Knowing what, when... Is any decision ever easy? 

I don't mean decisions like what to eat for dinner (although with my love of food, that too can be hard going), or what to watch at the cinema. I mean decisions that you know you will look back on one day - decisions which will change you in some way... If you can sense this is another post about change, and managing change (maybe a New Year has that effect on me) you'd be right...

I've been incredibly moved today by a conversation with a brilliant, fantastic teacher. She is thinking about her future, wondering what, when. Both of us were very touched by what we discussed (I don't mind admitting we both had a teary eye as we talked) because we were both struck by the way change can be heart breaking whilst heart building. Heart breaking for what you know will be left behind; heart making for the way you will grow in the future. But even knowing the positives does not make knowing what, and when, easy. These decisions about change are arguably the hardest decisions of all to make. Of course, as historians we can use the past to speculate about the consequences (history as a hotbed of experience, or a light from the stern illuminating the future), but no two people, places, events or situations are ever the same, so knowing what, and when, is difficult.

So what can do we? Does Ambrose help (see my previous post)? Well, actually, no, not exactly. What has occurred to me is that understanding what change to make can be thought through using Ambrose's model. Indeed, my friend and I were able to work our way through Ambrose very succinctly regarding the content of her decision. So, we thought, Ambrose's model seems a helpful way to reflect on why something turned out the way it did, or a helpful model to plan strategic change in a system (such as a school, or lesson, or our lives), but it does have a fundamental flaw: it misses out heart. Some might say heart comes into 'incentives' or 'vision' but what I'm referring to is slightly different. I mean the way the human heart can play on us: the way our feelings, our emotions, react. Heart can a have a lot to do with WHEN we decide to act. And the way we feel about something often defies models. Indeed, the Greek word for emotion "thymos" also means spirit, soul, courage, breath, mind - and I'd love to meet someone who could give me a model for thinking about these elements in order to help our decision making. So whilst Ambrose's model tells us my friend's decision might be the right one, it doesn't help her to know when it's right to actually execute.

If I'm losing you, here is a simple example: amazingly well planned lesson / series of lessons...  A particular student defies you in every possible way, whereas two weeks ago he was fine. This, I believe, is the thymos. Its his emotions. It could be caused by difficulties he is having with his Mum, or a fall out with a girlfriend. But try as you will, that thymos will defy your best efforts. Heart, thymos, is defying your attempt at that TIME to execute your model! To give another example, we could look to history. Would the Reformation have had the success it did at THAT TIME without thymos? Yes, yes, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox et al had vision, skills, incentives, plan, resources... But by god they had thymos too: their own and the thymos of the people, ready for change. So if thymos does affect change, as I hope you agree it does, then doesn't that mean that in history and our own lives thymos can be both an inhibitor and an agent of change? 

I wonder whether this is why so many history teachers feel uncomfortable about teaching empathy. Being able to explore and understand thymos is hard enough in our own lives, let alone the lives of people in the foreign past. If we want to understand change - what and when - it's far nicer to stay in the safety net of classifiable, modelled criteria. Who wants to swim in the murky waters and unpredictable affairs of the heart and soul to explain why William won at Hastings. What is more, emotion is so rarely documented in history that we really have very little in the way of evidence, so here too perhaps we have another reason why our own decisions in our own lives can feel so tough - even the past doesn't really give us an insight into people's emotions, so we actually have very little to go on, to reassure or act as a sounding board. 

But we should ignore emotion in history no more than we should ignore it in our own decisions. My colleague was only able to make her decision WHEN she had gone through her soul searching. I'm sure Luther only acted upon his decision to nail his theses to the door WHEN he could soul search no longer. Emotion - soul - distinguishes us from animals, and so it would be strange to deny what makes us what we are. Instead, perhaps there is something in thinking that the decisions you and I will make (and people in the past made) are things which we as history teachers CAN'T make a model for. If we could, we would be teachers of science. Decisions would be easy, formulaic and essentially dull. If that leaves you at a loss for how to study the emotional aspect of change in history, well, Sam Wineberg isn't a bad start. We shouldn't shy away from it any more than we should ignore our own emotions when making decisions in our own worlds. 

A day in which I feel overwhelmed. 

It's hard to give yourself a break when you're surrounded by the greats of the past. Not necessarily the 'big' greats (Hitlers and Henrys, as those who ill-informedly lament our curriculum might say), but just the ordinary lives of those people whose lives we touch when we study history. We see their courage in the face of the Great Depression, for example, or their resilience in the face of unsupportive Labour and Conservative government policy towards immigrants in the 1960s. We see their determination in the Battle of Hastings (fancy taking part in a fight to the death for someone you might never have met, in the name of 'Angleland'?), and their belief in the face of oppression (think we've faced anything like an Inquisition?).

So, if I've such brilliant role models in the past, why do I find it so tough to fight my own battles - even just the little ones, day to day? So this got me thinking... What are the ingredients one needs NOT to feel overwhelmed... i.e. what are the ingredients of courage, or resilience or determination - whether in the face of battle, or in the face of Year 9 (you might say they're the same thing). My first thought is: vision - you need a vision. You might call this purpose, philosophy, or mission - or simply the know why. It might be 'macro', concerning worldly or society-wide issues, or it could be micro, concerning just those Year 9s. But you need a core. If you don't have a vision, you get a sense of confusion (why am I doing this, what is the point?). You also need skills - the know how. Skills are the way you will do something - such as the skills Henry VIII needed to become that fine Renaissance Prince (being multi-lingual was a good start); I need the skill of behaviour management with my year 9s, and the skill of differentiation... Without skills, I'll get anxiety (I don't know how to do this?!). Next up I think you need an incentive: if I do this, I will achieve... If you do this, you will achieve... In our classrooms this might be called the relevance factor or the "we're doing this because". In the business world it might be called salesmanship! Without an incentive, you don't get customers; without customers you won't make money... or in our case, win over the children so they want to learn. Of course, another ingredient NOT to feel overwhelmed is resources. What will be used to implement the vision. This might be my brain (and others' brains) for the pedagogy and creation of resources. But it could also be more physical materials, from glue and scissors to a computer. Without resources, your vision + skills + incentive will be pointless because you've no delivery method. Then you need a plan. A plan makes the vision a long-term process, a journey - not just a flash in the pan that will last 20 minutes as with my year 9s today. I'd failed to communicate the incentive, I'd not demonstrated the plan (or 'made clear the enquiry' in history speak). They couldn't connect the dots... unsurprisingly, the lesson was horrible.

Those of you who have done any reading into change management will know that what I've written about here is a matrix by Ambrose from 1987 who wrote a book called 'Managing Complex Change'. He explored successful change and devised a model for planning for change and troubleshooting. And, as I re-read it now, it occurs to me how brilliantly relevant it is - not just for school leaders, but for us teachers too. Every single unit of work we teach is an attempt at 'change management' because we are seeking to change our students from a position of knowing/understanding X to a position of knowing/understanding Y. The model has helped me to see why I feel overwhelmed today (key ingredients were missing), and has given me a suggestion for what I need to implement.

Of course, I'm now wondering whether Ambrose's model can help us to think about change in the past. Can it help us to understand why the ordinary greats - the people who volunteered to fight William of Normandy, for example - showed such determination? Did they have a vision, skills, an incentive, resources, and a plan? Well, I certainly think so! Whilst their skills and resources might not have been wonderfully refined (the farmers with their pitch forks weren't necessarily the best prepared!), I suspect they had buckets of the rest... Perhaps the buckets of the rest, in this example, made up for the other two areas and convinced them the fight was worth it.  Perhaps this is why William won: his men did have great skill and resources, plus the other ingredients too.

So, the more I think about this, the less overwhelmed I feel, and the more I think I've just given myself something quite exciting to think about in terms of teaching what factors enabled change... 

What do you think?