In a culture of performativity, action research offers teachers an opportunity to step back and reflect on their practice. This paper reports on a collaborative project carried out between a university and a secondary school in England, in which the university staff supported an action research project within the school. Five school teachers volunteered to engage in this project. They were given an introduction to action research and were assigned a university researcher to support them. Despite the common input and a common school culture, the teachers engaged in very different models of action research. This article reports on two teachers whose approaches were dissimilar. It examines these differences and suggests that they can be explained by considering the teachers' different responses to a performativity culture.