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reached our students through their class experiences
in both direct and indirect ways. Next, we calibrated
...inside classrooms, our findings and coded them through inductive coding

teachers are creating a to create “clusters of meaning” (Creswell, 2016) in
our own reflections. We repeated this process in Phase
microcosm of a community. 2 by collecting and analyzing our students’ reflections.

Phase 1: Content Analysis
In Phase 1 of our study, we asked ourselves: What
explicit phrases are already embedded in our students’ assignments that reflect our
expectation? Are we making this expectation explicit to the students? We knew some
indicators that led us to believe that our students were understanding our indirect
curriculum based on the artifacts they were creating for us in class assignments.
For example, students spoke to a focus on the present moment in their classrooms
and about being non-judgmental; but we made this observation based on what we
remembered from student responses on their assignments. At that point we had not
yet gone into their assignments to find evidence of their response to our “hidden
curriculum.” However, we continued to have discussions about our pedagogy, our
curriculum, and what we really wanted to focus on in enriching our students through
an SEL lens. We started the project with “relationships, resilience, and rigor” as our
SEL frameworks, but after taking notes on our meeting discussion topics, we agreed
we were really seeking to explore “relationship building, grit, and mindfulness,” so
we evolved the measures we were reflecting on to match those indicators.

Phase 1: Findings
We divided our topics so that each of us would focus on that single component of
our curriculum. Then, we each completed a rubric marking where we believed those
indicators were met in our curriculum, specifically looking at assignments we were
using and outcomes we remembered from students we had taught in past semesters.
According to our self-reflection, we had five assignments that were strong in helping
students develop skills in relationship building, grit, and rigor, with two remaining
assignments also specifically targeting relationship building and rigor. We found we
had room for growth in enrichment with relationship building, grit, and rigor in two
assignments and another opportunity to grow in a third assignment in grit.
After Phase 1, we felt validated in some of our initial reflections—but not all.
We agreed that we needed to be direct and explicit in order to reinforce the ideas
in our assignments and curriculum that address relationships, grit, and rigor. We
wanted our learning experiences, assignments, and interactions with students to
be transformative. Finally, we agreed that the main focus of our class—classroom
management—is sometimes perceived negatively. However, we agreed that inside
classrooms, teachers are creating a microcosm of a community. Therefore, we
wanted to reinforce that our classroom management pedagogy and content should
reflect the kind of community in which we would like to live.
We revisited our ultimate goals: (a) to give our students specific skills to be
able to implement immediately in their classrooms, and (b) to continue to grow
professionally so that we could make sure we were doing what we said we were
going to do. We believed we had achieved these goals. But we were still curious:
What did our students think of their experience in our class? Did they have the same
kinds of ideas and findings that we had?

20 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators