session of the HoS meeting. As it had already occurred during the previous year’s meeting in Tirana, AESOP set up a Europe Cafè session that was organized according to the so-called ‘world cafè’ method (http://www.theworldcafe. com/method.html for further information), aiming at providing an open and creative conversation on a topic of mutual interest to surface participants collective knowledge, share ideas and insights, and gain a deeper understanding of the subject and the issues involved. Participants divided themselves into three smaller groups and gave life to as many parallel workshop focusing on issues that are of uttermost interest for the Association and its future activities. In the first workshop, co-chaired by Maros Finka (Slovak University of Technology) and Beata Banachowicz (University of Lodz), participants directed their attention and thoughts to the AESOP Experts Pool and to the issues of quality and expertise in planning education facilities. They were required to reflect and discuss the role and potentials of the Experts Pool in transferring expertise and assuring quality among European planning schools. The main themes at stake concentrated on the expertise and information that the latter need to perform within an International/European Higher Education Area and, in this light, the extent to which the potential services that AESOP Experts pool is providing is welcomed by AESOP Member Schools was debated. Particular attention was dedicated to the possibility to institute an ‘AESOP label’, in other words to whether AESOP should provide or not a formal assessment process for those planning schools that require it, as well as to the specific criteria – in terms of general and specific requirements – that planning schools should possess to be awarded such a certification. All this elements were discussed in the broader contexts of the role of research and practice performance assessment of planning schools in different contexts and at the European level, providing participants with a wider framework to reflect upon locate their own context in. Building on the discussion, the workshop delivered a series of conclusion and recommendations that will help AESOP to fine-tune and improve the activities of the Experts pool in the future. According to the outcomes of the workshop, the service needs more visibility. It should serve both the member schools – in terms of providing an added value through external evaluation as well as constituting a valuable platform for comparison – and AESOP itself – that may further improve its experience and knowledge about planning education in Europe. Moreover, when it comes to the possible provision of an AESOP label, participants agreed that the assessment process should be developed thoroughly paying particular attention to methods of evaluation, contextualization skills as well as elaborating criteria concerning the composition of the evaluation team. The provided certification should be separated from any sort of professional recognition, it should take into account existing differences between the various
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