Growing Pains; Growing Gains: Why All the Fuss About Development
If you’ve been following along in our blog series, we’ve been talking about NeuroDevelopmental Mentoring, or NDM. Our last post covered the neuroscience of NDM, especially brain states. For this post, I wanted to focus on the D of NDM: Development.
Human development has been around as long as humans. Yeah. There’s a real mic drop moment for you. But to separate what it means to be human from development is really not to grasp humanity. As the saying goes: “To err is human,” so it is also true that to learn, to change, to grow, and of course, to develop is human.
Simply put, development is really just growing. It’s changing, unfurling, or coming into true form. Quite opposite of evolving, which is changing from one form to another over time, development connotes becoming more and more of the core elements of the self over time.
So why all the fuss about it at NeuroDev?
Development is the product of a student’s experience here. It’s what we partner to create together. It’s also a philosophy. It’s found in what we all do with our abilities to make them stronger and what we do with our inabilities that drives us to innovate.
Referring back to the Neuro of NeuroDevelopmentalMentoring reminds us that neurodivergence isn’t a mental illness. There’s nothing inherent in neurodivergence to fix, treat, or correct. It’s a descriptor of a neurological difference from the typical neurological scenario. Neurodiversity is quite literally a neurological form of biodiversity: a difference.
That said, being neurodivergent in a world comprised, majorly of neurotypicals can present people with unique challenges. Some of our neurodivergent students experience amazing aptitudes and achievements in specific areas and wish for better skills or abilities in others.
That’s where development enters. A developmental mindset is much less about what somebody is good or bad at and much more about investing in experiences that help us all improve our abilities. Take two acorns for example. One acorn sat on the ground staring up at the mighty oak and said “I’m ruined. Look how small I am compared to that. I’ll never be an oak tree.” The other acorn saw the mighty oak and said “I am incredible. Look what I’m about to become.”
A developmental mindset is the second acorn. It is recognizing that an assessment of a person’s abilities or disabilities is a snapshot of their life and what really counts is the whole video of their life over time. It’s zooming out to see the whole perspective. At NeuroDev, we look at two things in that video. How can we partner to maximize strengths? And how can we team up to improve upon, support, and/or innovate around our weaknesses? Then we find a creative way towards both of those goals.
Just as the brain is plastic, meaning adaptable, so too can we flex, mold, and adapt, perhaps slowly over time. But what could be more fulfilling in life than an earnest effort to develop into the best version of ourselves and help others do the same? That’s the magic of development: all acorns are oak trees.