Blueprint

Blueprint for EQ Exercises
Once you have had some experience teaching EQ exercises — either those from this site or elsewhere — you may feel ready to start creating exercises of your own. As you get to know you group better and better, it might be useful to design exercises focusing on issues more relevant in your specific group. Remember to be careful with feelings, then design an activity by answering the questions below.
Question for the Design Process

  1. What is it that you wish to address? What are the emotional and cognitive objectives with your exercises?
  2. What skill or ability is it that you wish to explore?
  3. How can you introduce the exercise to create focus on the right issue?
  4. How can you debrief the exercise so that the objectives are accomplished? Which questions are effective with this specific issue?
  5. What are the affective questions (about feelings) and what are the cognitive questions (about ideas)?
  6. What could make the exercise to a disaster? Are there built-in risks to be foreseen?
    Structure
    Self-Science exercises follow a standard structure:
  7. Introduction or focusing activity
  8. Experiment/Game
  9. Sharing observations of what happened; sensing of emotions, recognising actions
  10. Discussion
  11. Closing
    This can of course be changed, but just make sure to close down properly. Leaving an exercise with emotions too upset usually will undermine your real goals, and in the long run, create a lack of motivation or even fear to participate.
    Test It!
    Before using the exercise with your participants, try it with some friends to see their reactions. When you test your exercise, you can assess whether it is too challenging (or too simple), if it leads to the right discussion, etc. Its better to design a exercise so that it can be made more challenging, than to make one that is too challenging. It is very difficult to rewind a process that has gone too far, so use your own emotional intelligence and awareness to sense what is appropriate.
    For More Information
    How to Teach Self-Science

Source: Joshua Freedman and Fredrik Torberger