Abstract:

In a rapidly changing world, where the labour landscape is continuously evolving, it is imperative to equip secondary school students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence necessary to successfully navigate their future career paths. By creating a safe and welcoming environment in the classroom, teachers encourage their students’ self-expression and reflection, fostering the development of their social-emotional skills, and their engagement with career exploration and the rehearsal of decision making skills. In addition, by integrating practical activities and collaborative projects, they enable adolescents to develop communication, teamwork and conflict resolution skills, preparing them to face the complex challenges of their paths. In this context, “Community Clubs” intervention aimed to develop a skills integrative approach in educational intervention for 10th grade secondary school students. This intervention design incorporates the methodology of educational psychological consultancy interventions and the modality of School Clubs. These School Clubs are coordinated by a teacher, under the psychological consultancy of a school psychologist, and supported by a research team from the School of Psychology, University of Minho. Psychological counselling can range from the psychologist being present at every session, to scheduling occasional visits, or only providing support on specific occasions (e.g., facilitating contacts and opportunities to explore students' interests). The participation of each school, teacher and student, whether in the experimental group or the control group, is voluntary. Throughout the intervention stages, through group work, the exploration of contexts and establishment of contacts, the secondary school students have the opportunity to explore their interests, develop career exploration and socio-emotional skills, as well as get involved in school and the surrounding community. To this end, a quasi-experimental plan was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention, with a control group and a pre-test and post-test evaluation, in the weeks before and after the intervention. This study reports the design of the “Community Clubs” intervention and explores the effectiveness of the first year of the intervention's implementation. In this first year of the intervention, twenty clubs were formed out of eight schools in northwestern Portugal. Measures of social-emotional skills, career adaptability, school engagement and study processes were completed by 134 students (62.7 % girls; M age = 15.44, SD age= .75), 94 of the experimental group and 40 of the control group. Results of the paired samples t tests indicated that the experimental group improved on social-emotional skills and on study processes. These results sustain the promising role of this skills integrative approach in educational intervention, which should continue to be further investigated.

Keywords:

Secondary school students, psychological consultancy, education intervention, career exploration.