People often respond to the pressure of attending a high school reunion or their child's wedding by going on a crash diet to get quick results. In response, friends may marvel about how good they look on the outside. But what folks don't acknowledge is that, in the name of getting results, crash dieters have done some very unhealthy things to their bodies. Efforts to quickly respond to the pressures of high-stakes testing resulting from the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) often abandon much of what is known about job-embedded staff development, such as teacher research, to seek quick fixes in hopes of raising test scores. To provide insights into how to avoid the "crash diet of professional development" (Brandenburg 2007), the authors have examined one particularly powerful form of staff development used by districts across the nation--teacher research. They discuss how teacher research can help shape the era of NCLB, rather than be shaped by it. (Contains 1 table.)