Teacher knowledge and development from the teacher perspective were studied. Teachers wrote their own stories using collaborative autobiography (writing individual stories in groups). This report documents the evolution of the research methodology in discerning the personal, individual, similar, common, and collective as researchers moved from gathering single cases to collections of cases of teachers' stories. Research focused on how to discern and represent what was common or collective without excluding the personal. Stories portrayed details of thinking and acting that teachers brought to the classroom. Researchers read the stories, identified themes, patterns, and essential structures, and noted what events, and vignettes best illustrated story elements. They recorded key words and phrases and represented collaborative interpretation using the teachers' own words and styles. Case studies and a capsule account (interpretive summary of the case study) are offered as well as a comparative analysis of clusters of stories that lets researchers identify types of commonalities relating to teachers' lives within their different experiences. The paper offers an aggregation of cases as a method for exploring commonality. It discusses how researchers can discern qualitative commonality through quantitative encoding and analysis and examines the role of the personal and contextual within qualitative validity and commonality. (SM)