The highest endowment of the human spirit on the intellectual side is the power to think. Learning to think is an essential process and end in all school work. Thinking is the intellect’s regal activity. In a vague way, all teaching appeals to the thought-activity of the pupil; but vagueness in teaching is as pernicious as it is common. To exhibit the value, scope, and process of thought is of inestimable service to the teacher. It gives specific direction to teaching processes, and saves the child from a thousand fanciful expedients.

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

Action research, colloquially referred to as ‘teacher research’ in academic discourse, represents a research paradigm that has been prominently adopted in the field of education and is gradually gaining traction in Turkish academic research. The present research systematically examines postgraduate action research conducted in the Turkish educational field in recent years, including considerations of subject matter, technical characteristics, and resulting outcomes. The last part of this scholarly work outlines a participatory action research framework in line with the established characteristics elucidated in the scholarly literature. The overall aim of this literary contribution is to provide a valuable resource for educators engaged in the intricacies of action research, postgraduate students, experts within the educational sciences, and diligent researchers, thereby fostering an enriched academic discourse.