Last week, when I asked fourth and fifth graders at my school how they felt when they thought about the test, they responded, “stressed,” “pressured,” “anxious,” “angry,” “butterflies in my stomach,” “fear of the unknown,” and “really, really, really, really nervous.”

So I was grateful that we were about to engage in mindfulness — the evidence-based practice that has helped me access calm, resilience, and joy during the hectic work day. I first came to mindfulness out of curiosity, and immediately noticed a drastic decrease in my own stress levels. After undergoing a yearlong training with the organization Mindful Schools, I started bringing the practices to my students. Three years ago, I adapted the practices specifically for state testing for the first time.

Research suggests that students who practice mindfulness show increases in attention, focus, and emotional regulation — all of which can be elusive in our frenetic world. A few years ago, my library was filled with students reacting to the large space and the absence of their regular teacher by running and screaming. After integrating mindfulness, I would see kids draped quietly over chairs, with their faces, minds, and imaginations lost in books. The same students (from the same challenging backgrounds) have more learning-ready brains that it is clear they are putting to use. I have transferred to a new school this year, and have been delighted to see the impacts of mindfulness on my new students.

But as educators know, even the most carefully calibrated classroom environment can fall apart when state testing rolls around. I could feel the tension in the room when I even so much as used the word “test” last week. By the time we got through the lesson, and with the skills they’ve built up through the past several months, I felt confident that my students would have the tools to get through these challenging weeks.

Testing weeks are hard for teachers, too. In a world where we are hyper-connected, and where it’s incredibly rare to spend several hours without access to devices or human interaction, the proctoring protocols are strict — and challenging.

Proctoring can be extremely boring, especially compared to regular patterns of constant interaction with very active young people. Mandated guidelines for teachers are similar to those for students: no talking, no reading, no electronics, and no sitting. So in addition to guiding my students through a pre-test activity to release tension and increase calm (which I will be sharing over the announcements in the mornings for all of our test-takers!), I developed the following mindful strategies to cope with, and ultimately benefit from, the mind-numbing protocols of proctoring.

Here’s what I did — and what I’ll be doing this week as my students start yet another round of English and math exams.

Bringing full attention to the feet. Every time I found myself becoming bored, I would redirect my attention to my feet. While my eyes gazed upon my students, I directed all of my internal sensory attention to what the ground felt like, what the inside of my shoes felt like, to the varying levels of pressure that different parts of my feet felt. Fully feeling the ground beneath me — in most people this leads to a pleasant, tingling sensation in the feet (but not always). This grounding activity takes the attention out of the mind and into the body. For me, this significantly decreases boredom and increases feelings of pleasantness. Scanning the room. As I slowly scanned the room, I took in as much detail as I could as I swept my eyes from side to side. (My kids would call this using your mindful eyes.) It may take as much as 20 or 30 seconds to pan the room. Part of this scanning is taking in the details of the students as well, noticing, noticing, noticing, going to the deepest level of detail possible. Similar to using the feet to anchor the attention, this technique anchors the attention in the visual field and allows the brain to find nuance and novelty in a situation where it is definitely not generally expected. Walking mindfully. As I walk around, I do “mindful walking” — one breath per step, nice and slow. And then slower than that. I pick up one foot and inhale, place it down and exhale, pick up the other foot and inhale, place it down and exhale. I find that this feels extremely calming and pleasant to the nervous system, especially after the hours of pacing on testing days. This is more than just walking slowly — it is placing a deeper attention on the mechanics of walking. “Sending thoughts” to the students. One of my favorite aspects of being the school librarian is that I have no idea about every single student’s academic standing, so I get to believe in all of them. I spent several sweeps of the room looking at each kid and thinking “I believe in you!”; “You can do it!” and “You’ve got this.” This game doesn’t get old. I also told them before we started the test that if they catch me looking at them, that I’m thinking about how much I believe in them. (And while it may not make an actual difference in their scores, who can’t use a little extra believe-in in their lives?) Shared breathing. Before the test I told the students that every time I changed the “time remaining” on the board, if they wanted, they could take a mindful breath with me and then keep going (a school-friendly version of one of my mindfulness teachers’ “I love you, keep going”). It got to the point where, in their isolated you-must-do-this-by-yourself worlds, we repeated this sound sequence again and again: eraser on chalkboard, chalk on chalkboard, one big deep together-breath whispering through the room. It was nice to be in that “together” with them, under conditions that otherwise preclude connection. Now that the tests are untimed, this technique could be used with a simple updating of the “Time Now” on the board. Modeling the focused mind. There are such things as “mirror neurons,” so what we project is totally picked up by sensitive test-taking nervous systems. I looked at it as my job to not allow boredom, anxiety, restlessness, or frustration to sneak into my own mind. Instead I let myself be as engaged, calm, and focused as I wanted my students to be. When my mind would wander, or I’d feel it shift onto a course I didn’t want it to go (perhaps a very familiar thought merry-go-round), I’d take a deep breath, go back to focusing on my feet, and be as steady and stable as possible. It’s totally a challenge, but totally doable.

These six ideas have helped me to enjoy the proctoring more (and in fact, to sometimes walk away with my nervous system so calm, I felt euphoric). Students have told me that the “taking a breath together” really helped them to focus and not be as scared. Additionally, I provided a script and audio-recording for the pre-test calming to each teacher in the school, and other students came up to me and told me how much it had helped them focus and “chase away all the butterflies” before the test. Kids who didn’t get the pre-test calming script were begging for it.

I am looking forward to sharing these techniques in my new school this week — and with truly open curiosity, we’ll see how it goes. As one educator, I can’t change the tests, but I can do my part to influence how students experience them. It has been tremendously rewarding to witness the impact of mindfulness on emotional regulation in the face of a highly stressful situation.

About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.