7 November 2023

In 2009 Mr Rod Bunten, the husband of the Governor of South Australia, left the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and completed a Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education. He then started a second career as a secondary school teacher of physics and mathematics. In this episode Mr Bunten shares his thoughts on making science and maths more relevant for students, preparing teachers for management roles, and why teaching is among the most honest and self-reflective of professions.

Show Notes

• School visits - Governor in Schools program

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. And today for something a little bit different, I'm joined by a man who's had a few careers I think over the journey, Mr. Rod Bunten. He's been a diplomat, he's been a maths and physics secondary school teacher, and currently he is, well, among other things, um, married to the Governor of South Australia, Her Excellency, the Honourable Frances Adamson.

Rod, thank you very much for your time.

Rod Bunten: Thank you for inviting me.

Dale Atkinson: So can I talk a little bit, first of all, about your journey from diplomat into teacher? How did that happen?

Rod Bunten: It happened because I'd reached a point in my career, and the Governor had reached a point in her career, we were both diplomats, that it made little sense for both of us to carry on, and even less sense for her to give up her career and me carry on with mine.

And I, I'd always considered myself not as a diplomat who used to do physics. But as a physicist who was doing diplomacy. So, I thought, I'll retrain as a physics teacher. There are things I want to teach people. There are things I think young people might need to know. And here's a job I can do anyway.

Dale Atkinson: And what was it about the appeal of teaching that drew you in?

Rod Bunten: Initially, it's two things. Initially, it was about the subject physics, about the fact that students as they learn physics have to reject everything they've ever been taught and hold dear and are good at and take on a new way of looking at the world. And that's, that's a fascinating process to go through and to watch people go through and to help people go through.

But the main reason was that I came from a pretty ordinary background. But I was good at physics. And if you're good at physics, you can go to, you know, Oxford and do physics. And nobody really cares what your background is, can you do physics. It's a lot harder if you're good at English literature because you don't have that cultural wealth of backgrounds that other people have.

So I always thought of physics as being, you know, boxing for smart kids. It's how you get out of the ghetto. And I've had an amazing life through physics. I met presidents, prime ministers, Nobel prize winners, Oscar winners, captains of the Australian cricket team. I'm here, in essence, and I wouldn't be if my talent had lay in the direction of modern languages or, as I say, history and not physics.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's an interesting message at a time when really across Australia and internationally as well, there's really like an outcry for more students to be studying those STEM subjects, to be going into mathematics, pure mathematics into physics. What is it that we aren't doing currently that we need to be doing to encourage some of those younger kids into the discipline?

Rod Bunten: There's two aspects of that. One is how do we get more kids in and the second and specific one is how do we get more women into it. You've got to make it relevant. You've got to make it about them. You've got to make students understand there are people in South Australia, engineers, designing a better mechanism of delivering stints to the heart.

They are going to save tens of thousands, um, or massively improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year, more than the most brilliant surgeon will ever do in a lifetime. They're engineers, not biologists. The physical sciences should be seen as something for people who care about the world, as well as people who just enjoy the challenge and fun of that maths-based world.

Dale Atkinson: I guess that's the difference. You've spoken a bit previously about, um, mathematics is a creative art form, rather than perhaps how it's viewed in high school. Certainly the early stages of mathematics is quite formulaic and dictated in terms of the outcomes. How do we present that creativity within maths and physics?

Rod Bunten: There are a number of ways you can do it. So, if you were to look at some of the project-based work, you know, initially, IB Maths was intended to be entirely taught by project. That is to say, the students would just do two years worth of projects. And they would learn the maths on the way as they needed it to solve the problems they were trying to solve.

If you look at Japanese maths teaching, it tends to be a quick five minute exposition of a new element of mathematics. And then the children are broken into groups. Mathematics in Japan is a group exercise. It's not like here where it tends to be a solitary undertaking. You don't want to share with anybody else because you want to be sure that you're the brightest.

It's a group exercise. They're given a group problem. They solve it as a group, other groups solve it, and they critique each other. I quite successfully, um, got people being creative by asking my students to write their own exam paper. Everybody wrote a question, and then everybody answered all of the questions, and then everybody judged each other's questions as to whether they were good questions, whether they were too easy, whether they were too difficult. So it started them thinking about the use of mathematics in quite a different way. But I'd turn it around, I think, and I'd say, well, how do people teach jazz? Because we need to teach mathematics the way people teach jazz.

At the moment, we're teaching mathematics the way they teach, if you like, to be a classical musician in a, in an orchestra, perhaps. We're focusing on accuracy and precision and learning technique rather than expression and creativity and operating with other people and feeding off other people's creativity.

So, that's how I'd love to do it. I totally accept that at the moment no teacher is given the resources to enable to do that. No teacher who did that would be particularly happy with their parents because all parents at the moment care about is that terrible four digit number, the ATAR. Nobody should judge a student on four digits.

Dale Atkinson: One of the interesting things that was discussed at the Maths Summit with maths teachers a bit earlier and a few leaders this year was around the concept of permission to fail for students and while you're talking it just makes me think about that as a, and quite often, maths anxiety is built around the fear that I will get the wrong answer, rather than, you know, I've come very close to getting the right answer and my creativity is being shown in these various different ways.

Is there a way that we can signal to students that, in essence, having a go at mathematics is part of the benefit of it, rather than just being seen as, you know, correct or incorrect.

Rod Bunten: I think there's a broader problem, not just in mathematics. I think it's most acute in mathematics. No teacher wants their student to fail. So all teachers, all school systems, go out of their way to put in place safety nets and scaffolding and support for students to stop them failing. The problem is, if you don't fail, you don't learn resilience. When I was doing teacher training, another mature teacher student who had previously been in the building industry said that he was on a building site and he watched an interaction where an apprentice turned up, uh, first day working on the building site and got there at, um, 8.30am and the subcontractor said, go away, you're fired.

You were supposed to be here at 7.30am, you're here at 8.30am. And the apprentice said, oh, give us a chance. And the contractor said, this was your chance, you're fired. And the trainee teacher said to me, why did he have to learn that lesson for the first time in real life? Why hadn't he learned that lesson in 18 years, 12 years of schooling?

So I think we have to let people fail in all subjects. When you get to mathematics, it gets more acute because there is this, this concept of the right answer. And if you structure a subject, and if you structure the way it's done, and if you structure assessment particularly, so that, that it's all based on right answer, wrong answer things, then people naturally become terribly averse to the wrong answer, because that's the only reward going, is getting it right.

So, a lot of it will come down to assessment, I think, but there are other dimensions as well.

Dale Atkinson: I'm just touching on, uh, the concept of getting it right and definitive answers, one way or the other. Can we move on to science? You've co-written a, a paper about teaching climate change science in senior secondary school and some of the issues and barriers and opportunities that exist there.

As I understand it, your argument Is that climate change should be taught by inquiry rather than transmission, and that the kids, the students, should be taught to make judgments about their claims. Why is that?

Rod Bunten: In science, science, not science teaching, but science as it's done, all judgments are personal.

Scientists stand on the edge of the unknown, hopefully on firm ground, trying to reach for the next firm ground. So, students must learn that knowledge is not perfect, knowledge is not an abstract. The purpose of science isn't to walk up a series of steps to this perfect knowledge, but rather to work out how to get from where we are to the next step.

That's one thing. But the main thing is that, of all the people you'll teach, only a handful will go on to be scientists. But all of them will go on to be citizens. And citizens need to be able to assess and judge claims about science and other things. But claims about science, it might be climate change.

It might be vaccines. It might be COVID transmission. And if you just teach a body of fact, what you are teaching them, the meta learning, is you achieve knowledge in science by transmission from a higher authority. If, on the other hand, you teach them how to make a judgment themselves, you're teaching them meta learning is very different.

There's an old saying, 'Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you destroy an entire ecosystem.' We need to give people the knowledge they need and not the wrong sorts of knowledge. It's really interesting, I don't know whether anybody's talked on this podcast about indigenous systems of learning.

But indigenous systems of learning are based upon the idea that there are safe knowledges for certain levels. And so the bottom level in Pitjantjatjara, and that tends to be the level that is safe for, you know, even people like us to learn. So that's what is sort of told to outsiders. We have a, unfortunately, a system with many wonders, but one of the problems of the internet is that almost anybody can become a teacher of people, particularly young people, not somebody who is trained, not somebody who necessarily has their best interests at heart.

But just somebody with a podcast or somebody with a, an axe to grind and we need to teach students to become their own judges of their own learning. So an inquiry-based approach to something like climate change, and I chose that for my paper because that was a really big issue, the science of climate change, 15 years ago, is a brilliant opportunity for students to learn that.

Dale Atkinson: Now from your experience, um, within the diplomatic service and then moving into teaching, what is the comparative way and what are the benefits of both in terms of how we prepare people for management roles?

Rod Bunten: So I came quite late to teaching as I've said, and I came with an assumption of how managers would be prepared.

So the idea is the diplomatic service, you reach a point in your career about 10 years in where if you're identified or wish to become a manager, there's then a period of extensive training, possibly full time or longer part time where you acquire a whole range of skills to become a manager. In the school system, largely, you sort of organically come up through the system and you organically bid or selected for positions.

And you drift up, drift is, that's a value, uh, laden word, but you, you move at whatever pace up through a system. And the advantages of that, of course, that everybody in a sense knows what is happening and it's quite open and also you are working with people. You are familiar with. The disadvantage seen from outside, a twofold, one, if you're having people just purely selecting the people below, inevitably people think that the best management style is the one they use, but that results in a cloning, that results in an organisation, reinforcing one single way of doing things. And the second thing is teachers, and an education system ought to believe in education, it ought to be so deeply entrenched in the DNA that its response to almost every problem ought to be, can we train to do this better? And if you do management training, you discover there are different management systems, different management styles, but also some very valuable techniques.

So two that served me well as a diplomat, one was an old-fashioned technique called management by walking. The idea being, you know, you want to manage a whole group of people, make sure that every day you sit and see them doing their work and just get a feel for, are they having a good day? Are they having a bad day?

Is the work going on? What are the problems they're facing? And a second is to judge what are the skills and strengths and attitudes of all the people in your team. How do they work together? Do they, do they complement each other? Do they clash? Is everybody on the same page? Which sounds like a good idea but isn't always a good idea.

So, for example, some people, particularly senior managements, often get really excited about answers to the question 'What does this mean for the organisation in three years time?' In many ways, that's what people look for when they're looking for senior leadership. Many other people, and I'm one of them, tend to be quite excited by the answer to the question, 'What does this look like for me on Monday?'

And if when you're exploring problems, and particularly when you're explaining what you're doing, you only look at what does this mean for the organisation in five years time, you will turn off and not engage. The people will go, yeah, that's fine, but on Monday, I've got my year 8, level 3 maths who are just a pain.

Or, for me, in my first year of teaching, every second Friday, I had triple essential maths on a Friday afternoon. You want to learn how to be an engaging and enthusiastic and fun teacher? Try teaching essential maths for two and a half hours on a Friday afternoon every second week.

Dale Atkinson: That sounds like, uh, whoever was sitting at the timetable, uh, didn't like you very much. That seems like an awful challenge.

Rod Bunten: It was fun. We enjoyed it.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's good.

Rod Bunten: I mean, they teach the syllabus, but we enjoyed it.

Dale Atkinson: Well, that's maybe where the creativity comes in, right? Friday afternoon, you've got to try all sorts of things. Can you tell us a little bit about the Governor's priorities around education during her term?

Rod Bunten: Yes, I mean, I have to start off with the obvious caveat that all of your listenership will be aware that none of them voted for the Governor. So the priorities for education are the government's, but the priorities for education inside her time here, uh, very much about leadership and citizenship. It's very much about how can we encourage students, encourage, enable, support students to be active citizens.

From my own personal viewpoint, I, you know, was a secondary school teacher and I always felt a bit that that was the Cinderella service in education. Lots of people get excited about universities, and there are good reasons for that. Lots of people engage in primary schools because for a whole variety of reasons, but I can see the attraction in that.

Secondary schools sometimes look like a bit more hard work and a bit more of a challenge, but I have to say as a teacher that was, I found nothing more rewarding than dealing with 17 and 18-year-olds. For two reasons. One, they all see the world in black and white and that is so refreshing after, as you reach my sort of age, and you tend to see everything in different shades of grey.

But the second thing is, if you, as one of my students were, come to school late because before you get there, you have to drive your siblings to their primary school because mum's a, uh, an addict and dad is absent if he was ever present. And you're 17, you are what is known as a winner in the lottery of life.

And 97% of the people on this planet would change places for you in a heartbeat. But it doesn't look like it, if that's your situation in life now. And it doesn't look like you have much options. But actually, people do. Those people do. And it's really exciting to be working with a group of people where actually the potential is so high.

Can I say just one thing generally about teaching which I, which I learned, and really surprised me, coming from diplomacy. And that is the honesty and collegiality of teachers. Teachers are much more self-reflective of their own performance than almost any other profession I've come across. I was once observing a substitute teacher in a maths class. It's always a tough, really tough job being a substitute teacher. And this class for this individual, who was off task all the time, hadn't gone well. There'd been several interactions, ended up with the individual being excluded and sent off to the level two. And as we left to go different ways, the substitute teacher turned to me and said, I know you've been watching what I did.

I want you to know that's not how to do it. I really didn't handle that kid well. Don't use that as a model. And walked off and I thought, 25 years as a diplomat, I've been in meetings with ambassadors, ministers, prime ministers, councillors, all sorts of people. Never once did we walk out and the leader of the delegation go, 'Oh, didn't do that very well, did I?'

Everybody always tries to find an excuse to externalise failure, if you like. Teachers don't, they know that it's a performance art, you don't always get it right, you go into the staff room, you seek support from your colleagues, and normally you get it, you dust yourself off, you go back and think, I'll do it better next time. That's a great thing.

Dale Atkinson: So just as a final kind of reminder to all the educators and teachers out there, you can actually request a visit of the Governor and you can request to visit Government House if you go onto governor.sa.gov.au to check it out and we'll have those links in the show notes for everybody to access as required.

Mr. Rod Bunten, thank you very much for your time.

Rod Bunten: Thank you. It's been great fun.