Video Responses

Joseph McNure

Response 1

My first time teaching at high school was much more comfortable than my middle school
placement. I feel more excited about teaching high school because I feel that I can
communicate better with the students. My humor was better received here than in my first
placement. However, I had a hard time keeping every student engaged. Because of their
increased musical ability, I wanted to stop and work with a particular section after immediately
recognizing what they needed to be better. This caused other sections to sit for too long. I will
have to work on building a library of activities that keep everybody busy while making sure the
music improves. This is a strength of my cooperating teacher that I am trying to emulate.

Response 2

By the end of my second video (7th week of teaching at this placement), I felt much
better in front of the class. I discovered that I wasn’t as good at producing fun activities on the
spot to work on the music, or at least, I was trying to emulate my cooperating teacher’s style.
His personality works very authentically with this teaching style, but I found that I needed to find
other ways to keep all of the students engaged that works with my personality. I found that the
students respond better to me when I specifically plan everything out, and it works well with my
teaching personality. The personality of my cooperating teacher is more spontaneous and
therefore the students find it authentic when he is as spontaneous with his teaching.