(You can find the full text of the 3LPlace Curriculum section on Social Awareness here.)
Social awareness increases our ability to successfully navigate the world of social communication. We need social communication skills when we are seeking information, requesting assistance, desiring emotional connection, wanting to be playful or creative with another, expressing an idea or insight, sharing an experience or needing comfort.
Effective social communication asks us to draw upon several critical processes:
- Language to process, understand and generate on a verbal and nonverbal level
- Regulation to manage one’s attention, emotions, sensory sensations, and thoughts
- Facilitation to know when and how to start, contribute, respond; and Inhibition to know when and how to stop or rein-in reactivity and impulses
- Several forms of Intelligence:
- Experiential - informs us based on prior social experiences
- Reflective - enables us to pause and reflect both on what we wish to say and what the other person has said/responded
- Interpersonal - understands the desires, intentions and motivations of others
- Intrapersonal - understands our own feelings, motivations, thoughts and fears
The Social Awareness module places a strong emphasis on skill building through self-exploration, personal insight and self-discovery. The active process of going inwards creates the opportunities for personal growth that are necessary for making meaning surrounding who we are. But this process only takes students halfway on the road to finding and establishing their personal empowerment. To truly step into their own, we must guide students to turn their newly developed power of awareness and attention outwards. Personal insight becomes far more meaningful when it can be applied in social contexts and in relationships.
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