Abstract
The article focuses on the current trend of increasing the quality of education, which brings increased demands on teacher competences when introducing differentiated teaching for primary school pupils in heterogeneously composed classrooms, starting from the very beginning of schooling. The Ministry of Education, in its Strategy for Education Policy of the Czech Republic until 2030+, emphasises didactic practices in teaching that allow differentiating teaching according to the needs of pupils.
However, many teachers are not sufficiently prepared to do this and there is very little relevant literature and research to help them in practice. The present multi-case study summarises the latest findings in this area, analysing the concept of intrinsic differentiation, not only its cognitive aspects but also the social dimensions of teaching.
It highlights the knowledge of specific pupils and their individual peculiarities as an important condition for the implementation of internal differentiation. It describes the analysis of the pedagogical means of differentiation of the content of the curriculum, in particular the differentiation of the difficulty of the curriculum, the scope of the curriculum, the time aspect, the use of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives and the implementation of group work schemes in teaching.
The subject of the multi-case study is primarily the contribution of differentiated instruction to each student's individual personality and to his or her full learning experience. The data on which this study is based was collected from five teachers in five schools in the Pardubice, Central Bohemia and Hradec Králové regions, focusing on the main subjects of Czech language and mathematics in the 1st-5th grade of primary school.
The survey was conducted once a week in 2021 and 2022.