The contribution that psychologists can offer to schools: co-designing interventions with teachers

The provision of individual psychological counselling services to students prevails in Italian schools, even though the literature has long since identified other effective strategic areas of intervention (Matteucci et al, 2024). Among them, the Teacher Participatory Action Research (TPAR) is based on the idea that teachers can democratically co-construct with psychologists an in-depth knowledge of the relational and institutional context in which they work (Pedone, 2023). Within this framework, this study presents an intervention model against school drop-out developed by the non-profit association “Maestri di Strada” in Naples, Italy (Parrello, 2023). The school psychologist works with teachers by co-designing activities through the experience of reflective groups, with the aim of bringing out contextual needs and constructing specific interventions inside and outside the classroom. To illustrate this model, a corpus of 19 reflexive group observation reports from three secondary schools (19227 tokens) was subjected to thematic analysis of elementary contexts by T-LAB (Lancia, 2012). Five clusters emerged, which mainly highlight teachers’ requests for systematic and long-term psychological interventions. Interventions should aim at improving the relational school climate and tackling teacher’s sense of ineffectiveness and powerlessness. The alliance between teachers and the other adults should be fostered.