What Do Students Learn from a Graduate Course Based on Simple Interactions?
By: Dr. Junlei Li
Do you remember the scene in the “Sound of Music” when all seven von Trapp children jump to Sister Maria’s bed on a scary, stormy night, and she cheers them up with a song called “These Are A Few of My Favorite Things”?
When we have the opportunity to spend weeks in a row designing and teaching the Simple Interactions-based course at Harvard Graduate School of Education, it often feels like we are sharing quite a few of our favorite things about relational work collected over the last 15 years. As the challenges mount in the wider world outside the classroom, we (students and teaching team alike) often feel reassured of the very “human” reasons for hope we hold in our simple, everyday interactions.
Here is the course description and progression of our Spring of 2026 “Empowering Human Relationships across Developmental Contexts” class. What do students think they learn from this course? We looked back at their thoughtful comments in the course evaluations over the years, and here are three overarching themes.
Slow down and appreciate the power of “simple” interactions
While this may appear to be the most obvious outcome of a course based on “simple interactions”, students consistently find this to be a transformative way to look at their work and to look at the work of those around them. It’s one thing to say or to know in theory “every interaction matters”; it’s a whole other experience to see, describe, discuss, and re-see what these interactions look like across very different social, institutional, and cultural contexts. Even years later, students will refer to a particular video in class and talk about how the interactions made them feel, like the crossing guard or the caregiver who read a piece of junk mail to put an anxious child to sleep.
“[This course gave me] a deeper understanding of just how important the small interactions that caretakers, educators, and many others have with children and the difference small, internal shifts towards bettering these interactions can have and create lasting, beneficial impacts on their development in many ways.”
“This course has made me understand the value in the smallest interactions, and the butterfly effect they can have on entire institutions and communities.”
It’s not easy to keep faith in simple, everyday interactions when we all know how enormous the systemic challenges are in education, community development, and other important areas of helping professions.
Develop real skills to notice, describe, and reflect on interactions and relationships
Even before the Simple Interactions Tool is introduced in the course progression (usually about mid-way through), students engage in the practice of “noticing, describing, and reflecting” on interactions. These skills are introduced in the contexts of analyzing the match between children’s developmental needs and adults’ relational capacity, critically evaluating how we define and measure quality, and discovering extraordinary practices in settings with very ordinary resources.
Students describe such skills as:
“The art of noticing, learning how to reflect on the practices of professionals and institutional behaviors towards kids and young people, and how creating a space for valuable and caring interactions can be a factor for change. It provided a framework for deeper observation, instilled a sense of urgency, and emphasized the importance of designing with care in mind.”
“This course changed the way I see and understand human relationships. I learned how small, everyday interactions can deeply affect children and youth, especially in settings shaped by control and limited choice. I gained concrete skills in observing interactions, noticing power dynamics, and asking what a child or young person truly needs in the moment.”
One interesting thing we learned over the years is that by about mid-point in the course, some students start to become impatient with “just” noticing and describing interactions. They are eager to learn “how to change/improve interactions”. We gradually developed teaching approaches to help students understand that noticing and describing interactions are not separate from changing interactions, but rather are a core change mechanism in efforts to improve relational practices. By making the invisible visible, professionals may begin to do more intentionally and expansively what they were previously doing intuitively (but unnoticed).
Deepen commitment to relational practices that make us human
It always fills us with hope and gratitude to see students leave this class, graduate, and start to focus on doing relational work in whatever organizational contexts and countries they are in. It is a course that moves students, not just intellectually towards concepts and competencies, but as human beings. It is not uncommon to see students tear up in class (for good reasons!) and in office hours. There are times when students told us they went home after class and called their parents, former teachers, siblings, and friends to thank those who loved and cared for them. Students who were parents themselves want to talk about their own parenting experiences. The course did not prescribe what they should do, but provided the language for them to describe how they are growing as parents.
“The final class project stood out as the most meaningful. It pushed me to think deeply about how I want to show up for others, which marginalized groups I want to center in my work, and the kind of change I hope to contribute to. The process of reflecting, mapping relationships, and connecting theory to lived experience helped me clarify my values and long–term goals in a way that felt both personal and practical.”
“The course also helped me slow down and reflect rather than react. It gave me language to understand experiences I have had working with vulnerable youth and helped me connect those experiences to research and theory. Most importantly, it strengthened my commitment to approaching my work with greater empathy, intention, and respect for the humanity of the people I serve.”
When we have the opportunity to spend weeks in a row designing and teaching the Simple Interactions-based course at Harvard Graduate School of Education, it often feels like we are sharing quite a few of our favorite things about relational work collected over the last 15 years. As the challenges mount in the wider world outside the classroom, we (students and teaching team alike) often feel reassured of the very “human” reasons for hope we hold in our simple, everyday interactions.
Here is the course description and progression of our Spring of 2026 “Empowering Human Relationships across Developmental Contexts” class. What do students think they learn from this course? We looked back at their thoughtful comments in the course evaluations over the years, and here are three overarching themes.
Slow down and appreciate the power of “simple” interactions
While this may appear to be the most obvious outcome of a course based on “simple interactions”, students consistently find this to be a transformative way to look at their work and to look at the work of those around them. It’s one thing to say or to know in theory “every interaction matters”; it’s a whole other experience to see, describe, discuss, and re-see what these interactions look like across very different social, institutional, and cultural contexts. Even years later, students will refer to a particular video in class and talk about how the interactions made them feel, like the crossing guard or the caregiver who read a piece of junk mail to put an anxious child to sleep.
“[This course gave me] a deeper understanding of just how important the small interactions that caretakers, educators, and many others have with children and the difference small, internal shifts towards bettering these interactions can have and create lasting, beneficial impacts on their development in many ways.”
“This course has made me understand the value in the smallest interactions, and the butterfly effect they can have on entire institutions and communities.”
It’s not easy to keep faith in simple, everyday interactions when we all know how enormous the systemic challenges are in education, community development, and other important areas of helping professions.
Develop real skills to notice, describe, and reflect on interactions and relationships
Even before the Simple Interactions Tool is introduced in the course progression (usually about mid-way through), students engage in the practice of “noticing, describing, and reflecting” on interactions. These skills are introduced in the contexts of analyzing the match between children’s developmental needs and adults’ relational capacity, critically evaluating how we define and measure quality, and discovering extraordinary practices in settings with very ordinary resources.
Students describe such skills as:
“The art of noticing, learning how to reflect on the practices of professionals and institutional behaviors towards kids and young people, and how creating a space for valuable and caring interactions can be a factor for change. It provided a framework for deeper observation, instilled a sense of urgency, and emphasized the importance of designing with care in mind.”
“This course changed the way I see and understand human relationships. I learned how small, everyday interactions can deeply affect children and youth, especially in settings shaped by control and limited choice. I gained concrete skills in observing interactions, noticing power dynamics, and asking what a child or young person truly needs in the moment.”
One interesting thing we learned over the years is that by about mid-point in the course, some students start to become impatient with “just” noticing and describing interactions. They are eager to learn “how to change/improve interactions”. We gradually developed teaching approaches to help students understand that noticing and describing interactions are not separate from changing interactions, but rather are a core change mechanism in efforts to improve relational practices. By making the invisible visible, professionals may begin to do more intentionally and expansively what they were previously doing intuitively (but unnoticed).
Deepen commitment to relational practices that make us human
It always fills us with hope and gratitude to see students leave this class, graduate, and start to focus on doing relational work in whatever organizational contexts and countries they are in. It is a course that moves students, not just intellectually towards concepts and competencies, but as human beings. It is not uncommon to see students tear up in class (for good reasons!) and in office hours. There are times when students told us they went home after class and called their parents, former teachers, siblings, and friends to thank those who loved and cared for them. Students who were parents themselves want to talk about their own parenting experiences. The course did not prescribe what they should do, but provided the language for them to describe how they are growing as parents.
“The final class project stood out as the most meaningful. It pushed me to think deeply about how I want to show up for others, which marginalized groups I want to center in my work, and the kind of change I hope to contribute to. The process of reflecting, mapping relationships, and connecting theory to lived experience helped me clarify my values and long–term goals in a way that felt both personal and practical.”
“The course also helped me slow down and reflect rather than react. It gave me language to understand experiences I have had working with vulnerable youth and helped me connect those experiences to research and theory. Most importantly, it strengthened my commitment to approaching my work with greater empathy, intention, and respect for the humanity of the people I serve.”
We don’t quite know how this deepening of commitment to building relationships as a human being and a professional happens in this class. Our best guess is that it’s empowering to see all the examples in the course content of people who put faith in relationships even under the most difficult circumstances, and that it’s reassuring to sit in a classroom of your peers and be interested and invested in learning about human relationships together week after week. This might be what researchers call “collective efficacy”, which extends beyond self-efficacy to help people feel they are not alone in believing something is worth doing.
We want to share all of this as a note of gratitude to the larger Simple Interactions community. Over the years, numerous members of the SI community have contributed to the course as guests or teaching fellows. Our partners from the Fred Rogers Institute visited in-person with their own undergraduate students. Monique Sternin, whose pioneering work on “positive deviance” has inspired much of the Simple Interactions approach in fieldwork, has visited the classroom multiple times. Our colleagues at Oak Hill residential youth care in Edmonton, Canada, have been appearing live or via pre-recorded interviews since the pandemic, helping to teach our students what they once taught us about what it means to “smell real” (be authentic) in relational care with youth. Emily Meland, who co-directs Simple Interactions today, began as a teaching fellow in 2020. Our longtime SI friend Kelly Raudenbush was our “remote teaching fellow” throughout the pandemic. Melissa Butler, who taught us what it meant to work with teacher communities, has appeared in video, recording, and in person. Thelma Ramirez, who co-authored the Early Relational Health report and Fatherhood Engagement report, was among the very first cohort of graduate students in 2018. Liz Zhong, who integrated the course concepts into her work with migrant families and their children in China, serves as the lead teaching fellow this year. Numerous translated versions of the Simple Interactions tool were created by students from those countries.
The Simple Interactions work has been enriched by such extended learning experiences with graduate students from around the world and across many sectors of the helping professions. The course has served as a “sandbox” for experimenting with ideas for teaching about human interactions. Every idea that we took to “real world” workshops was likely first piloted in the course, and every idea that grew from our encounters with the field came back into the course. The classroom, in this case, is not just a place of learning, but an incubator for ideas that matter in the world outside.
We want to share all of this as a note of gratitude to the larger Simple Interactions community. Over the years, numerous members of the SI community have contributed to the course as guests or teaching fellows. Our partners from the Fred Rogers Institute visited in-person with their own undergraduate students. Monique Sternin, whose pioneering work on “positive deviance” has inspired much of the Simple Interactions approach in fieldwork, has visited the classroom multiple times. Our colleagues at Oak Hill residential youth care in Edmonton, Canada, have been appearing live or via pre-recorded interviews since the pandemic, helping to teach our students what they once taught us about what it means to “smell real” (be authentic) in relational care with youth. Emily Meland, who co-directs Simple Interactions today, began as a teaching fellow in 2020. Our longtime SI friend Kelly Raudenbush was our “remote teaching fellow” throughout the pandemic. Melissa Butler, who taught us what it meant to work with teacher communities, has appeared in video, recording, and in person. Thelma Ramirez, who co-authored the Early Relational Health report and Fatherhood Engagement report, was among the very first cohort of graduate students in 2018. Liz Zhong, who integrated the course concepts into her work with migrant families and their children in China, serves as the lead teaching fellow this year. Numerous translated versions of the Simple Interactions tool were created by students from those countries.
The Simple Interactions work has been enriched by such extended learning experiences with graduate students from around the world and across many sectors of the helping professions. The course has served as a “sandbox” for experimenting with ideas for teaching about human interactions. Every idea that we took to “real world” workshops was likely first piloted in the course, and every idea that grew from our encounters with the field came back into the course. The classroom, in this case, is not just a place of learning, but an incubator for ideas that matter in the world outside.