, 1993; Argyris & Schön, 1991). However,  action-researches conducted autonomously by  individual schools, are generally more relevance- than rigour-oriented, and this fact often undermines the scientific status of the proceedings.  A new kind of actor can be beneficial in helping schools in finding an adequate balance between relevance and rigour in their action-researches: the School Improvement Advisor/researcher (SIA). This one is an academic researcher acting part-time inside the school and for the school,  developing his action starting from school's and teachers' needs (Ostinelli, 2007; 2008). His action is non-invasive and is guided by three main functions:

1. The epistemological one, aimed at guaranteeing the scientific status of the improvement process conducted by the school
2. The interface one, aimed at establishing a bridge between practice in the school and results stemming from the academic educational research
3. The consultancy one, aimed at giving sound advice and assistance to the actors of the school (principal, teachers, students, etc.)

The idea of SIA was firstly presented at the EERA-ECER 2008 Conference in Göteborg:(Ostinelli, 2008).  During the last four years, the experience extended itself to more schools, leading to various outcomes (the introduction of the methodology Understanding by Design, the development of a questionnaire for the evaluation of teaching and relationship into the classroom (Ostinelli, 2013a), the performance of workshops with teachers, the development of communities of practice). The activity of the SIA was also reviewed by a group of external academic researchers and was included in the project ILE by the CERI-OCSE (Crescentini & Kyburz, 2012).

A stretch of time of four years of SIA's practice is the object of this proposal, where a reflection and a self-evaluation about the experience, based also on a feedback from teachers and pupils, are and will be performed. This is actually leading to summarize the main lessons learned during this span of time, and, looking to the future, to the best ways to extend this kind of approach to other schools. Particular attention is paid to the need of a  paradigm change in today's teachers views and to the possible ways to achieve it, taking into account the outcomes of our experience.

- Argyris, C. (1993) Knowledge for Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass - Argyris, C. & Schön, D. (1991) Participatory Action Research and Action Science Compared. In: W. White (Ed.), Participatory Action Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass - Crescentini, A., Kyburz, L. (2012) Case Study - The School Improvement Advisor - "Supporting the Schools in the Management of Change" http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/49930807.pdf - Lewin, K. (1951) Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper & Row - Lewin, K. (1967) Resolving Social Conflicts. New York: Harper & Row - Ostinelli, G. (2007) Il miglioramento della qualità nella scuola e il ruolo chiave del consulente educativo. Orientamenti Pedagogici, 54 (4), 713-734 - Ostinelli, G. (2008). The School Improvement Advisor/researcher (SIA): helping the individual school in the self-management of improvement . Paper presented to the EERA-ECER Conference, Göteborg, 2008 - Ostinelli, G. (2013a) Design and realization of the Questionnaire for the evaluation of teaching and the relationship with the teacher. Revue Suisse des Sciences de l'Éducation, in course of publication - Ostinelli, G. (2013b) "Teacher professional development between methodological innnovation and paradigmatic change". Paper presented to the ICSEI Congress, Santiago.