Expressive writing and guidance interview as educational tecniques for building high school students’ professional life Project.

Abstract

Professional guidance is an inescapable duty of the teachers who are already engaged at school teaching curricular disciplines. The students, at the end of the high school, need a teacher-tutor who knows them well and how to use valid tools to assist them in the construction of their professional life project. Without being specialists in professional guidance, teachers can learn to use the “SeCo” methodology (“Expressive Writing and Guidance Interview”) to accompany their students in the delicate process that leads them to choose a specific training-professional option. In this article, after mentioning the theories of “personal growth through writing about oneself” built by Pennebaker and “non-directivity” developed by Rogers in which the “SeCo” methodology is inspired, we describe the heuristic itinerary (2015 - 2018) that has led to the development of this methodology: the pilot research published in 2015 demonstrates that prospective writing has a positive effect on the sense of self-efficacy and decisional capacity of the students, and the professional future represents the topic most described by them during the writing sessions; exploratory research published in 2017 demonstrates, at the same time, the effectiveness of the prospective writing and guidance interview on the aforementioned soft skills and the methodological limits of experimental plan used. Finally, we present the five main phases of the guidance process developed to carry out an upcoming experimentation with a wider sample of students in which the “SeCo” methodology will be used.