Teachers across Europe face a multitude of challenges associated with the characteristics of their profession, e.g., new skills requirements and rapid technological developments, challenges associated with their teaching and classroom interactions, e.g., discipline and increasing social and cultural diversity. The challenges faced by teachers are adding to the frequency and intensity of their emotional problems. Therefore, teachers’ resilience and well-being need support. One mechanism for supporting teachers lies in promoting their social, emotional competencies and diversity awareness. Possessing and developing teachers’ social, emotional competencies and diversity awareness has proved to be important, both for the teachers themselves and for those they are in close contact with. Much of the work in diversity research has focused on training multi-culturally competent teachers and on transforming the curriculum to embody multiculturalism. Nevertheless, a gap remains between conceptual understandings of diversity and teachers' actual abilities to respond to challenging moments of encountering diversity. One of the possible mechanisms of support for teachers in challenging situations is mindfulness (Roeser et al., 2012). Mindfulness as teachers’ ability to focus and stabilize awareness of the present moment and to be aware of their patterns of behaviour and reactions when under pressure, can be understood as a tool for fostering social and emotional competencies on one hand as well as diversity awareness on the other. In the current paper we are empirically testing this hypothesis by analysing the predictive power of teachers' mindfulness for their own well-being as well as their behaviour in the classroom, e.g., mindful teaching and self-efficacy to teach in diverse classrooms. We will use data from the Slovenian sample of the “HAND IN HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges (HAND:ET)” project (N = 272; 253 females). Implementing the HAND:ET project, teachers were administered with a battery of measurement tools targeting their social, emotional as well as their diversity awareness competencies. In the current study we will use MAAS (Brown & Ryan, 2003) as a measure of mindfulness, WHO-5 Wellbeing Scale (Topp et al., 2015) as a measure of well-being, Mindful Teaching (Frank et al., 2016) as a measure of mindful teaching and PISA 2018 Teachers' Self-Efficacy to Teach in Diverse Classrooms (OECD, 2020) as a measure of teachers' self-efficacy to teach in diverse classrooms. Implications for research and practice will be discussed.

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