Abstract:

PACE stands for Program of Equal Access to Higher Education, an initiative that was originated by Professor Francisco Javier Gil (Universidad de Santiago de Chile) and institutionalized by the Ministry of Education in Chile. This program supports vulnerable high and vocational schools in various ways to help academic merit students to be admitted in affiliated higher education institutions, as an alternative to their admission tests performance.

One of the prioritized areas of PACE-UTALCA program is focused on giving support and training to educators and school counsellors in order to broadening the tools for those professionals that consequentially help in a better way their students during decision making regarding their academic future.

The contingency of a global sanitary emergency has affected the actions of many education professionals and the counseling dimension is not the exception. Counselors perform a wide variety of tasks, according to Lewis, B., (2020) “School counselors serve the social and emotional needs of students so they can be prepared for academic rigor”. Considering this definition, as well as the conditions of the present exceptional situation, a task for the specialized team program has been to first diagnose and then respond to counselors needs with appropriate training.

In this research, 9 educational communities are represented although the results had been expanded to 16 schools that belong to the program. Counselors were gathered throughout an itinerary of 5 journeys since December 2019 to December 2020, they had a space to freely interact and shared about the creation of orienting material that can help students and themselves to fulfill the objectives of counseling, considering the present restrictive situation of sanitary emergency. While working in these aims, good practices have been identified regarding to improve the future work of a learning community of school counselors.

The methodology includes the implementation of a strategical analysis where the participants identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and menaces occurred throughout the work supported by program and the projection regarding the new environment caused by pandemic.

Some of the key questions to be answered in this research are: What is the opinion of school counselors regarding the support obtained by PACE-UTALCA? What are the needs expressed by school counselors in the context of global sanitary emergency? What were the good practices identified and implemented to follow up in a learning community of school The results of the implementation of good practices as well as the functioning of activities and use of resources created in collaboration with the school counselors, during the first term of 2021, are added to the present analysis.

Keywords:

School-counseling, pandemic, good-practices.