Available October 7, 2025
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At a time when conflict and polarization feel like an unrelenting fact of life, how can we build stronger, kinder school communities where everyone feels seen, known, and valued? That’s one of the pervasive questions facing school leaders right now, and one that Jason Craige Harris is ready to help answer. He joins Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing leadership practices to center human dignity, and why he feels that reframing is so vital to well-being.
Creating thriving communities, Jason says, requires a cohesive vision that contains two key ideas: dynamics, or the quality of our relationships; and mechanics, which encompass the systems and structures that help people remain in relationship to one another. How seen, heard, and valued do all members of a community feel? What are the norms and practices that are upheld? Those questions are foundational to leading in a way that affirms human dignity.
Jason advocates for structured listening across constituent groups, both as an antidote to the impulse to always be “solving” and as a way to understand how each member of the community actually experiences their reality. Do they feel a sense of belonging? Do we understand how they could feel more connected to the environment through a change in our practices? He points out that in the absence of really engaging with people and listening carefully to their perspectives, our brains become “storytelling factories” that will fill in any blanks with assumptions—right or wrong.
Listening, he cautions, is the beginning, not the end. Jason encourages leaders to begin a listening process, then distill the feedback, share it with the community, and outline a plan to address what has been heard. From there, he says, the iterative process continues, with leaders implementing plans, reporting on the progress, getting more feedback from the community, and repeating. Transparency and accountability are vital to creating a system in which listening becomes a transformative and helpful tool. He offers several frameworks for thinking about how to listen, how to center dignity, how to change the way we think about norms, and how to design useful professional development opportunities that will benefit our communities.
Jason describes his work as being aligned with dignity, rather than words like equity or inclusion, because he says he relates to human dignity as the “high dream” for which he wants to strive. For him, dignity—the ability of every human being to feel seen, heard, valued, listened to, understood, acknowledged, recognized, and treated fairly—encapsulates a unifying goal that everyone can work toward.
Key Questions
Some of the key questions Morva and Jason explore in this episode include:
- What are the starting points school leaders should consider in assessing their culture and values?
- How can we balance listening practices with maintaining a sense of forward motion and cultural transformation?
- What does it mean to center dignity in our leadership? How does a dignity-focused practice connect us to values around equity and inclusion?
- How can school leaders overcome the main challenges to implementing systems that support human dignity and thriving?
Episode Highlights
- “We have to engage in a bit of a listening tour to hear how people are experiencing their cultural reality. And one of the reasons why is because our brains are storytelling factories. And in the absence of information given to us, whenever we detect gaps, we create, right? We fill it with our own sort of assumptions. And those assumptions, I'm not saying they're automatically wrong, but they're not automatically right most of the time.” (6:58)
- “For a long time in my work, I framed things in terms of what I was against. Like I had a really clear idea of like, I don't want exclusion. I don't want assimilation. I don't want violence. I'm not even sure I really want tolerance. And so my whole imagination was defined by being anti-forces that were debilitating and dehumanizing. And at some point I realized, gosh, like, I'm not sure I've spent much time trying to thickly describe the world that I want, like what I'm fighting for versus what I'm fighting against. … Let's just say that if exclusion somehow disappears, if racism disappears, if whatever-ism it is disappears, then will we no longer have purpose?” (19:15)
- “I worry that some of our school communities, because of the desire to avoid controversy and division, and the complexities that come with grappling with challenging human issues, like the desire to avoid crisis, then leads some toward a kind of superficial peace, a sort of superficial consensus. You know, we all kind of just get along, you know, which kind of mutes and erases the perspectival diversity that I think is what makes school so interesting. Like we have all these different kinds of people with different ideas and lived experiences and you see the world differently than me. And I actually want to learn how to see the world through your eyes. But if you can't even talk about what the world looks like through your eyes because of this kind of you know, hush, then it's going to be hard for me to actually engage in real learning.” (25:16)
Resource List
- Learn more about Jason via his website.
- Follow the work of Pollyanna, the organization for which Jason is a speaker.
- Read Jason’s thoughts on leading and listening at Medium.
- Watch this interview with Jason about the need for a “revolution of compassion.”
Full Transcript
- Read the full transcript here.
Related Episodes
- Episode 67: Leadership Through Listening
- Episode 66: School in a Time of Hope and Cynicism
- Episode 64: Pluralism in Education
- Episode 37: The Dignity Lens in Education
- Episode 30: How Equity and Well-Being Work Together in Our Schools
- Episode 15: Inspiring Wonder and Community in Schools
About Our Guest
Jason Craige Harris is devoted to the work of alignment—where compassion shapes our relationships, and integrity and efficacy anchor our systems. Interested in all spheres of human life—from the intimate to the institutional, the interpersonal to the structural—Jason works at the intersection of culture, leadership, and social impact. He is a multidisciplinary strategist who helps groups build trust, navigate complexity, and design structures that work. He partners with leaders, organizations, and families to cultivate practices and systems rooted in dignity and designed for transformation. Trained in ethics, psychology, and systems thinking, Jason draws on tools as varied as coaching, storytelling, meditation, conflict mediation, group facilitation, and restorative practices.