School-Work Alternation: Teachers’ Voices about the Development and the Assessment Process of Soft Skills

The European (COM, 2010) and national recommendations (L.107/2015) are focused on the reinforcement of the partnership between educational contexts and the world of work. The aim is to build spaces for transformative learning for all systems involved, and to provide students with experiences, useful for developing not only technical-professional, but also soft skills. The usefulness to promote, in the young generations, the development of skills useful for real life, led researchers to investigate, through a qualitative approach, if according to the teachers’ perspectives, the compulsory School-Work Alternation (SWA) experiences promote soft skills development, and if teachers include it in the students’ learning design and assessment process. Findings show some contradiction between learning, design and assessment processes, with important implications for practices and policies.