Posted on by Dr James Shea

Why we all need a grandmother in our heads – no tener abuela

No tener abuela is a light hearted comment made by Spanish speakers to someone who is self-congratulatory. It roughly translates to someone without a grandmother to provide the congratulatory praise so they provide it for themselves.

The concept of no tener abuela can be a cultural lens through which we can re-examine the British relationship with ambition and self-worth. In the UK, particularly within working-class communities, there is a long-standing tradition of policing self-praise. Friedman and Laurison’s work is a good primer on this. Phrases such as ‘too big for your boots’ or ‘your head won’t fit through the door’ are often deployed as a means of maintaining humility. Yet, these cautions can inadvertently create a barrier to personal growth, suggesting that acknowledging one’s success is a form of class betrayal or an act of arrogance.

In reality, learning to be self-congratulatory, especially in the absence of a symbolic, doting grandmother to do it for you, is a sophisticated strand of metacognition. It is the practice of stepping outside oneself to objectively evaluate and celebrate an achievement – even if knowing when to articulate those thoughts is yet another cultural norm to navigate.

Moving beyond material evidence

When we discourage children from thinking or saying ‘I smashed it’, we often force them to look elsewhere for evidence of their success. If a child cannot rely on their own internal voice for validation, they inevitably turn to tangible substitutes:

  • Material rewards: stickers, toys, or money.
  • Social validation: digital dopamine from likes and shares.
  • Outcome-bias: only valuing efforts that result in a ‘win’ or a ‘payday’.

By relying solely on these external markers, we risk fostering a purely transactional relationship with effort. If an achievement does not earn anything visible, a child may begin to view the effort itself as valueless.

The power of internalised praise

The reward for playing a brilliant game of football or tennis should not be restricted to the trophy or the praise from the sidelines. The most enduring reward is the ability to reflect and acknowledge one’s own performance: “Well done, I played excellently.” Whether it is writing a short story at school or volunteering for a charity, children should learn to internalise this praise, finding genuine satisfaction in their own efforts. While they must eventually navigate the cultural nuances of how and when to voice this pride to others, the foundational skill is the ability to validate oneself

Teaching children to share these moments with those close to them, not as a boast but as an honest assessment of their own hard work, is a vital social mobility skillset. It provides a buffer against the pervasive fear of overreaching, allowing them to value the process of improvement even when there is no immediate financial or material reward. By learning to articulate their own value, they cultivate a durable sense of self-worth that remains steady, even when external validation from their community is withheld or actively discouraged.

Self-congratulation as a tool for strength

Developing this internal grandmother is not about vanity: it is about becoming stronger. It is an essential component of self-regulation and mental health. When a person can look at their own performance and find satisfaction without needing an audience, they become less susceptible to the fluctuations of public opinion or the addictive pull of short-term rewards.

We should encourage the next generation to embrace a touch of the grandmotherless spirit. If you have done something great, you should be the first person to recognise it. Valuing the things that lead us to reflect, ‘you did great,’ is the surest way to build a life defined by authentic purpose rather than material accumulation.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Why teachers can play classical music in lessons without creating the split attention effect

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Music has long been recognized for its potential to enhance learning environments and cognitive processes. Teachers often incorporate music into their lessons to create a conducive atmosphere for students to focus, engage, and retain information. Classical music, in particular, is a popular choice among teachers due to its calming and stimulating effects on the brain. However, when it comes to playing music with singing during lessons, the dynamics change. An up to the minute study by Sankaran et al. (2024) sheds light on the neural processing of music and speech in the human auditory cortex, providing insights into why teachers may prefer classical music over vocal music in schools for extended writing.

The research conducted by Sankaran et al. delves into how the brain encodes different aspects of melody, such as pitch, pitch-change, and expectation, while listening to Western musical phrases. The study involved recording neurophysiological activity directly from the human auditory cortex using high-density arrays placed over the lateral surface of the cortex. The findings revealed that music-responsive cortical sites, primarily in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), showed significant responses to music compared to a silent baseline period. This suggests that the brain processes music in a specialised manner, with distinct neural populations encoding various melodic features thus removing the split attention effect.

One key aspect highlighted in the study is the difference in neural responses to music and speech stimuli. While certain regions in the STG selectively respond to music over other sounds like speech, the encoding of higher-order sequence structures in music plays a crucial role in this selectivity. The brain’s sensitivity to the unique acoustic structure of music, particularly in terms of spectral and temporal modulation patterns, influences how music is processed and perceived. This distinction in neural processing between music and speech raises important considerations for teachers when choosing the type of music to play during lessons if they wish to reduce the chance of creating a split attention effect during their lesson.

Classical music, known for its instrumental compositions and lack of vocal lyrics (operatic music aside), offers a rich auditory experience that can positively impact cognitive functions such as focus, memory, and mood. The absence of lyrics in classical music eliminates potential distractions leading to split attention that may arise from processing verbal information while trying to concentrate on academic tasks. Additionally, the complex and structured nature of classical music can enhance cognitive processing and creative thinking, making it an ideal background accompaniment for extended writing (or artwork) during lessons.

On the other hand, music with singing introduces an additional layer of complexity to the auditory experience. The presence of lyrics in vocal music requires the brain to simultaneously process verbal content and musical elements, which can divide attention and potentially interfere with cognitive tasks. The study by Sankaran et al. suggests that the neural processing of speech and music with lyrics may engage overlapping neural circuits, leading to a different cognitive response compared to instrumental music.

In conclusion, the research on the neural encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex provides valuable insights into why teachers may choose classical music over vocal music during lessons. By understanding how the brain processes different types of music, teachers can make informed decisions about the auditory environment in lessons to optimise student learning and engagement. Classical music, with its instrumental compositions and cognitive benefits, remains a preferred choice for creating a conducive learning atmosphere, while music containing singing may introduce additional cognitive demands that could potentially deliver a split attention effect.

This is a blog of the paper Narayan Sankaran et al. (2024), Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex. Sci. Adv. 10, pp. 1-16. 10.1126/sciadv.adk0010

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Working memory: could it be that it’s just poor resolution rather than 4-7 items?

We’ve all had the lecture. You can only hold so many items in your working memory because there are only so many slots. It’s in the Core Content Framework (CCF) for trainee teachers. It’s in the Early Careers Framework for recently qualified teachers. And it’s in all the NPQs. If I undertake sequence of colour, number, or items of information tests on you then, after between four and seven items, depending on context, you cannot remember the sequence accurately. Here is what it says in the CCF:

And so we break down instructions into small ‘chunks’. We think about capacity all the time and use it for instructional coaching. Granularity is key. But that idea of working memory having a limit, having only so many slots, is not the only idea in psychology. There is another theory which has just as much validity as the fixed idea. An idea that suggested we could be using many more items than 4-7 in teaching and it would still work. Welcome to the world of low resolution memories…

One competing idea is that the limit on capacity is based on resource rather than a fixed number of slots. It’s nothing new – it’s been around as long as the ‘slots’ idea and instead of slots, it says that working memory is a fluid pool of resources. In other words, you can remember a few things with precision, but that when you overload working memory the result isn’t a total failure to remember additional items, but a degradation in the quality of the memory of all eight items. It’s like pouring your working memory into 8 jars instead of 7. It’s spread around more thinly. The more items, the more pixelated (to use a modern term) the memory. If you want sharp resolution, then keep the number lower, if the outline is important and you’ll be adding resolution over time then the detail isn’t so important at the start. For example, an important part of kinesiology is knowing all 206 bones in the human body. But you still start with the skeleton of all 206. You will probably then divide the skeleton up into groups of more than 4-7 bones. You add detail as you go down so that magnitudinally, the memory can zoom out and in as it is needed. In many ways, it makes good sense to start with a very poor pixelated skeleton memory and then build detail up, rather than start with small detail of 4-7 items. Having the ‘whole’ in your memory, no matter how grainy, can work well when adding detail later on and being able to construct the fine detail into the whole picture.

Where else might this begin to make sense in teaching? Well, certainly in English. One of the first things you do before teaching an extended text is to teach students the plot. If you are teaching pupils The Merchant of Venice then you teach students about the pairs of characters, the love interests, the racism, the basic plot around the borrowing of 300 ducats by Bassanio, through his friend Antonio, to pretend to be rich in order to woo Portia (Bassanio really doesn’t come out well in this play), the cross dressing and even the idea that Portia is played by a man who cross dresses back into a man to play the young lawyer. It’s a fiendish plot and one of Shakespeare’s more simple plays! But we absolutely teach the plot first using name tags, bags of gold and solid drama pedagogy. And all those items are not only more than four to seven items but the pupils won’t remember much of it…in great detail. However, as we go through the play and its key scenes, so we will add detail and so that grand plot will come together just like the skeleton with the 206 bones. Once that has happened, then our pupil can zoom in and out of the play examining themes, character evolution and key quotations at ease as they consider the play through the lens of a question. They can recall the large plot of more than 4-7 items and also add detail to each subsection of the plot. This idea is reinforced by one the earlier ideas about resolution rather than slots from this paper by Frick (1988) which found the parsing of knowledge (separating knowledge into items) did not happen as the knowledge entered working memory, but at the point of recall, something he calls the ‘process of recovery’.

Working memory is a finite resource. But rather than see it as restricted to 4-7 parsed slots, begin to see that depending on context and the pupil’s individual strength of working memory, resolution is that which is affected rather than number of items. And then, even further, start to think about delivering something that won’t be recalled immediately in fine detail. Deliver a whole worked example in its entirety first and then go through each section of the worked example in detail.

One issue for us all is why the CCF eschews this contrasting idea of resolution from its literature review. You can still overload working memory, but you are only overloading its ability to create memories with fine resolution. And then Frick would say the parsing happens on the recall, not on the initial learning so there’s further debate there.

There is clearly a place for lower resolution memories in teaching in terms of bigger and more complex sets of data. By adopting the idea of resolution you begin to work with magnitudinal ideas. You can move along the magnitudinal spectrum and allow pupils to zoom in and out of schemata seeing both overarching and complex pictures whilst they are also able to focus and recall fine parsed detail. It’s an important refinement to the idea of working memory and cognitive load and we have to, as teachers, consider how that affects the way we approach our teaching.

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