Lecturer B applied for assessment of pedagogical competence in the first round of applications of the Pedagogical Career Ladder Pilot Project. Both experts were in agreement in their assessments and recommended that the applicant should be placed at the Established Teacher Level. It is important in this context to emphasise that the experts in the first application round presented a common opinion37, which in practice ought to put increased demands on arriving at consensus.38 The academic appointments board made the same assessment as the experts and decided to recommend that lecturer B be placed at the level Established Teacher (Minutes of the Academic Appointments Board, 2007-03-06).
Before the third and last round of applications within the framework for the pilot project Lecturer B again applied for assessment of pedagogical competence. Two new experts assessed the applicant’s qualifications, which resulted in one expert
36
1 500 SEK per month.
37
Before the second round of applications the instructions to the experts was changed saying that the experts would make their official reports individually.
38 Formulating and standing behing a common official report probably means in practice that
placing the applicant at the Established Teacher Level and one expert placing the lecturer at the highest level, that is, Excellent Teacher. The academic appointments board made a careful analysis of how both of the experts had dealt with the different criteria in their reports and wrote the following in the minutes: “The academic
appointments board consider that the expert opinion that places Lecturer B at the level Established Teacher ought to be given greater weight as it problematises and analyses why the applicant has not been proposed to be placed at the Excellent Teacher Level.” (Minutes of the Academic Appointments Board, 2007-10-19)
Moreover the board maintained that the applicant lacked synthesis in regard to evaluation of student results and reflection upon the course evaluations that had been attached. The academic appointments board decided to recommend that Lecturer B be placed at the Establish Teacher Level which was confirmed by the vice-chancellor (Vice-chancellor, 2007b)
In the cases where two experts arrive at different conclusions regarding suggested placement of an applicant on the Pedagogical Career Ladder, the academic appointments board is put to the task of carefully weighing the arguments from the two expert opinions to a well thought through/sustainable conclusion. The quality of the individual expert opinion in the sense of stringency, consistency, analysis and conclusion has great importance when the academic appointments board takes a stand. Moreover the quality of the application together with the result of the interview of the applicant increases the weight of the material upon which the final decision is to be made. Thusit is of great importance that one of the members of the academic appointments board has participated in the interview and can refer to the results of it. Case 3. The academic appointments board makes a different assessment than the expert
During the first round of applications of the Pedagogical Career Ladder Pilot Project 2006-2007 Lecturer C applied to have their pedagogical competence assessed. The interview was carried out by two experts together with a member of the academic appointments board. The two experts, who together presented a formal report, assessed the applicant as having fulfilled the criteria for Excellent Teacher. The academic appointments board considered that the experts had been somewhat vague when demonstrating that the established criteria had been fulfilled and formulated the following in the minutes: “The academic appointments board does not make the
same assessment as the experts and does not see that Lecturer C has fulfilled the requirement for the level of Excellent Teacher. The criteria in the instructions are formulated in the present: the person “leads /…/”, “promotes /…/”and there is nothing that says that it is enough to think that the person in question is going to do that in the future. The motivation both predicts and registers reservations.” The
academic appointments board (Minutes 2007-03-06) wrote further: “/…/ it is not
enough that one has the ability to fulfil the criteria, instead it shall be clear that one fulfils them.” The reasoning of the academic appointments board led to a unanimous
decision to recommend that Lecturer C should be placed at the Established Teacher Level. The vice-chancellor did not take a decision and referred the case back to the academic appointments board.
Intensive e-mail communication arose between the members of the academic appointments board regarding the case. A clear line in the dialogue was that the
existing criteria for the different levels of the career ladder were considered to be vague, which in turn meant that the experts would be expected to be vague in their common report. During the same time period the project leader for the Pedagogical Career Ladder within the framework of the pilot project asked the experts to further sharpen and clarify their formal report.
Each individual member of the academic appointments board went through Lecturer C’s application material once more for the purpose of trying to relate the applicant’s qualification portfolio to the criteria in the pedagogical careen ladder. Different interpretations and analyses were communicated internally between the members of the academic appointments board which came to function as a learning process with in-depth understanding of the significance of the criteria in the career ladder.
When the experts turned in their revised report, the academic appointments board brought up the case for renewed assessment. The board’s internal deliberations in the case together with a new formal report from the experts in which obscurities/questions had been corrected resulted in the board making the same assessment as the experts. The decision meant that the academic appointments board recommended that Lecturer C be placed at the level Excellent Teacher (Minutes of the Academic Appointments Board 2007-04-12). The vice-chancellor confirmed the level (Vice-chancellor, 2007a).