[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I am Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:32] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today we talk with Dr. Cynthia Ballenger, author of, most recently, “Teaching is inquiry: Observation and reflection as the heart of practice.” Dr. Ballenger has been a public school teacher for over 35 years and has worked with teachers and student teachers in many ways. Welcome, Cindy.
[00:00:52] Cindy B: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:00:55] Amy H-L: Tell us about the title of your book, “Teaching is Inquiry.”
[00:00:59] Cindy B: Well, I actually had to argue a bit for the italics for is. And for me, and I think in some sense for many, many teachers, if not all, teaching is inquiry. I mean, teachers who don’t think of themselves as participating in a practice known as teacher research or inquiry-based teaching or something, nevertheless, do wonder often about various students, I’m sure, and sort of making it more that a good, crucial part of teaching is wondering about one’s students and what they’re thinking and how they’re approaching things is what I feel is very important, particularly these days where it’s kind of downplayed, like teaching is conveying this bunch of information with these objectives and goals.
[00:02:00] Jon M: You’ve been very influenced by the ethnography of education. What is ethnography of education and why is it so significant for your work?
[00:02:10] Cindy B: So the ethnographies that I was influenced by were ones done, I think, mostly in the late eighties and continuing somewhat since then, that were very based in the details of classroom work. So I see ethnography, the crucial factor being that they are detailed accounts, and the ones that I was interested in or most influenced by also tended to be linguistic ethnographies, or at least ones that were very interested in discourse. In another words, different cultural practices in terms of speaking, storytelling, conveying information, and then just generally, the variety of ways people talk to convey information. And so to me, those anthropologists who did that work really made it possible for teachers to participate because they were both stories and they were detailed and we recognized them, and yet it gave us some distance from the everyday stuff.
[00:03:15] Jon M: Do you have a sense of how much ethnography, because it seems to me that it’s so critical. I mean, certainly the ethnography that I’ve read just really changed the whole way that I looked at things, but I don’t have a sense of how much it’s actually taught in teacher ed programs or how much it’s talked about in schools. Do you have any sense of those things?
[00:03:37] Cindy B: My sense is that rarely. I think during the seventies and eighties when there was a crucial focus on the achievement gap or opportunity gap, whatever we should call it, there was an interest in cultural differences, and the ethnography then was somewhat was included in teacher education, but I don’t think it is anymore. It’d be interesting to see some statistics for how much “Ways with Words” sells at this point versus earlier times.
[00:04:12] Jon M: And that’s Shirley Bryce Heath, ” Ways with Words.”
[00:04:15] Cindy B: Yeah.
[00:04:15] Amy H-L: Could you tell us a little bit about “Ways with Words”?
[00:04:18] Cindy B: Well, “Ways with Words.” I think Jon agreed that this was his experience, too, and I’ve heard it from many teachers, was sort of life changing, because she went into three communities, African American community in the Piedmont, which I think is North Carolina, might be South, and then mill workers in that same area, and they were white families and then teachers’ families in the same area, so all the same area. And she recorded conversations between parents and children when parents were asking for stories from the kids about what they did that day or when they were telling them how to do one thing or another. And then she compared. So she first really figured out or made visible differences in those three communities and their ways of doing these things, places when parents would talk with kids, places when kids would talk with parents. I think we’re all sort of aware that in different groups, children take a more or less central role in family conversation.
But then after doing a fascinating job of describing these differences, she then looked at the schools and what were the expectations for language use in the schools. And found out variety of different things for the African American kids. And then this was followed up by people who looked really closely at sharing time and looked at what happened to African American storytellers in sharing time and how that didn’t fit well with the expectations that the children brought from home for telling a good story.
And she also looked closely at the white working class kids and what their strengths were and what their weaknesses were. I don’t think she did look closely at the difficulties at whatever point the middle class, the children of teachers might have. But I have. I’ve seen that. I think she saw them as successful in school, which they do tend to be.
[00:06:28] Jon M: Yeah. The thing that struck me, I think you’re right in terms of, you know, when she was looking at middle class kids who were both white and Black, but the thing that I remember most was that she felt that the teachers were successful at scaffolding, that the child from the middle class would say something and it fit very well with the way the teacher was thinking, and the teacher would sort of almost be able to finish the sentence or take the next sentence very easily, whereas the teachers were having a harder time with the working class kids, both white and Black. If I remember right, that the Black kids when they entered school were very good storytellers, very imaginative in many ways, and that that didn’t necessarily fit so well with teacher’s expectations, that were very linear. You know, A, B, C, D, you’re gonna learn these.
Whereas the white working class kids were much better at that because their parents weren’t encouraging imagination. They didn’t, in many cases, they were fundamentalist religious and didn’t want, for example, their kids reading “The Wizard of Oz” or being read to, that kind of thing. They did well in the early grades, but then when the school wanted more imagination, they were having a harder time.
And so the only ones who really made it through this maze almost were yeah, the middle class kids. And the white and Black kids sort of got dropped off, you know, at different places but along the way. Does that fit with what you…
[00:08:03] Cindy B: Yeah, that fits with the way I remember it. You know, teachers responded. People used to read this, and I don’t know if they do anymore, but I do remember teachers really responding well in terms of sharing time and allowing kids whose stories were not linear to take, you know, have much more room for them. And how that all has finally worked out, it would be interesting to follow up.
[00:08:27] Amy H-L: So it would seem to me then that a more ethnographic approach would create an equitable classroom where more voices are heard.
[00:08:39] Cindy B: That’s definitely the goal. I think of some, you know, like Franz Boas and some of the really great anthropologists as I read them, and I’m far from a professional, they were trying to present to people who didn’t know such and such a culture, what were the values and strengths of that culture? The source of ethnography in anthropology was that view that there are values and strengths in every different culture.
[00:09:11] Amy H-L: Yeah. You say that every child has something to offer. What does that mean in practice?
[00:09:19] Cindy B: It can be tricky, right? Sometimes to see, I think one of the examples that I think of is my boy, whose name I can’t, oh, Cesar, who was the one who believed that a story he had read, which was “The Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom,” by Sachar, I think. Yeah. Anyways, he believed it was true. And we were doing a just a sort of standard exercise where each kid was telling me what was the genre of the book they were reading, and they’d say science fiction or nature nonfiction, whatever. And when it came to him, he said that that book was nonfiction. And the kids started explaining to him their definition of realistic fiction. It could be true, but it wasn’t. And they kept sort of beating on him a little bit. And he resisted the whole way and finally said, “well, maybe it happened to the author’s brother.” I think it was, anyway, someone else in the family, but he wasn’t willing to let this be considered just plain old fiction. And so when I looked closely at the book, I realized, well, among other things, I learned that it really was close to the author’s life. He had named the school counselor the name of his wife, who was a school counselor. He had been a kid who got in trouble in school, so it was somewhat less fictional than some things might be.
But also as I look through the book. I saw all these moments where that would sort of strike you, where you’d think, whoa, that must have happened. It’s such an odd detail, and that’s what I think he had to offer the other kids. He had done a very close reading, closer than some of the others. He had noticed and been struck by things like that. That’s an example of a kid who seemed wrong and maybe to not understand what the rest of us understood, who had something to offer everybody. I feel like I see that all the time, but it’s not always immediate by any means.
[00:11:27] Jon M: So you have focused a lot of your work on children like this and what you call the puzzling child. Can you give some more examples of the puzzling child and why you think it is so important to focus on her or on him?
[00:11:45] Cindy B: I was thinking about this conversation I had with a bunch of fourth graders about what made the Charles River, which is the river in that runs through Boston and Cambridge and so on, and there were kids talking about erosion and different geological processes. But this one guy who was a puzzling child held out his hands and he said, when you’re in the shower, your fingers get pitted. If you, I think he takes long showers is my suspicion. because if you take long showers, you do get those little bumps kind of in your hands from the water, I guess, or maybe from the water pressure, I’m not sure. But he suggested that this had to do with the way rain might have made holes that eventually joined each other and became a river, became an erosion pathway that led to the Charles. And what I think he had to offer everyone was really that physical imagining.
Some of the other kids were talking off the sort of what I would think of as the tops of their heads. And they are also puzzling, but they’re more like me so I don’t, I forget to puzzle over them sometimes. And so they would say things like, erosion happens high and the water runs down and eventually it digs out the earth. And what [inaudible] was doing was making it so physical that I think it helped us all. And of course I think it’s important to acknowledge that he was thinking deeply and not sort of off the track. So, you know, keeping in mind who’s the puzzling kid here and what does that kid suggested tends to deepen the curriculum for everybody.
So I’m thinking about this kid that I’ve been teaching this year whose name is Jack and he is in kindergarten and he’s on supposedly special needs. He’s on an IEP. I assume that term is common, individual ed plan. And so I go in there and he’s writing his name backwards. And he’s fascinated. He’s writing it backwards and forwards, but the teacher is a little annoyed at him and wants to make sure it’s done correctly, and then later she’s asking the kids to read their first word. So they’ve been working through this program where they learn phonics and they know most, they know all the general sounds. So they have the word a t, at. And this is their first full word, putting together two sounds and they manage to read at. And then Jack asks “what would happen if you put the T in the front?” And it’s just such a terrific question because it’s sort of not part of what they’ve been taught and it makes me look through all these other notes I have on him. I just. I tend to write things down about him. And I noticed one day I’m telling him, “Jack, do this.” And he says, “how do we ask?” And I say, I, I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Jack, do this.” Finally, I realize I’m supposed to say “please.” And if I say, “please do this, Jack,” he’ll say “thank you.”
say you. So he’s always playing with switching things around and changing the order, including in that way. When I run into him in the hallway, I only work, I’m supposedly retired, so I only work one day a week. And he will tell me how many Fridays he’s seen me. He, when he sees me, he knows it’s a Friday. So I feel like there’s something about this kid that really has to do with patterns.
So this is the completely imaginative leap. I was watching him pack up at the end of the day, and most of the kids do, but you get called, you’re supposed to go pack up, you get your backpack, you stuff your things in. When Jack gets there, he puts the backpack on his lap and his stuff all around him and it takes up much more space than any of the other kids. And he just, some of the stuff he can’t even find and he’s reaching behind him, but he doesn’t look frustrated and it takes him at least twice, if not three times as long to pack up. But he seems perfectly happy doing it. And I’m wondering if so this is a little out there, but he’s making a comment on this organization that he’s being asked to follow this strict, do it this way, in his way of packing up, which has. Nothing to do with normal, organized structure. And I will tell you that I shared this with a few friends and one of them who was a really terrific early childhood teacher in Boston told me that she still remembers being driving with her family. She was four years old and she realized that dog was God spelled backwards and it made her so happy because she loved dogs and she was on her way to church, and Jack made her remember that.
[00:16:41] Jon M: That’s a great story.
[00:16:43] Cindy B: He’s just all about patterns, but not in a narrow way. There are places where he has none, like when he packs up.
So Marcel is another example of a puzzling kid from whom I think all students learned, and I did as well. He and I, with three other seventh grade boys, were reading “Locomotion” by Jacqueline Woodson. And in that book, the main character, who has lost his mother, he’s a kid and he’s lost his mother, and he occasionally goes to the cosmetics counter at the local drugstore and he asks for a particular kind of perfume as if he’s gonna buy it. But actually this is the perfume his mother used to use, and so when he smells it, he feels like she’s there again. So my boy, Marcel, who has been sent to me because he is not a good reader, all these kids are evidently not good readers due to probably the state testing. So Marcel, at this point in the story says, sounds like the mama has cancer. And I’m puzzled because, that’s not part of the story. Marcel goes on, she gets better and gets sick again. He’s speaking very slowly and quietly, and I repeat what he says in confusion. And then I teach the word drugstore because the kids only know drugstores as ways you might get drugs. They only use the word pharmacy, which I hadn’t known ahead of time. So then I ask. Marcel wants more. If the mama’s alive again, what does he mean? And he says, “no, she’s not alive again. But she feels alive.” And I say, again, “feels alive,” puzzled. I was actually momentarily alarmed because I thought he was off track and I worried that I had chosen a book that was too hard. I mean, I’m very close to correcting him here and actually I might have done that because my notes don’t say, and I often forget to do this, but this time I remembered. I asked Marcel to tell me more about what he’s thinking and he tells me hesitantly, as I recall, slowly, that his grandmother had cancer and she seemed to get better when she got her medicine and then she would get worse. So Marcel is recognizing something about this smell and how it’s somehow what comparable to what the medicine did to his grandmother, making her seem alive again. Although she was alive at this point, but then it fades. So he is reading about this orphan child in the book, feeling this pain. And I think this must have brought his mother to mind. He is reminding me that the smell is more than just a simple memory to the child in the book, which is how I’d read it. I thought it was sort of cute that he did this, you know, he kind of faked out the person at the perfume counter. So I’m a much more experienced reader and the detail of the perfume makes sense, but it doesn’t prompt a powerful experience. Maybe I’m a bit jaded. He brings the book to life for me more strongly. And from this time on, I make sure Marcel’s connections are a part of how the group proceeds because he’s reminded me and he has a sensitivity to the sensory detail of this book. And the book has a lot of sensory detail, but I’m not sure I recognized it until he puzzled me about it. So this experience helped me to think about the range of responses that students make to literature and the range of experiences that they bring, not necessarily the ones we’re assuming. It keeps the topic of how we connect to books alive and puzzling. And without this it can become rote. It often sort of slides into something where we think we know what’s gonna happen. But because of Marcel, I see the book more deeply, and he had that to offer to all the students.
[00:21:00] Jon M: So I’m curious, because we were talking about ethnography earlier and the idea of puzzlement that it seems to me that some of that sometimes can be tied to culture, that if different cultures have, you know, different ways of responding in school, for example. And obviously then there’s also individual children who are just puzzling in their own way. Do you have a sense of how the two, when and how the two interconnect and, and how you sort of tell what are sort of broader cultural factors and, and what are individual?
[00:21:42] Cindy B: Yeah, no, I think having looked at cultural differences. For example, looking at the way, according to Shirley Bryce Heath, African American children often make analogies rather than identifying something by a simple name. So what do you see there? And it’s a broken down car, and they talk about something else that’s broken rather than saying it’s a broken down car. She gives an example of something like that. That is then a category that I can look for that I would never have looked for. So, you know, noticing a child who uses analogies or who tries to be metaphoric might be something that I learned from culture, from cultural studies, but one finds it in many different individuals and also in different kinds of study, like maybe more in science. Maybe some kids would do that more in science. So the kid with the fingers and the shower is maybe metaphoric in some way. And thinking about kids who are really pretty literal. For me, that category probably does come from cultural studies, but it can be used all over the place.
I had a child who, we were talking about dinosaurs and she said that you had to be careful of them because they were dangerous. And the other kids said, no, but they’re extinct, don’t worry. She said, “no, no, you really have to be careful.” And it turned out she was talking about she had rhinoceros mixed in with dinosaur, you know, so she’s hearing something. And she was a native speaker of English, but she didn’t speak English at home. She spoke Spanish at home, so she was bilingual. I don’t know if that had to do with it, but after I realized what was happening, which was not immediately, we paid some attention to those endings and what those endings actually meant and the difference in spelling and so on, because she had noticed something important and yeah, I don’t know. I guess, does that have to do with culture? It might have to do with bilingualism.
[00:24:03] Amy H-L: Cindy, I’m missing something here.
[00:24:05] Cindy B: What she thought a rhinoceros was a kind of a dinosaur because she heard saurus, and thought of saurus. Now they’re spelled very differently, but she didn’t know that. So she’s puzzled when kids are telling her you don’t have to be worried anymore because they’re extinct.
[00:24:25] Jon M: I have a question because when you were talking about, I think it was Jack, and you were talking about how he prepared for leaving. I have some experience with kids with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and the issue of where things get put and how they get placed and so forth can be absolutely critical for them. And I’m not sure what that quote offers other kids, but it’s obviously, it can literally life and death for that particular child. So it strikes me that, you know, that you can be talking both about where there’s a deeper insight as in the cases that you were talking about, or a non-conventional insight, and then there can be something which is not inherently designed to offer something to the other kids, but just is something that the child has to do. And we’re having the teacher recognize that this is something not to gloss over or to get mad about, or to say, well put your stuff together the way I want you to, but to really recognize that it’s something that’s deeply personal.
[00:25:42] Cindy B: Right. Huh. Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, with Jack, he also, I think again, they were asking for switches. Oh, they were supposed to be switching vowels, you know, in this phonics program. And he asked could he switch the last letter instead. And they had PA and it was supposed to come out pan, pat. But what he asked for for the last letter was L, which of course doesn’t work because we double it in spelling.
So it was sort of interesting what happened there. But again, he was looking for the switching around patterns as you’re sort of saying about OCD kids. And yeah, I believe I’ve probably seen this maybe profoundly therapeutic to have something that you are kind of compelled to do to be brought into a social environment where other people respond. I wrote about this in my book. I had a student who was considered pretty seriously autistic and had been nonverbal, voluntarily, selectively mute, whatever the term is. And she was really fascinated by worms. But you couldn’t tell if she was actually interested in worms because all she did was when we went outside, was rake the ground for them. And it almost seemed both perseverative and physical. You know, maybe a form of self-soothing. She’d just rake the earth and sometimes we’d find some worms, but when we brought them into the classroom and the other kids began, became interested in the worms, I believe that she always did have some level of interest. So it wasn’t like it came out in no place. She began to speak and began to study the worms. So it was the perseverative quality I think alleviated a little bit, but it still was kind of there. But when she was in the social group, she would talk about the worms and kind of show kids stuff about them. You know, you never know with any individual child what their capacity to change those compulsions is.
[00:27:58] Amy H-L: In the book you speak about stopping time. How do you stop time?
[00:28:05] Cindy B: I think you take some kind of note. You can talk into your phone if that’s your easiest way. I started out with audio recorders, but I didn’t always use them. I did when I could, but then IRBs got into the act and I didn’t wanna go through everything to get permission, so I stopped recording and I scribbled, and it’s not always legible, but I think scribbling and then trying to go back and fix the writing and add what you remember strengthened my memory.
I think it’s a good activity for all of us, unless you’re not getting older, but if you are, it strengthens your memory so you have some kind of note. Or maybe you have children’s work. If you have children’s work, you’re in good shape. People who study children’s writing, you still wanna know what was said in the writing conference the best you can. Because you’re not gonna understand it, I don’t think, until you have time when things are quiet. And the other value of having stopped time in that form where you have something is you can share it with others.
And then you add, like, I didn’t have notes or photos of the way Jack did his backpack, but I wrote it when I had a chance. And I know some teachers will say they really don’t have time to do that. Yeah. I no longer have children in the home. But it becomes something you really enjoy. Maybe it becomes a form of meditation.
[00:29:39] Jon M: So that you’re recommending it, or for you that it works as a form of helping to fix it in your mind for reflection?
[00:29:47] Cindy B: Yeah, and then I think it’s a form of planning, so I’m not sure it takes extra time. You might feel that it does, but you realize, sort of see where you can go next.
[00:29:59] Jon M: Interesting. It really, it can move something from being transitory to, I mean, I know that the subtitle of your book is Observation and Reflection, and it seems as though that’s a way of concretizing the observation so that you then have more of a chance for reflection.
[00:30:21] Cindy B: Yeah. And like an ethnographer, you try to write down things that you don’t think are important. because somebody else may see that they are, or you yourself may see that they are later.
[00:30:32] Jon M: Your book is essentially a series of stories. What is the role of stories in teaching?
[00:30:39] Cindy B: I think stories is how probably all of us, but certainly teachers, learn. It’s the most democratic way of helping people get a new perspective. And so I tried to include, you know, some of my process of thinking one thing and then realizing another thing because so much of how teachers now are taught and always have been taught is either theory. Or lately, it’s even more directive than some of the theories that we would’ve read years ago. But it’s my sense, my experience, I guess, that I’ve learned from stories and because stories aren’t telling me I have to do it one way or another, and yet stories are participatory. So I feel like I was there and then that was a kid, and do I know a kid like that? Maybe? Sort of? And what did that person do and what might I do?
[00:31:32] Amy H-L: So inquiry requires time to concentrate on each child as an individual. What kinds of systemic support are needed for teachers to be able to do that?
[00:31:46] Cindy B: Right? Yeah. Better meetings. My sense now is that meetings are just taken up with testing issues and then sort of who’s gonna do recess duty, but lots of things that aren’t really about kids. And that has to change. I know it’s going to be difficult because there’s only so much time in the world, but there has to be time to look closely with others at individual children. I was fortunate in the schools I taught in, generally, where we made that time, but it’s pretty much gone now, even there.
[00:32:25] Jon M: It sounds, you know, the name of the program is obviously Ethical Schools, and it sounds as though this issue of systems that that support deep observation and reflection are really an ethical issue. Are schools able to really do right by children if they aren’t structured to enable that kind of deep thinking on the teacher’s part and interaction with the individual children? And I know that that’s huge structural question. It’s not something an individual teacher can, you know, certainly can’t do on their own, but what are your thoughts about that?
[00:33:12] Cindy B: I think that’s true. I mean, if we believe all children have something to offer, if we believe all children are intelligent, as opposed to thinking of them in tiers as to how intelligent they are, if we think they are people we have to value, then we have to be able to see them better.
I mean, one thing that some schools do is, you know, teachers take turns observing in other people’s classrooms or academics come in and do the observations, or principals. I think that those are ways to try to do this. I think they, from what I hear, the observations are, the value of looking at puzzling kids in an open way, assuming they are intelligent, means that you will learn something you didn’t know before, that you will be surprised. And I think a lot of these observations don’t work that way, don’t have that focus, kind of, but they are something, to have someone else come in and maybe you can say, you know, I’m having trouble with my math class. What do you see in this discussion? But I think the best thing would be to say, I’m having trouble understanding this child. Can you look and tell me what this child is doing? Because maybe you really don’t have time. Somebody suggested to me that it’s a muscle, sort of, this kind of observation and you can strengthen it. And I think that’s true. So I can usually do pretty well at remembering things after all these years. Other people, I think, can strengthen that muscle.
[00:34:49] Jon M: Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about?
[00:34:52] Cindy B: Oh dear. Let me think. Did I make any notes that include things?
[00:34:56] Jon M: You need to “stop time” on the interview.
[00:35:00] Cindy B: So you ask about the democratic or the ethical point here. And I think I want to say something about the culture in schools these days and also about the relation of that to testing. I mean, we can’t justifiably be against any form of testing. I think we want to know what our students have managed to learn and what they haven’t. But the testing culture as it is now is, in my opinion, both anti-democratic and unethical probably for a number of reasons. But the one reason that upsets me perhaps the most is that this testing and the point of view it takes on children and learning has taken over a lot of our way of thinking about our work. The more that I talk to teachers about inquiry, the more I hear back how distressed they are at the deficit mindset that is everywhere, you know, if you ask, what do you think about such and such a child? More than likely now the answer is, he can’t do this, he won’t do that he’s this sort of child or that sort of child, unable to pay attention, no family support. Maybe you even get a sense of his level in some area. I think this view is deeply unethical. It lacks curiosity and perhaps even prohibits curiosity in some sense. It doesn’t challenge our thinking about how we see another human being, which is necessary if you are, to use your phrase, Jon, going to do right by that human being.
And finally, maybe to follow up on this point. I want to add one other thing that I just noticed. I want to point out what happened when we talked in this interview about my student, Jack. When I was describing Jack packing up and also about his enjoyment in reversing the patterns, spelling his name backwards and switching letters around. In other words, Jon mentioned the difficulties of kids with obsessive compulsive disorder. I had never thought of that in reference to my observations of Jack. I probably tend to pack up the way Jack does. Not quite so disorganized, I’d say, but I think my reflections and observations on Jack were in some kind of tune with my own style.
Jon was able to think of something else to see it from a different perspective. And as he says, for this child, it may be something very personal, not necessarily something to regard as a deficit in either the case of his packing up or his backwardness. It may be something very important to him, very likely. So telling this story to someone else, to Jon in this case, has added to my vision, not narrowed it certainly, but added. We have nothing final here or definitive. But I believe we have a deeper picture of my student, and also maybe a deeper curiosity of what obsessive compulsive disorder might mean.
I’m very moved by the statement of Jerome Bruner, a great and broad thinker about the mind and how meaning is created. He wrote in a book he called “Acts of Meaning,” “negotiating and renegotiating meanings through the mediation of narrative and interpretation is one of the crowning achievements of human development.”
[00:38:52] Amy H-L: Thank you, Dr. Cynthia Ballenger, author of “Teaching is inquiry: Observation and reflection as the heart of practice.”
[00:39:01] Cindy B: And thank you too. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the interaction.
[00:39:05] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our email newsletters. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Bluesky. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.