Abstract:

The aim of the present paper is to present the innovations comprised in the 2017 Romanian counselling curriculum framework for middle schools. The policy document has been designed by a group of experts and practitioners, under the coordination of the Ministry of Education, while the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) assured the scientific coordination and Euroguidance Romania supported the sharing of information and the validation process. The curriculum will be implemented for pupils of the 5th grade (11-12 years old), starting with the 2017-2018 school year and progressively to the other three grades (6th-8th). The aim of the counselling curriculum framework for middle schools was to propose a set of transversal competences, based on the key competences established at European level, with the aim to support the continuous development of the career management skills, socio-emotional skills, healthy lifestyle skills and information and learning management skills during the whole compulsory education. The process started in 2013 with the new curricular framework for primary education and in 2014 for the vocational stream, and it will continue with the development of a similar framework for the Romanian high schools in the future. Within the present paper, the results of recent IES research will be presented (2016 and 2017), in respect with noncognitive skills and their development in adolescents, as well as data from similar international initiatives for middle schools which informed the Romanian process. The vision, the concepts, the structure and a short example of the curricular framework design will be presented, together with the discussion of the results of a validation process, run by IES at the end of 2016. Recommendations are drawn in relation to the future implementation of the innovative curricular framework in Romania.

Keywords:

School curriculum, counselling, middle school, noncognitive skills, adolescents.