Read the full transcript of Episode 77 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Jason Craige Harris joining host Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing leadership practices to center human dignity and why that reframing is so vital to well-being.
Morva McDonald: Hey, welcome back to New View EDU! I’m really excited to start Season 9 with a conversation with Jason Craige Harris.
Jason is a speaker with Pollyanna, an organization working to build stronger and kinder communities, and a multidisciplinary strategist working at the intersection of culture, leadership, and social impact in K-12 schools and beyond. As a mediator and educator, he has a long history of working with groups of all kinds and families in the United States and from around the world––helping them move through conflict, set new norms, and reach their goals.
I’m also super excited to speak with him today, because he will be part of our upcoming Thrive conference, so this is a wonderful opportunity to introduce him to our NAIS community. Without further ado, let’s get to it.
Hi Jason, it's great to see you and I feel really, just actually really delighted to talk to you for a couple of reasons. One of which is I don't know you that well, so I'm always interested in talking to people I don't know that well, who I think are probably really brilliant and have great ideas. And the second is, I've really, myself, been puzzling over where we are right now, particularly related to justice, equity, all of those big terms, and in prior conversations with you, I know that you have really interesting ways of thinking about that work that I found really grounding and foundational. So, just welcome, and it's great to see you.
To start off, I know that there are two big ideas that I think are really central in your work. One is about alignment and one is about dignity. And just to kick us off, like talk to me about both of those big ideas.
Jason Craige Harris: Well, thank you so much for having me, Morva. It's great to be here with you. I spend a lot of my time working with schools and working in nonprofits and companies. And the experiences I've had where I've seen challenges and I've seen people sort of wrestling with, like, things are not functioning exactly the way we want them to. You know, our students aren't thriving in the way that we want them to, or, you know, perhaps we have some challenges with employees. What it's come down to in my experience is usually issues related to people not feeling seen, heard, or valued. And issues related to there not being clarity on purpose or vision, and there not being systems or structures to facilitate that level of clarity.
And so when, for example, there isn't clarity, or there is no cohesive vision that is moving a classroom forward or moving a department forward or a school forward, as a result of that, people can feel unseen, unheard, and undervalued because their needs are not being met. You know, like the lack of alignment, the lack of mechanics that help a class or a group move forward, if you don't have that in place, you could feel like, oh gosh, like what am I doing here? And do people see me? Do they see what I need to be able to do my best work?
And conversely, before we get to just alignment issues, we gotta address the heart of the human experience and every student, every faculty member, every staff member, every parent and parental figure, wants to know that they're going to be seen for who they are and what they can bring to the school community. And so you have to tackle both of those together. And I often frame them as dynamics and mechanics.
You know, dynamics speak to the quality of the relationship in our communities, how we engage with each other across lines of difference, how we honor each other's perspectives, even if they're different from our own. Mechanics refer to the systems and the structures that facilitate the quality of our relationship. Do we have good meeting hygiene? Do we have classroom norms that enable all of the students to be able to be co-owners of the classroom environment? So we need both of those pieces to thrive.
Morva McDonald: I think that's super interesting because I, having been a head of school and just in my own experience, we tend to separate those things. And we don't think often about how systems are actually connected to the relationships that we have and build and maintain in an organization. Right? And so when you think about it, like, if you're giving advice, let's say, right, to a school leader, and they're really struggling with like, things around school climate and culture, what are your first pieces of advice about where to start thinking? Not solving necessarily, but where to start thinking about where they might identify their main challenges.
Jason Craige Harris: I really appreciate that you named the impulse to solve. And as a strategist, I often think about the three point plan or the five point plan to solve people's issues. And in my early days as a conflict mediator, I would sit down with people and they would tell me a first run of the experience they had that brought them to the mediation. And then I would say, I think that, I think we could solve this. And I would offer them three ideas and they would look at me and they would be like, that's great. And they would go back and tell me the same story all over again. And I'm like, why the broken record? And what I realized was that they were not there to engage in problem solving right away. What they wanted was someone to listen to them and to seek to understand their experience from their perspective.
And I would say that there's a lesson in that for us as leaders, which is, before we push towards solving, which is often a knee-jerk stress response rather than a studied way of engaging, it's often a reactive response. Like it's the fixer in us. You know, we have the fight in us, we have the flight, the freeze, the fawning, which is people pleasing. But some of us also have that fix mentality. I gotta go in and devise a solution right away.
I often like to ask myself the question like, Jason,what are you trying to solve for? And can you thickly describe that? And if you can't thickly describe what you're solving for, it means you haven't done enough listening. And for me, listening has to be intentional work and it has to be systemic work. And by that, what I mean is that the first step of any transformative process, any real solutioning process, is to create structured opportunities to hear from constituency groups. And that could mean a carefully crafted, scaffolded, and well-sequenced survey. It could mean focus groups, individual conversations. But 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. And those assumptions are shaped by, often, some unconscious processes in the human brain. For example, we know that one of the schemas, in other words, one of the categories that shapes how we organize information in our heads is consensus bias, which is the impulse to assume that my experience is the only experience. The impulse to assume that people agree with me even on controversial issues.
There's always this moment when someone goes into a room, and they're like, whoo, isn't it cold in here? Looking around for confirmation from everyone else. And there's some people are like–
Morva McDonald: –Yes. I mean, we're essentially really Jason, we're all basically a little bit like two year olds in this fact, right? We're like, yes, it is about me.
Jason Craige Harris: 100%. And so that's actually why listening is so helpful because, you know, we might make an assumption that isn't helpful. And so the first place to begin is to create opportunities for folks to share with us, how are you experiencing this environment? Like, I feel like I belong here. I feel a strong sense of connection here. Do you feel that same sense of connection? And if not, why not? What could we shift to increase the likelihood that you will feel more connected in this community?
Morva McDonald: It's such a good response because I think you've, again, you continue to really, I think, blend the notion of not just individual experience, but the cultural, the collective experience in a place, right? And how that is connected to, shaped by, influenced by, cultivated by, right? The systems that are existing, and that listening is a really important factor there.
And one of the things you point out, which is really true in schools is, because of the nature of the work at schools, we feel a lot of urgency as educators. Things are going wrong at a school or we're not exactly pleased with how things are going. We have a lot of need to solve them because there are real people on the other end of usually whatever that kind of problem is, which makes sense, right? Like you don't want people to be having a poor experience, right? And so there's an urgency bias inside of there.
I don't know if this is a fair question, but I am interested in how do you think about, in an organization, how do you decide or how do you know as a leader that you've done enough listening? And is ever there a time when you've hit the threshold? I mean, now you're over into some other tipping point and which is kind of dissatisfying where people are like, all you keep doing is asking me for how I'm doing or my input. Like, how do you think about that dimension of that work?
Jason Craige Harris: That's a really great question, Morva. And for me, listening has to be in a reciprocal relationship with leading, or in other words, with taking meaningful steps forward. And so in my mind, there's a couple of steps in the process of trying to understand the experience of one's own community or perhaps of a particular constituency group.
You know, the first step is, we create a structured opportunity to listen. The second step is that we then need to reflect back some of the highlights of what we heard. And I've heard a lot of dissatisfaction with listening tours because constituencies will say, but like, what did you learn? You never told us what you learned. Like you did all this listening, but we have no idea what you actually heard and what we shared.
So there's this moment where like, OK, I've done a round of listening. Now it's a good opportunity for me to reflect back what I've heard from the community. And in my view, if you have done a listening effort in which you have touched on each of the major stakeholders or constituency groups in your community, then that's an opportunity after you finish that round to crystallize what you've heard and to identify, here are the three main points that I heard with great clarity across the groups and within each of those groups.
And then at that point, in my view, it's an opportunity to create a set of initial actions for what you might do to address those concerns. And here's where I think we get a little bit more granular, which is then to go back to the community and say, here's an initial plan of how I'm proposing to address some of the challenges that I've heard. What do you think about that plan? And in that way, the community is like, oh, we can see the progress. Because it's not they're just coming back and asking us the same questions all over again. It's that they're putting, they're creating a product, a suggested plan, and then we get to sound in on that plan.
Then they go back, the leaders, and they take that feedback, they iterate the plan, and then they share the finalized version of that plan, right? And then they begin implementing it, and then they report out at predictable intervals on a quarterly basis. So here's what we've accomplished in this quarter, on the basis of the plan that we established in consultation with you. It's that kind of spiral effect of even revisiting some of the same ideas, but from a higher location. It's that kind of spiral effect that I think creates trust in a community.
Morva McDonald: It's a highly iterative process, right? Sometimes we can get, I think, trapped in the idea that listening is one way, right? And your point that it's reciprocal, that reciprocity also has action in it. Things get developed, ideas get fleshed out, they get responded to, right? That iteration seems really valuable and an important element of the process.
Jason Craige Harris: And to your point, the iteration and the reciprocal engagement is essential, in part because as leaders, we can get it wrong.
I remember an organization hired me to come in and to do an assessment of their culture and of their sense of engagement. And as I mentioned, I always begin the process with some sort of structured listening experience. So I was doing a series of focus groups. There was one focus group that I met with pretty early on in the process. I heard from them and one of the first questions I asked was, you know, could you tell me a little bit more about what gets in the way of connection here?
Now this was during the height of COVID-19 infections around the world. And many of these staff members said, well, Jason, what gets in the way of connection for me here is, I'm tired of being at home. Like, I would actually like to be back in the office where I could talk to my colleagues. And if there's an issue, I can just run around the corner and have a quick little chat and sort it out. It didn't take all of this back and forth on one of these technology platforms.
And so I walked away from that focus group like, wow, remote work is actually really a challenge for this group. They really want to be back in person. And I had kind of solidified an assessment on the basis of what I heard in that focus group. I was like, OK, I kind of can already consider the recommendations I'm going to make to the leadership team. I'm going to probably say something about the need to bring people back to work in person. I'm going say something about the loss of efficiency by having people work at home, the prevalence of conflict that can happen because we're not in person, face to face, having conversations. So I made an initial assessment.
I went off to another focus group, and I asked the same question. And I actually let on a little bit in my response. I said, you know, I want to ask this question about what kind of thwarts connection here. You know, I'm assuming that maybe remote work might be a challenge for folks. And I saw a lot of shaking of the heads and I was like, this is really interesting. So I said, could you tell me, I see some shaking heads. Can you just tell me what that means?
And one gentleman raised his hand and I called on him and he said, no, actually remote work isn't a problem. Like I love being at home. It's been great. And I feel like things are going well and I would not say that's the biggest factor in thwarting connection. And I will be honest with you all. I formulated in my head some assumptions about this person. And I was like, OK, maybe this guy's a little bit lazy. Maybe he's just like–
Morva McDonald: –He's got a lot of laundry to do at home.
Jason Craige Harris: Yeah, a long lunch in the middle of the day. You know what I mean? Like he's like looking at one email. Like, so I had all these assumptions, and what came out of his mouth next, stunned me and chastised me simultaneously.
He said, this is the first time in my history as a worker when I am not being judged by the wheelchair that I use, because on Zoom, you can't see the wheelchair. People, for the very first time, are having to see my face first, then the wheelchair by which I'm often defined.
That was a powerful moment for me, of like, wow, Jason, you slipped into this unconscious storytelling about what you thought was what was needed in that moment based on a limited data set.
I was so lucky that I had the opportunity to listen a bit more broadly than just one constituency group. I was able to listen and to hear and to have my view expanded so that I could come back with a slate of recommendations that was more attuned to the plurality in this community.
Morva McDonald: Such a clear story, I think, about the value of the breadth of the people that you speak with, right? That you talk to in order to understand something that's going on in your organization, right? And that we sometimes turn to the most familiar or the closest and to really work against that, to go broadly in order to understand the challenge that you're facing. I really appreciate that story quite a bit.
I'm going to turn this to your concept of dignity, because I think, I have a wondering about that. One wondering I have is I think there are some terms we now read about or think about, and we say, yeah, I know what that is. It seems at the surface, very familiar to us. Everybody wants dignity, everybody would say that.
But I have a suspicion that in your work and in your thinking, there's quite a bit of depth here about what you mean when you use the term dignity that goes beyond being heard, right, and recognized. And I just, I'm just curious about that. And I’d love to hear about that perspective. And I think it has the possibility for schools right now to be an anchoring idea that is universal in a sense, that allows us to maintain our connection and our dedication, if you will, to diversity or equity or inclusion, whatever the other terms you want to use in that bucket. So I'm just curious, how do you think about dignity? How would you talk with us and our audience about that?
Jason Craige Harris: There are two things that come up for me. I think one is trying to get a level of clarity about what humans are after, right? Like what is it that we want, in terms of the culture of our schools, in terms of the culture of our departments, our office staff, our leadership teams? What's the high dream that we're striving for?
And 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. And the reason why that was so important was because I desperately needed a North Star that could shape how I worked and for what I was working. And that could actually give me a sense of resilience and purpose that was beyond simply reacting to forces that were rooted in indignity.
I mean, because ultimately, 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? You know, and so it was that wrestling that led me to this idea of, I have to find some words, some language, some, as Elizabeth Alexander calls it, words that shimmer, that can help me conceptualize the world that I want to be, the world that ought to be.
And so dignity became one of those words for me, like this understanding that every single person wants to be seen, heard, valued, listened to, acknowledged, recognized, understood, to be treated fairly. As Donna Hicks argues, to be physically safe and also psychologically safe. Like that is a universal human aspiration. When I began listening to people with that lens, when they would tell me stories about experiences that they had that were challenging that I could not identify with, it was me listening for their quest for dignity that allowed me to connect my different story to their story and to somehow reduce the psychological distance between me and them. It's like, wait, that's just another face of the same quest for dignity.
So secondly, there are times when I have heard people share experiences of harm that they had in the world, and there were moments when I kind of wondered like, well, if that happened to me, I don't think that I would feel like I was harmed. Like, why did that harm you? It was the language of dignity that helped me to better understand, like social scientists have, after many, many, many, many years of studying human behavior, have begun to identify the kinds of behaviors that predictably diminish a person's sense of dignity. And so while I may not be you, I may not have had your same lived experiences, we both are in this human journey.
And so the language of dignity, the concept of dignity and dignity studies, all the different scholars who have created a field of studying dignity, have helped me to better understand these intricacies of the human condition. So much so that as I travel across the country working in schools, I've been telling folks that this conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion is really at the end of the day, at its best, is about human dignity, in that when people say that they want an environment that is diverse, broadly representative of human differences, an environment that is equitable, which is to say that we all have equal access to resources to be able to learn and grow and thrive, that is inclusive, which is to say that we all have a seat at the decision-making table and can influence decisions that impact us.
When people talk about DEI, at its best, I believe those who are advocating for it are advocating for an environment of dignity, where people feel seen, heard, and valued, and they feel physically and psychologically safe. Which means, then, that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not an ends in themselves. They are a means to an end. They are strategies to help us achieve the broader vision of dignity. And so I want to help center dignity as the thing that every human person is after. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are three of the tools that we need to help create that culture.
Morva McDonald: You touched on this a little bit. How do you, how would you articulate right now, given what you know about schools, given your experiences, kind of what are the main challenges in this current context, right, that you find schools are facing in this regard? And what are ways, if you have any, of thinking about how to see ourselves through them, without getting lost in a divide, essentially. How do you think about that?
Jason Craige Harris: It's a really great question, Morva, and Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind for me, because he talked about in his work the idea of negative peace, which is the sort of absence of visible, tangible tension, but without the presence of what he thought of as brotherhood and goodwill.
And 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.
And so I worry that to avoid conflict, we have institutionalized conflict avoidance. And that I think makes for a recipe without the right ingredients for a productive learning environment. It's actually anathema to what it means to be a member of a thriving learning community. So that's sort of issue number one. Issue number two is that as we begin to have conversations across lines of difference about challenging issues, we might face what I think of as competitive suffering or oppression Olympics, whereby different groups of people are like, vying for preeminent status in the hierarchy of like who's the most excluded in the world? Who's right?
Morva McDonald: This is familiar, familiar to me of course, yes.
Jason Craige Harris: And I think that, that too, for me is a concern because I think that actually breaks down the possibility of common ground. I think it is based on the assumption that empathy is a scarce resource and that there's not enough empathy to go around.
And so I think that both of those issues of competitive suffering and of superficial consensus and unity are products of the same problem, which is an absence of alignment on how we can have hard conversations and still stay in community with each other. And in my experience, communities need concrete agreements on how we have hard conversations and concrete examples or what social scientists call behavioral scripts or social scripts for having those hard conversations.
For example, I could say to someone, You never listen to me. You never take me seriously. Right? So that is one possibility of having a hard conversation. If I don't feel heard by you, just tell you, you never listen to me. Right? So that's a script that one could imagine being said from a high school student to another high school student, for example, from an adult to another adult in a school community.
Now the person is trying to convey that their boundaries have been crossed. But because they don't have a productive script, they resort to whatever the script was that they learned growing up, and they're using that. Now, it's nothing wrong with conveying a boundary in a conversation. But the way this person has just conveyed that is likely to cross a boundary for the other person. And that boundary is, wait a minute, you're like, reducing me, like the one time I made a mistake, that is now the whole of my identity, you're saying that I always? And I never? Like the absolutizing can feel so offensive. And now we have a conflagration because someone's putting up a boundary, but in a way that is a little clumsy and sloppy, which is why the community might need some agreements on how to have that competition.
For example, we could teach the practice of just naming my own experience without characterizing someone else's behavior. For example, in this moment, I don't feel heard. And I'm wondering if you can work with me to have this conversation in a way that can allow both of us to be heard. Now the other person is unlikely to hear that as an indictment against their whole being. So it's not that we can't have hard conversations, it's that we need to be able to have them with appropriate guardrails. And so I recommend, to all school communities, going through a process of working with the community to come up with a list of agreements and commitments and scripts that can be readily used in hard conversations to enable people to say what they need to be, to say, without trampling on the dignity of someone else. And conversely, to be able to listen with a level of generosity, right? Knowing that people might say something imperfectly and clumsily, but you shouldn't just dismiss them, right? Immediately, you should try to engage and hear it for the spirit in which it's being said.
Morva McDonald: It seems to me like the, early in the conversation you mentioned the components, part of the components of dignity related to being seen and heard and valued, right? But you also mentioned this notion of clarity of purpose and vision, which seems really important to me here in this example, even as such, that we share something in common about our vision, whatever that vision is, maybe that vision is about how we treat each other. We share in common a vision about how we treat one another in this community. And so therefore, in a moment like this, I'm less likely, right, to return to my back pocket response script, which is maybe not so helpful, right, but maintaining that vision and purpose.
The reason I point that out is, you know, this from being a school person for so long, schools, people in schools do all kinds of norm setting, right? I think you're talking about something different here. So I'm wondering if you can help me tease apart, right, something that's a very common practice in schools. Like every faculty meeting I've ever been in has done norm setting, right? But talk to me about how what you're imagining and what you're talking about is different than the more typical practice I think that we often experience in a school community and is really important for a leader to contemplate.
Jason Craige Harris: In my experience, the typical process for norm setting is seemingly simple and superficial. It's like, here's a list of just five things that we broadly all agree to do. For example, speak from the I perspective, right? Three before me, so that once I speak I let three other people speak before I speak. Those are useful. What I'm talking about though is something a little bit more practical, which is, people actually need language for how to say the hard thing. You know?
And as a mediator I spend a lot of time working with folks on developing language that feels authentic to them to be able to ask a hard question or to say a hard thing. And that kind of norm setting involves helping people come up with scripts that they can use in moments of tension. Because in a moment of tension, our cognitive bandwidth tends to shrink. The stress that we experience in our body, the cortisol, the adrenaline rushing in, kind of reduces our ability to do more complex thinking and higher order reasoning.
So for example, one script that I often teach in my sessions only consists of three words. Tell me more.
Morva McDonald: Tell me more. I'd like to know more.
Jason Craige Harris: Tell me more. And that right there is an invitation to the other person to share a little bit more, particularly in a moment when perhaps they have said something that has left me feeling unsettled. Maybe the story factory machine in my head is already at work trying to make sense of what they've just shared. And maybe I've come up with some narratives that are not particularly generous or helpful.
And maybe I can't reach in this moment for a sophisticated question that a philosopher would ask. But I do remember those three words, tell me more. They're in my back pocket at all times. So the norm for that would be exercising curiosity, right? But how do you do it actually in practice? Well, the script is, tell me more.
So sometimes our norms, not that they're bad, but they often don't come with that level of tactile granularity, you know, so that we actually help people practice the actual words that they can use in a moment. And when they practice with those words, they begin to feel a sense of self-efficacy, like, “Oh, I can have this conversation.” It's not going to immediately go off the rails and go terribly. It's possible that we can have a hard yet productive conversation.
Morva McDonald: In the beginning you said, I think three things that are really vital to your way of thinking about what's happening in school. One is about dignity, being seen, heard, and valued. The other is about the clarity of purpose, right? Kind of vision, right? And I think we tend to think about that at the broad level of the organization, but I have a sense that you're also talking about like, there are these smaller moments that you have to have a shared purpose in order to build a community around certain ideas. And the third is the systems component of it, right?
And as you know, schools, many schools, certainly some independent schools, not all but many are very stretched, right, on their resources and time. So talk to me a little bit about, as you think about the variety of schools that you're in, how you see people invest and develop those systems and the kind of time and capacity, but also the will that it takes to do that work.
Jason Craige Harris: One of the things I tell leaders with whom I collaborate in schools is that more time upfront can actually mean less time on the back end. You know, sometimes it's like, I can't find the time to work with my community to create scripts for how to have hard conversations. Like we have so much to do and like we've got academic work and we're trying to like, graduate these students and…
What I say is, imagine a scenario where you don't invest the time. And as a result, all of these issues unfold that were preventable if more time had been invested. So the first thing is just, it's a shift in consciousness. And so many of the leaders I'm working with are like, yeah, Jason, like that, that's really helpful. If I put more time in on the front end, I can consider it an investment. And that that investment is likely to have a real good return. And that's been a helpful shift for folks.
You know, just practically speaking, I am seeing school leaders really deepen their investment in professional development. You know, thinking about the first couple of days of a school year, thinking about key touch points throughout the year that they can follow up on because we know the one and done never actually works for anybody. But I'm seeing school leaders, you know, say, look, it's really important that we gather faculty and staff together, right, to have professional development around how do I maintain a kind community? How do I do my part in creating a community and sustaining that community in a way that allows each person to thrive? So, you know, doing, you know, kind of opening days, something there, doing a touch point throughout the year, making sure that we include faculty and staff.
So often, professional development in schools excludes staff. And the truth is, is that so many staff have meaningful relationships with students. Like there are some students in our schools who are like, yeah, I like my teacher, but I really, really, really like our director of security. They are cool. Right. And so those relationships are so important. We want to make sure that office staff are also getting the support that they need.
I'm also seeing schools invest in parent education, in part because if the school is adopting an approach that it is trying to socialize throughout the student body and students are going home and having a misaligned experience because parents are not caught up with what's happening in school, then that's a really hard environment for our students to thrive in. And so I'm seeing schools redouble their commitment to bringing parents and caregivers along in the process by investing in, you know, an hour, hour and a half session in the evening, in the morning for parents a couple of times across the year to make sure that they are moving in lockstep with the school's vision for creating a culture of dignity. And even, I might even say a relational culture, a culture in which we are centering relationships in what we do.
Morva McDonald: Jason, I have to say it's, I feel like I'm at the tip of an iceberg with you. I don't know if that's the right analogy, but I feel like I'm just learning a little bit about you and I feel like you have a lot to offer us both and you do something so well, which is connecting a set of big ideas. Big concepts with the practical aspects of what it is to be in a school or what it is to build a relational culture. I mean, the notion that people need scripts in order to reorganize the way they respond under stress. Like we know that, right? But we don't often spend time there, right?
And so I really appreciate your ability to connect those two things together. I'm always sad when I'm at the end of a podcast, I'm like, we just got in there, right? But it's been really so lovely to speak with you and learn a little bit from you. And I'm really excited that you'll be at Thrive talking with us and really again, exploring, I think, which are really valuable concepts and valuable ways of practicing, right? It's a practice that you're engaged in, and practicing that work in schools. So I just want to appreciate you and thank you for your time today.
Jason Craige Harris: Thank you so much for having me and it's been such a joy to be in conversation with you.