Boost Self-Awareness for Confident, Reflective, and Emotionally Savvy Students

What is Self-Awareness?

Self-awareness is a student’s capacity to recognize and understand their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, as well as how they impact themselves and others. It involves several components for our students such as:

• Emotional Awareness: A student being in tune with his or her own emotions and understanding their origins, which helps students manage them effectively.
• Self-Reflection: The ability to introspect and evaluate one’s thoughts, behaviors, and experiences. This includes recognizing patterns and learning from them.
• Understanding Strengths and Weaknesses: Students know what they are good at and where they may need improvement. This helps students in setting realistic goals and making informed decisions.
• Self-Perception: How a student sees themselves in various contexts, including their self-image and how they think others perceive them.
• Impact on Others: A student recognizing how actions and behaviors affect those around them, and understanding the social and emotional dynamics at play.
• Values and Beliefs: Understanding what drives a student’s decisions and behaviors, including their core values and personal beliefs.

Self-awareness is a crucial aspect of personal development and emotional intelligence for all of our students. ExQ helps students develop strong self-awareness skills, helping them navigate their personal and professional lives with greater insight and effectiveness, improve relationships, and foster growth and resilience.

What does ExQ’s exclusive data reveal about Self-awareness?

Through its patented technology, ExQ’s data quantifies and validates students’ Executive Function strengths and challenges. For example, in the chart above, in a metro Atlanta school, during their Benchmark Assessment of nine areas of Executive Function, ExQ evaluated students’ Self-Awareness, which showed that 62% of students were at the lowest tier of Self-Awareness competence, lacking self-knowledge with an average score of 38%. At the end of the year-long training with ExQ curriculum (20 lessons), their self-awareness scores improved to 44%. This is a 6% gain and also indicated that students moved up to a higher level of self-awareness.

When students engage with ExQ’s Executive Function classes, they increase their abilities to identify and achieve their own goals and become independent thinkers able to shift strategies during times of change or unexpected distractions. ExQ helps teachers and their students understand their learning strengths and challenges, and then provides an individualized curriculum that explicitly and directly teaches students how to develop Executive Function skills, such as self-awareness, helping them monitor their own growth and progress over time.

Without a strategic plan to prioritize teaching of Executive Function skills as a core curriculum in our schools, students will not be taught how to develop self-awareness skills nor will they cultivate a consistent self-reflection practice as a pathway to self-improvement. That’s why we believe ExQ is such a game changer in helping our students gain personal insights to succeed in school and beyond.

Join us for an upcoming ExQ Lunch ‘n Learn to hear more about how teaching Executive Function skills with ExQ is transforming students’ learning experiences. Sign up here.

What do learners say about developing Self-Awareness with ExQ’s Executive Function curriculum?

Before using ExQ, High School student, Markel, was struggling with Self-Awareness and his ability to focus. ExQ quickly helped him develop a self-reflection practice and this gave him the Self-Awareness he needed to connect his study habits to his inability to focus and the impact it was having on his grades. He also learned new study habits and strategies for learning how to focus, by taking breaks and managing distractions. The interactive games he played with ExQ enhanced his understanding of patterns and concepts, improving his school performance and ability to multitask. ExQ also inspired him to think about his future, fostering ambitions to become a dependable individual and work towards his goal of becoming a fashion designer. Overall, ExQ helped Markel become a more Self-Aware, resilient, and goal-oriented student!

Self-awareness is a foundation for students’ understanding of themselves and the world around them, and teaching Executive Function with ExQ can help students build self-awareness that increases literacy in a number of ways:

• Children’s Literature: Children’s literature can help students recognize their own emotional characteristics by connecting with characters and their emotional aspects. For example, teachers can ask students to share how they think characters are feeling in a story, and then help them understand their own feelings and emotions. This can help students develop self-efficacy and motivation, which can help them learn to read.
• Self-literacy: Self-literacy is the ability to read, understand, and use information about oneself in different ways. It’s similar to literacy in that it involves the ability to source, interpret, and communicate personal data in context.
• Emotional Literacy: Emotional literacy involves self-awareness, recognizing one’s own feelings, and knowing how to manage them. For example, students can learn to stay calm when they feel angry or reassure themselves when they’re in doubt. They can also learn empathy, which is having sensitivity to the feelings of others.

With ExQ, students develop foundational self-awareness skills that enable them to succeed in learning to read and building a love of reading for life!

ExQ helps students build self-awareness skills that improve their mental health by helping them understand themselves and others, regulate their emotions, and make better decisions:

• Understanding Themselves: Self-awareness helps students understand their strengths, weaknesses, and how their actions affect others. It can also help them make sense of their cultural identities.
• Regulating Emotions: ExQ teaches self-awareness techniques to help students learn to label their emotions, which can prevent mislabeling and projecting them. This training can lead to better emotional regulation, which can help students perform better academically, have stronger relationships, and experience greater mental well-being.
• Making Better Decisions: With ExQ games and coaching, students build self-awareness skills, becoming better problem-solvers and decision-makers. It can also help them feel empowered and intentional in their personal journey.

With ExQ, students develop self-awareness skills that help them prepare for college and careers in many ways, including:

• Decision Making: Self-aware students can make better decisions that align with their goals and values, which can be helpful when choosing a major or career path. ExQ feedback training can also help students learn how to evaluate opportunities, assess risks, and make choices that reflect their authentic selves.
• Academic Performance: Students who learn Executive Function skills by understanding their ExQ Learning Profile, can identify their strengths and weaknesses, which can help them focus on areas that need more practice and support. ExQ also helps students handle the stress of schoolwork and deal with transitions and risk aversion with new skills and habits.
• Communication: ExQ students build self-awareness and can understand their communication style and be more attuned to others’ emotions and needs, which can improve their interpersonal skills. The Executive Function skills students learn with ExQ can be important in both personal relationships and later in collegiate or professional settings.
• Emotional Intelligence: Self-awareness is a key part of ExQ’s social-emotional learning, which is the process of developing skills that are important for success in school, work, and life.