For decades there has been a divide between educational research and practice. Sometimes the blame is placed on teachers for not following research-based strategies or not being trained well enough to read the literature. Just as frequently the blame is placed on researchers for not (a) studying topics important to teachers, (b) writing them so they make sense, and (c) providing useful findings. However, all of these suggestions, as useful as they may be, take research as an activity radically different from what teachers do. A qualitative research study with an excellent classroom teacher of secondary remedial reading helped me to see that there is another way to see this problem. Just as this teacher, Mary Thomas, saw that to help her students really become readers required not just improving their decoding but helping them take on a whole new identity in relation to reading, so I began to see that many teachers need to take on a whole different relation with research. Even reading research carried out by others, and thinking about how it might be applied in one's own practice, is an active process. But even more so, as Mary felt that if it is important for her to encourage students to make meaning as readers, it is also important for teachers to make meaning about their students, to "read" them. Just as Mary sees reading as the co-creation of meaning by the reader with a book, she sees research as the co-creation of meaning, and therefore something teachers already do, whether they think of it as research or not.