In this article, the author explores how collaborative teacher research can reposition teachers to be powerful stakeholders and policymakers rather than skilled technicians and implementers. She begins with a brief review of the historical antecedents to collaborative teacher research in order to detail how teachers and their allies have fought off marginalization and misrepresentation of teachers in educational research. Then, she highlights selected collaborative approaches, both in pre-service and in-service teacher education, to illustrate how collaboration helps transform practice and research, as well as how it bridges epistemic divides between academics and practitioners. In so doing, she suggests how teacher education programs might retool and reconceptualize their work to include research relationships with teachers and teacher education that involves teacher inquiry. Ultimately, she makes the case for collaborative research practices in educational scholarship that are democratic and inclusive, and warns against practices that may involve teachers, but nonetheless reiterate past knowledge hierarchies that subordinate and co-opt them. Understanding the strengths and limitations of collaborative teacher research practices is of the utmost importance at a time when, teachers are continuing to lose control over their work, and Arne Duncan has called for scholars at universities and colleges to give up their ivory towers and get more involved with underperforming public schools.