Clearing the fog: Constructing shared stories of a novice teacher's journey

This study presents parallel perspectives of a novice teacher's struggle to improve his teaching during his third year as an elementary string teacher. Throughout that year, Jelani met with and was observed by his school district supervisor and a faculty member at the local university. All three of us agreed that we wanted Jelani to succeed, yet we each felt as if wandering in a dense fog, unable to discern a clear route to the hoped-for outcome. Alternating between our voices, we tell the stories of our individual experiences as we worked together, creating here the story of our shared journey through gradually lifting haze. We identified four elements that helped disperse the fog: Jelani's increasing pedagogical content knowledge, his self-confidence and persistence, the opportunity for Jelani to work in the university's String Project classes, and the supervisor's mentoring style.