The Practice of Café-Philo: A Proposal for Teaching and Evaluating Skills in Secondary School

Internationally, it is essential to identify, plan and implement the training practices, inside the school, which deal with the personal growth of the individual in the wholeness of their personality and nature. For such reason, the teaching of transversal skills has become a widespread proposal, and also in Italy a bill was passed, which has raised two fundamental issues: how to develop the acquisition of these skills and how to develop an efficient evaluating criterion. This contribution aims at presenting the practice of caféphilo as a possible methodology to build skills in secondary school students. Even if its theorisation and diffusion is quite recent, it is extremely interesting and promising, as it provides numerous benefits to the development of skills which can be identified in three macro-areas: reflective, communicative and ethic-value. Accordingly to the rules of café-philo you can evaluate the process of acquisition of the skills because, involving dialogic practice, sharing one own’s experience and welcoming other people’s ideas, it puts into a play all non-cognitive skills which otherwise would be difficult to evaluate. This practice is quite engaging and could help the scholastic institutions turn into a real fertile soil for the education of individuals that can act concretely, apply an independent critical thinking and their own various skills that would help them to stand out and find their way around in today’s society. Moreover, in response to the legislative proposal it would also contrast the early school leaving consolidating the affection of students towards school itself.