A number of recent professional development projects in Australia have expected teachers to engage in action research as a process for professional learning and educational reform. This study investigated the experiences of ten teachers from one school who spent a year undertaking action research projects as part of the Innovative Links Project. The author was a participant observer in the study in her role as the school's "academic associate" for the project. In this article, the project's expectations of the teachers are examined to reveal the extent to which they were based on realistic assumptions about the conditions within which the teachers worked as they tried to achieve them.