Neuroplasticity is defined as as the brains innate ability to change itself in response to how people live their lives. Our brain has pathways or connections that it uses whenever we perform a particular task, any task. If this is a task we do all the time, say driving a car, that pathway is naturally going to be stronger. This is our brain responding to us doing this task so often that it recognises this is an important pathway to maintain.
Understanding neuroplasticity can benefit people, particularly when we want to change our habits, or learn a new skill. If we wanted to learn a new task, initially our brain would not know what we were doing, it would be inexperienced. So when we are learning we do not have these pathways initially but as we learn our brain creates them, and the more we access this new skill, the more our brain creates stronger pathways in itself to help us access this information. Making us more adept at this skill.
The idea of Neuroplasticity is that the more you do a task the stronger the connections in your get stronger, so to increase your Neuroplasticity, the more you do the task or skill, the greater the connections in your brain will become.
Along with doing the skill, keeping healthy and active, which in turns keeps you brain healthy too will also promote neuroplasticity alot more easily.
A growth mindset is basically the idea that people understand that they are able to always improve themselves if they are willing to put the work into it. Simply put having a growth mindset means you believe: if you TRY to better yourself, you can.
Why a growth mindset is important is because someone who has this mindset, will have better motivation and resilience towards working towards a goal. With a growth mindset, you understand that you will work towards your goal, and even if you do not succeed immediately, you do not get disencouraged by failure, if anything, you find that it is part of the process. This compared to a fixed mindset, where a person believes their talents and skills are all inherit, and their is a limit to how much they can succeed. This leads to people with fixed mindsets to avoid challenges, and be discouraged by failure.
Yes, very much so. I did not know what a Growth or Fixed Mindset was before this exploration. After learning about them, I learned that I have some of the tendencies of those with fixed mindsets. And reflecting back on my schooling, I see how that definitely influenced that in some ways. I think just knowing about this concept has changed my view of learning.
I think it will change my motivation going into learning. There have been moments in this course were I felt very out of depths and helpless, like I will never get through this, or I am incapable. Just learning about growth mindset, I feel has changed my outlook on this course, and also to approaching other aspects in my life.
I think understanding Neuroplasticity has shown me the importance of repetition, using the skill everyday to get better at it. How this will influece my learning plan is that it will mean I should be learning everyday, at least a little bit. I think the improtance of this is to grow and maintain those strong connections in your brain of this skill, in this case coding. This is an important note for anytime I want to learn a new skill but in terms of my learning plan for this course I think it has emphasized the idea of touching the keyboard everyday.
Understanding a Growth Mindset has shown me the importance of resilience, and having a mindset that is able to fail and not be so easily discouraged. I think in this course, it is an inevitability that you will fail or get stuck at some point. I think how you can be successful is being able to take it in stride and keep moving forward. Learning about Growth Mindset, and how having that mindset can lead to better success, has stressed the importance to me that I need to try engage that mindset, so that it can lead to future success for me.