Czech and Finnish Primary School Teacher in the Background of Inclusive Education

Abstract

The paper discusses the issue of primary school teachers in the conditions of inclusive education in the Czech Republic and Finland. The aim of the thesis is to create and compare real profiles of Czech and Finnish primary school teachers with an emphasis on finding out what is behind the quality of inclusive education in Finland and how these findings can improve inclusive education and the teaching profession in the Czech context. The key aim is to create an ideal profile of a first grade teacher in inclusive education, i.e., a conception of the teachers’ own learning processes, competences and real conditions that a teacher needs for his/her work in a heterogeneous classroom. In order to achieve the goal, the comparative nature of the work and the design of the qualitative case study was chosen, where the case is understood as a primary school teacher against the background of inclusive education — the total number of participants is 20 teachers (10 Czech and 10 Finnish). The main methods for securing data were content and thematic analysis of Czech and foreign sources. The findings became the basis for further reflection and the creation of semi-structured interviews and observations. The first round of data processing used case studies of individual participants, which were subsequently supplemented by data obtained by axial coding. Real profiles of both Czech and Finnish teachers were then created. These profiles were compared and a draft ideal profile of a primary school teacher in inclusive education was created, which reflects the data obtained by the research of this thesis with the data from the thematic analysis and was created from below, based on the opinions and experiences of the teachers themselves. The results show that the professional primary school teacher has a positive attitude towards inclusive education; uses a variety of teaching strategies leading to active involvement of pupils; is involved in his/her own professional development and the development of the school as a community; uses individualisation and differentiation in his/her work and is part of a multi-professional team. Conditions must be created for the teacher to do his/her job where other teaching staff are available to take away from the teacher’s high demands for specific knowledge of special education and legislation; lower class sizes; the introduction of pupil assessment criteria and the use of appropriate forms of assessment.