This article focuses on classroom-based narratives that reflect how a convenience sample of 25 graduate students, who were also practicing teachers, wrote about and utilized the real-life events and experiences of their students to help them become instructional explorers and effective problem solvers. The narratives had to be a depiction of actual events that occurred in instructional practice and had to reflect the reality of classroom practices. They also had to provide for multiple perspectives and levels of self-analysis. In the narratives, the teachers functioned as freelance writers, attempting to better understand and cope with the challenges of teaching in a large, urban school district. The study showed that three kinds of influences defined the environment in which classroom-based narratives dominated the scenario (extrinsic, intrinsic, and individual values and beliefs). The case studies and self-reflections helped the teachers analyze their beliefs and demonstrated how thinking about and reflecting on instructional approaches could result in changed paradigms and improved teaching. (Contains 12 references.) (SM)