Chris Conway was confident when he started his first year teaching fifth grade at Riverside Intermediate in Fishers. He student taught at that school before, a class of similarly aged kids, and he felt confident he could anticipate and handle many different types of situations.
On top of this, his teaching partner was a veteran teacher and provided him with a lot of resources and support. But all that said, some things really surprised Conway in his first year.
As a fifth grade math teacher, his students had to take the ISTEP+ in the spring. Before the school year started, he said he wasn't worried about his students passing the assessment, since his school's passing rate is usually so high.
But once spring time came...
"I definitely got stressed as it got closer," Conway said.
He was talking about it a lot outside of school and sharing his worries with his girlfriend. His biggest concern wasn't his students' abilities. It was the amount of time he had to teach all of the standards they needed to know.
"They're tested over all these standards but they're not tested at the end of the year," he said. "So I had to try and plan and get in things that I thought were going to be in the test."
As the testing session approached, he could tell his students understood the importance of the test, even though he tried to not stress them out about it.
He said the pressure impacted some students during the test.
"I had one boy who is very very brilliant but he works at a snails pace," Conway said. "I updated them on how much time they have left to get through, we got down to ten minutes left and he knew he wasn't going to finish and he started to break down in the middle of the test."
While preparing his kids for the ISTEP was a new experience for Conway, he feels like the experience prompted him to grow as a teacher. Looking ahead, he says he'll be more prepared to teach all the content on the test, before the test.
"One of the biggest standards in fifth grade is you have to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions," Conway said. "It takes a long time to properly teach them that and get all the way through it. I'm going to start fractions sooner, as soon as we get back from winter break."
Celebrating the Successes
Even though the first year of teaching comes with a high learning curve, inevitable failures and lessons on better ways to do things, Conway says he's going to focus on what makes him a successful teacher.
One of his proudest moments of the school year was seeing the progress one student made in math.
"He's never gotten good math grades in his life. He's really struggled in math but he wanted to be good at it," Conway said. "So every single morning we would practice math. Any chance he had he would ask me for math practice."
At Riverside, fifth grade students can be in a regular fifth grade math class, or an advanced class that teaches sixth grade standards. The student was in Conway's regular class, and he was mastering a skill the advanced class was struggling with. So Conway asked the student to teach the lesson to the advanced class, hoping it would help with the student's confidence.
"I brought him in and had him teach the sixth graders how to do a certain type of math problem, and his face just lit up," Conway said. "You could just see the confidence and how proud he was of himself."
By the end of the year, the student was getting As on assignments and tests.
It's moments like this that helped Conway realized ISTEP+ scores and evaluations weren't the only important way to measure if he was succeeding as a teacher.
"I need to evaluate myself on have I done the best I can do? Have I tried my best and made connections with these kids? Have I not only taught them their standards but have I taught them some life lessons and helped them grow up in this past year?" Conway said. "The way I look at how I evaluate myself has changed a little bit."
