Get to Know Erasmus+ My Compass
Inclusive. Educational. Innovative.
This is a Erasmus+ KA220 project in which 5 organisations from 4 different European countries cooperate in order to enhance students' education.
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In recent years, there has been an international increase in the retention of young people in secondary education and a growing participation in tertiary education. As young people study longer, they have to make more decisions about what and where they study and the commitment required to achieve the desiredprogressions. Such decisions are becoming increasingly complex, both because of the proliferation of higher education pathways - so much so that they constitute a veritable 'training market' - and because of the growing dynamism of the labour market as a result of digitisation and, increasingly, energy transition processes. In order to help students develop this capacity for action, educational systems are turning to career guidance.
Career guidance and planning are strategic for promoting a sustainable, inclusive and innovative social transformation, thus essential for coping with the great changes taking place. The MY COMPASS project focuses on orientation; the My Compass project builds on the OECD longitudinal study mentioned above, which analyses the evidence supporting effective orientation. Among them, the My Compass project will focus on career conversations, which, according to the OECD, predict lower levels of unemployment, higher wages and greater satisfaction in the future.
Finally, we would like to emphasise that the My Compass project is in direct continuity with the Calling project, focusing on orientation activities to make teachers autonomous in the management of an entire orientation process.
The general objective of the project is to support the evolution of the teachers' role in line with the new teaching demand expressed internationally by students and the world of work; a teaching model that must also include orientation, i.e. a guide to exploring one's own aspirations and choosing strategies to pursue them. This will be achieved by transferring to teachers the theoretical models and methodologies necessary to carry out two key orientation activities: the advanced and integrated analysis of students' personal aspects (professional interests, values and strengths, detected by means of special questionnaires) and the return of the results of this analysis to the students, aimed at stimulating initiative in professional planning.
The MY COMPASS project envisages the production of two tangible outputs:
(1) Methodological Toolkit, providing the models and methodologies;
(2) Evaluation report on the effectiveness of the Toolkit experimentation, giving an assessment of the quality of the use of the methodologies and proposing recommendations for improvement. The transfer of models and methodologies to teachers meets the selected sector priority, as it provides teachers with the necessary resources to meet the new demands in terms of guidance.
At the same time, a second specific objective will be pursued: to enable teachers to apply inclusive guidance practices towards students with vulnerable conditions, in order to prevent the transmission of existing inequalities in the professional sphere. This will be achieved by making teachers aware of the negative impact of vulnerable conditions on their professional choices and outcomes, but also by transferring to them the methodologies for addressing the needs of different vulnerabilities.
The achievement of this objective involves the production of two tangible outcomes:
(1) a dissemination presentation (contained in the Methodological Toolkit) focusing on (a) the psycho-social mechanisms that explain the impact of vulnerabilities on career aspirations and choices and (b) the specific techniques of inclusive guidance;
(2) an assessment of the quality of the taking into account of specific vulnerability conditions, contained in the Evaluation Report on the experimentation.
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The organisations are the following:
Eulab consultunting (Roma, Italy) - training organisation
Istituto Omnicomprensivo Orte (Orte, VT, Italy) - coordinator school
53rd Lyceum of Athens (Athens, Greece) - partner school
Liceul Teoretic "Ovidius" (Constanta, Romania) - partner school
Agrupamento de Escolas José Saramago (Poceirão, Palmela, Portugal) - partner school
