Dean Pam Grossman travels to Norway to receive honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo

Dean Pam Grossman travels to Norway this week to celebrate her acceptance of the Doctor Honoris Causa award from the University of Oslo. She is the sole recipient of the school’s educational doctorate, while other industry leaders will receive the award for their work in areas such as law, medicine, and mathematics.  

As part of the program, Grossman will give a talk called “The Dream of a Common Language: Core Practices for Teaching." As an international leader on teacher quality, her research has been critical to the University of Oslo's QUINT Centre, which stands for Quality in Nordic Teaching.

The center has drawn foundational theory and methods from Grossman's work, ranging from her Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO) manual to her seminal 2009 paper “Redefining teaching, re-imagining teacher education.” The PLATO manual identifies and expands the ways we define high-quality teaching, while the 2009 paper "argued for a major shift in teaching and teacher education, from a focus on the knowledge that teachers need in order to teach, to a focus on how teachers use that knowledge in practice." 

The University of Oslo announced the doctorate in 2020, but the festivities have been delayed for two years due to COVID-19. The institution has granted honorary degrees since 1824, typically given every three years.

Earlier this summer, Grossman presented one of the three keynote speeches at the 2022 QUINT Conference, which took place in Iceland and brought together leading experts and researchers on teacher quality. Grossman's keynote focused on project-based learning, and can be watched at the bottom of this page.