The ND Teacher’s Summer Recovery Series: A Beginner’s Guide to Qualitative Coding
Have you ever read something you wrote a few weeks ago and felt a jolt of recognition?
Maybe not because the writing was good, but because you could suddenly see something in it you couldn't see when you were living it: a word you kept coming back to without realizing it, a pattern in what made the hard days hard, a thread running through the entries that you didn't notice you were weaving.
That moment of recognition is what qualitative coding makes intentional.
It's not a complicated process. It's not reserved for researchers with graduate degrees. It's a structured way of reading your own words and asking what is this actually telling me? And for neurodivergent brains that are wired to find patterns, it can feel less like learning a new skill and more like finally having a name for something you've always done.
So What Is Qualitative Coding?
Let's strip away the academic language entirely.
Qualitative coding is the process of reading through written material — journal entries, interview transcripts, open-ended survey responses, field notes — and identifying recurring themes, patterns, and meaningful categories. You read through the text, notice what keeps showing up, give those recurring ideas a label, and then look at what those labels tell you when you step back and look at the whole picture.
That's it. That's the process.
In a research context, qualitative coding might involve multiple researchers, formal codebooks, and reliability checks. We're not doing that. We're doing the personal version — one person, one journal, one summer's worth of honest writing. The methodology is the same. The scale is human-sized.
Where This Comes From
Qualitative coding has been a cornerstone of social science and education research for decades. When researchers want to understand human experience, not just measure it but actually understand it, they turn to qualitative methods. They collect narratives, they read carefully, and they look for the patterns underneath the words.
The underlying premise is one I think most ND people will recognize immediately. Numbers don't capture everything. Some of the most important truths about human experience live in the stories people tell, the words they choose, and the things they return to again and again without quite knowing why.
Researchers figured out a long time ago that if you want to understand something complex, you have to listen to it carefully and look for what it's trying to tell you. That's all we're doing this summer — listening carefully to ourselves.
Pattern Recognition: Your Built-In Advantage
Pattern recognition is frequently cited as a cognitive strength associated with autism, ADHD, and other ND profiles. You may have spent years feeling like your brain worked against you in systems that rewarded linear, sequential processing. Qualitative coding rewards a different kind of thinking entirely. It rewards noticing. It rewards the ability to hold multiple pieces of information at once and sense the connection between them.
You are not behind on this skill. You are very likely already ahead.
A Simple Walkthrough
Let me show you what this looks like in practice with a brief example.
Imagine someone wrote these three journal entries across three weeks of summer:
Week 1: "I feel like I can finally breathe, but I also don't know what to do with myself. The quiet feels weird. I kept checking my work email even though school is out."
Week 3: "Had a good day but kept waiting for something to go wrong. Made a list of things I want to do this summer and then felt guilty for not starting any of them yet."
Week 5: "I realized I haven't actually stopped moving since school ended. I've been filling every day. I don't know how to just be."
A qualitative coder reading these entries might notice several recurring themes: difficulty transitioning out of high-alert functioning, guilt as a persistent undercurrent, an uncomfortable relationship with stillness, and a possible pattern of using busyness as a nervous system regulation strategy.
None of those themes were labeled in the entries. They emerged from reading carefully and getting curious. What is this person returning to? What does this keep circling back around?
Now imagine doing that with your own writing. Imagine reading eight weeks of your own honest reflections and finding the threads you didn't know you were laying down. That's Week 7. That's the payoff this whole series is building toward.
What the Coding Process Will Look Like in Week 7
I'll walk you through the full process step by step when we get there, but here's a preview so you know what you're building toward:
You'll read back through your journal entries from the summer with fresh eyes. As you read, you'll mark words, phrases, or ideas that feel significant — things that keep showing up, that carry emotional weight, or that surprise you. You'll give those marks simple labels, just a word or short phrase that captures what you're noticing. Then you'll step back, look at the labels you've created, and turn an analytical lens to your thoughts. What categories are emerging? What themes are these pointing toward?
From those themes, you'll draw a small set of insights about your own patterns. You’ll discover what depletes you, what restores you, what you keep avoiding, and what you keep reaching for. Those insights become the foundation for the self-advocacy work in Week 8.
The journal pages throughout the series are designed specifically to generate the kind of material that codes richly. The prompts aren't random. They're developed with intention to build your unique dataset. Every entry you write between now and Week 7 is data you'll get to use.
Why This Matters Beyond the Series
Let’s take a brief aside to talk about how this expands beyond personal wellness.
The skills you're building this summer — noticing patterns in narrative data, drawing meaning from qualitative information, translating self-knowledge into actionable insight — these are the same skills that make exceptional educators.
When you sit across from a parent in a conference and you say "I've noticed that your child consistently struggles most in the transitions between activities, not in the activities themselves" that's qualitative observation translated into advocacy. When you read through a student's anecdotal notes and identify a pattern that the screener scores missed — that's coding. When you build an accommodation plan based on what you know about how a specific nervous system works — that's the same process, applied outward.
The lens you turn on yourself this summer is the same lens you already use for your students. You just haven't had formal permission to use it on your own behalf.
Consider this your permission.
Keep Writing
If you've been journaling since our last Pre-Launch post, you already have entries to work with. If you haven't started yet, now is a genuinely good time. Not because you're behind, but because every entry you write before Week 1 is context you'll be glad you have.
Write honestly. Write without editing. Write about the end of the school year, about what your body feels like right now, about what you're hoping for and what you're dreading. Don't worry about whether it's coherent or meaningful. Coherence and meaning are what the coding process is for.
You're not just preparing for a wellness series. You're starting to listen to yourself, maybe for the first time with this kind of intention.
That's not a small thing. That’s the first step in self-advocacy. Let’s keep walking this journey together.
~Dr. Henderson