The interest in this paper is directed towards teachers’ experiences of collaboration, in particular of moderation when marking national tests. The purpose is to describe and discuss these experiences as expressions of a teaching profession in change.

The point of departure is that the now extended national testing in Sweden also increases the demands on moderation as the teachers are supposed to mark the tests together.  The National Agency for Education stress that the tests are intended to "support equal and fair assessment and grading", and delivers samples, instructions and examples on how the tests should be marked. Teachers are also supplied with advisory texts on how to conduct moderation. This we regard as a part of a growing interest by the state to control and evaluate schools and teachers’ performances, and of parent’s claims on fair assessments and grades for their children.

Collaboration is thus recommended in policy and what we might call professional tools for assessment is provided by the state. This development supports descriptions of teaching in terms of an organizational form of professionalism based on external control and accountability at the expense of a loss of a professional autonomy. However, we believe that teachers’ moderation when marking national tests also needs to be described as an expression of an occupational form of professionalism that is based on teachers’ collegial authority, self-control, ethics and trust. Interviews were conducted with teachers about their collaborative work in general and more specifically on their joint marking of national tests. Further, we have conducted observations of teachers moderation work when marking national tests. The interviews were audio recorded and fully transcribed.

The results indicate that teachers use the state-provided tools with enthusiasm and express a commitment to their collaborative work. We argue that they develop a collective professional knowledge in their moderation work with national tests. In this sense, they express a kind of state-directed professionalism that we describe as sharp but delimited and definitely different from the wider kinds of professionalism that has been described as a result of a “chock professionalization”.

The purpose of this article is to study whether moral stress is a phenomenon relevant to teaching practice and which may make a significant contribution to understanding why teachers repeatedly reported feeling burdened by work. Moral stress can be caused by acting in conflict with ones own conscience, e.g. when one knows the right thing to do but institutional constraints make it difficult to act in a way that is consistent with ones morals. The method used in this study is critical incident technique focusing ethical dilemmas in teaching. The findings add a phenomenon to previous research of moral stress in other professions; moral stress can be caused not only by external regulations, but also by internal moral imperatives in conflict with one another.

Respekt för lärarprofessionen behandlar två fundamentala verktyg eller förutsättningar för läraryrkets utövande: yrkesspråk och yrkesetik. Alla lärare har tillgång till någon form av yrkesspråk och yrkesetik, men frågan är hur gemensamma och användbara dessa är för vardagsarbetet. Boken diskuterar hinder och möjligheter för lärarprofessionens utveckling.

Resonemangen utgår från ett stort empiriskt material. Utifrån lärares egna berättelser, argument och diskussioner utkristalliseras såväl tillgång till som behov av att utveckla den yrkesspråkliga och yrkesetiska kompetensen. Boken identifierar och förklarar företeelser som är svåra att upptäcka i vardagsarbetet.Lärarstudenter och utbildare får en sammanfattande framställning av de krav i yrkeslivet som lärarutbildningen bör motsvara. För enskilda lärare och lärargrupper är bokens innehåll en väg till professionell utveckling och ökat yrkeskunnande vad avser lärares pedagogiska arbete. Respekt för lärarprofessionen utgör ett bra underlag för att diskutera lärarprofessionalism och yrkeskompetens inom skilda lärarkategorier.Respekt för lärarprofessionen är en reviderad och uppdaterad version av Respekt för lärare och Respekt för läraryrket, som under många år använts inom lärarutbildning och lärarfortbildning.

Teaching is the only profession in which the practitioner themselves has to create the conditions required in order to execute their professional duties. What this means is that teachers themselves have to organise and lead the work so that teaching and learning are made possible. For example, this can be compared with the medical profession, in which several other professional groups are involved in the preparations ahead of the doctor's meeting with the patient. These can include receptionists, nurses and laboratory assistants. The doctor's meeting with the patient is structured in a way that aims to place greater focus on the patient's problem and give them the opportunity to see more patients. Furthermore, professions that deal with adults can expect their patients or clients to remain loyal to the established, profession-specific structure.

Schools are, of course, organised according to a certain structure. However, the fact that there are a large number of pupils, who are young, have varied needs and different attitudes to being forced to be there, requires the teacher to exercise leadership; leadership they often have to master alone. Consequently, student teachers are not required simply to develop their knowledge of the subject, their didactic proficiency and their interpersonal skills, but must also develop a type of leadership that forms the basis of their ability to practice their profession. This study uses interviews to investigate student teacher's perceptions regarding leadership in the classroom – what it encompasses, what is required and which problems they predict will arise in future.

Grading is often perceived as one of teacher's most difficult tasks. Despite most teachers endeavoring to grade their students as objectively as possible, many students feel that they are subjets to unfair grading. The aim of this study is to describe what it is about a teacher's grading that contributes to the perception of unfairness. This study used the critical incident technique, with 411 practicing teachers in Sweden contributing their own experiences of being assessed in a school context. The main findings from qualitative data analysis indicate that when teachers fail to follow guidelines of the current grading system, use undependable information, allow themselves to be influenced by irrelevant factors, or are ambiguous in their communication, the pupils percived the grading process as unfair. The findings are analyzed and discussed in relation to a theoretical model of teachers' grading, validity and reliability, and three ethical principles.

The aim of the present article is to contribute empirically derived knowledge about Swedish researchers’ experience of ethical problems, conflicts and dilemmas in their research practice in relation to the ethical vetting legislation and procedure. The study has been carried out using the critical incident technique, with researchers from various disciplines providing examples from their own research practice of problems relating to research ethics. The analysis of the researchers’ responses indicates three phenomena, partly in line with similar studies in other countries: (i) the law of ethical vetting puts limits on the relevant research ethical questions; (ii) it is not possible to anticipate all questions of research ethics; and (iii) there are consequences to the fact that the boards for ethical vetting ignore problems that fall outside the law.

In this article, ethics and law in the teaching profession are described and discussed, starting with the ethical dilemma that teachers point to as the most difficult, according to referred empirical studies - intervention when a colleague acts in an ethically incorrect way towards students. Furthermore the author discusses the critique coming from virtue ethics in relation to ethical principles and shows that even Aristotle suggests ethical principles under certain circumstances. Swedish teachers ethical principles had very little time to be achieved before an increasing juridification of teaching took place. This phenomenon is discussed in terms of professional autonomy and professional judgement.

Most accounts of the ethical problems facing researchers across a broad spectrum of research fields come from ethicists, ethics committees, and specialists committed to the study of ethics in human research. In contrast, this study reports on the ethical questions that researchers, themselves, report facing in their everyday practice. Fifty-five Swedish researchers contributed 109 examples of ethical dilemmas, conflicts, and problems in research. They were all researchers at the postdoctoral level in the fields of medicine, the humanities, education, and the social sciences, who devoted at least 50 percent of their working hours to research. They reported issues they face before, during, and after gathering data. Their range of issues is broader than generally discussed and points to the importance of researchers’ ethical sensitivity.

Most accounts of the ethical problems facing researchers across a broad spectrum of research fields come from ethicists, ethics committees and specialists committed to the study of ethics in human research. In contrast, this study reports on the ethical questions that researchers, themselves, report facing in their everyday practice. Fifty-five Swedish researchers contributed 109 examples of ethical dilemmas, conflicts and problems in research. They were all researchers at the post-doctoral level in the fields of medicine, the humanities, education and social sciences, who devoted at least 50% of their working hours to research. They reported issues they face before, during, and after gathering data. Their range of issues is broader than generally discussed and point to the importance of researchers’ ethical sensitivity.