Daniel Goleman and Exquisite Learning
One of the major educational goals of Exquisite Learning is to help pre-teenagers and teenagers to explore and express self-awareness and to further facilitate social- emotional learning. You may ask, why we choose pre-teenagers/teenagers as our target audience? What's the relationship between self-awareness and social emotional learning?
According Dr. David Hamburg, a psychiatrist and the president of the Carnegie Corporation, there are two crucial periods in a child's adjustment and development. One is the year of transition into grade school, and the other is the year into middle school or junior high school (Goleman, 1995). Puberty is a transitional and challenging period for many teenagers, due to the biological change and intellectual growth. In addition, under the high academic demands, dense peer pressure and increased stress, it is the social-emotional abilities to keep adolescents from the crimes, drugs, and violence.
As the thinking capacities develop, they start to wonder who they are, what are their values, what are they different from others…etc. It is the time and need for these pre-teenagers and teenagers to explore and express themselves. Therefore, through playing with Exquisite Learning, our audience is expected to form the concept of "self-awareness" during the process.
Quoting from Daniel Goleman (1995) defined, "self-awareness is the sense of an ongoing attention to one's internal state". A person with self-awareness is able to aware of him/her self and others. The reflection resources in Exquisite Learning is designed for facilitate self-reflective awareness. The "Reflection Phrases" provoke the users to reflect themselves at both self-mode and group-mode. The "Reflection Journal" provides the users to write down their feelings and thinking, and facilitates the reflection process. The "Reflection History" is the place where the users could store those reflection journals. The users could read these journals and reflect on them as the time goes by.
On the other hand, self- awareness is the root to the social-emotional learning (Goleman, 1995). From the self-awareness, other components of social emotional intelligence such as "Empathy", "Peer relations", "Self-motivation", "Self-regulation", are built up. In Exquisite learning, we focus on three social emotional competences: "Self-awareness", "Empathy" and "Peer relations".
Source:
Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence . New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
Last updated: December 7, 2002