Guidance in students’ learning paths

“Guidance in students’ learning paths” is a project aimed at making schools able to deliver counselling throughout the whole educational path, from the first to the last school year.

The proposal, developed between 2020 and 2022 by ANPAL Servizi, an instrumental body of ANPAL (National Agency for Active Policies), with the involvement of 658 secondary schools located throughout the country, had as its main objectives:

• to make students able to develop CMS, self-counselling skills, career decision making skills;
• to provide secondary schools with operational tools for the design and implementation of guidance paths starting from students' vocations, interests and aptitudes.

In order to implement the model, 1372 teachers in secondary schools were provided with specific training for a total of 1003 sessions.

In central-northern regions, such as Marche and Emilia-Romagna, the schools tested some of the proposed tools in the two-year period of upper secondary school, while in the southern regions the model was tested only in the last three-years.

The “Guidance in students’ learning paths” proposal was afterwards also included in an ad hoc training course on guidance in schools involving around 1430 teachers in four different editions.

Following Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, the steps developed and followed during the testing were: Collection of data; identification of students’ needs via ad hoc workshops; students’ needs-based activities such as workshops, lessons, talks aimed at exploring students’ interests and aptitudes, work shadowing, career portfolios, workshops specifically designed to draw up a CV and develop CMS; meeting with experts; individual or group career counselling; apprenticeship, final debate focused on all the activities carried out.

These activities were not intended to be a unique approach, but rather conceived as a recommended model to be implementedon a national scale.

The model included the following tools for the design and implementation of guidance paths, starting from students' vocations, interests and aptitudes:

• Toolkit, to identify guidance needs of the students and plan the activities to deliver;
• Journal de bord, to support students' critical reflection about their own and others' experiences;
• Action plan workshop (for final year classes), to support students in reflecting on career choices, goals and paths to take up;
• Toolkit, to encourage students to think independently about their experiences and to share them with other students;
• Guidelines for teachers, to provide operational guidelines for ANPAL Servizi’s territorial operators, teachers, tutors and operators responsible for guidance on ANPAL Servizi’s digital platform.

The proposed model was aimed at providing Italian secondary schools with operational tools useful for creating guidance courses within schools.