Counseling in the United States is a mature profession with established professional norms and models for practice in a wide range of settings.  School counseling is an important counseling specialization that has developed very clear descriptions of professional practice that are reflected in role and function statements (ASCA, 1990), explications of comprehensive developmental guidance (Gysbers and Henderson, 2006) and, most recently, in the ASCA National Model for School Counseling Programs (ASCA 2012).   In Italy, counseling is a developing profession and its model of operation in schools still evolving.  While there is increasing recognition that the counseling can make potentially important contributions to the improvement of schooling (Carey and Bertolani, 2009), there is currently a wide range of actual ways that counseling is being implemented within schools. (Bertolani, 2010).   In Italy, in order for school counseling to grow and achieve its full potential to positively impact students lives, it will be necessary to expand the range of activities and services offered by counselors in schools.  It seems particularly important to find ways to introduce counselor-led prevention-oriented programs to the Italian educational system. 

Eccomi Pronto is a research-based, preventative-developmental, school counseling curriculum that is based on the principles of self-direction theory, structural cognitive development, positive psychology, and narrative therapy.  It is a story-based curriculum that is delivered by school counselors and primary school teachers.   Eccomi Pronto is base on the fundamental assumption that students’ academic development and personal development are inextricably bound together.  Each story is grounded in an area of positive psychology and teaches student ways to understand themselves and ways to direct and motivate their own behavior.  The curriculum helps students develop pre-literacy skills and the ability to construct their own self-stories. The characters and events in the stories help students see how these concepts can be used by to improve their lives.  Eccomi Pronto helps teachers understand the inner lives of their students, develop strong nurturing relationships with their students, and develop skills in using group process to promote personal-social development in their classrooms.

The curriculum was initially developed through a partnership between the University of Verona Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Department of Student Development, and has been implemented and evaluated in the primary schools in Trentino Alto Adige thanks to the funding from Caritro Foundation.

This presentation will describe Eccomi Pronto and methods used in its development, discuss how to work effectively with teachers in order to promote implementation, illustrate principles for effective implementation in a school gleaned from the work in Trentino, exhibit and discuss example of students’ follow-up and present evaluation results and findings. 

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