Selection of didactic principles for quality teaching in the first triad of primary school

Quality of education is a common topic of reflection in modern society. The implementation of a high-quality educational process requires a competent, qualified and efficient executor of the process. He needs to take care of his professional development by maintaining his professionalism and following novelties. In planning and leading lessons the teacher can help himself by following didactic principles, which he can consider consciously and wisely, which helps to improve the quality of the management of the educational process. The researches point out the complexity of lessons and the teaching profession. The teacher has a significantly important role in planning and execution of the learning process. He needs to form an encouraging learning environment, which will allow students to develop lasting competences. In the theoretical backgrounds of the master’s thesis, we defined the quality of lessons and highlighted the importance of the teacher’s role in raising quality of lessons. We defined the didactic principles as a didactic term, presented their main characteristics and open dilemmas, and made a summary of different classifications considering what classifications by different authors have in common and where they differ. In the empirical part, we used a qualitative research and the descriptive method of pedagogical research. The research includes 10 classroom teachers, who teach in the 1. educational period at different primary schools and have different length of service. We performed semi-structured interviews with them. We found that teachers describe quality lessons as lessons, where students acquire the demanded knowledge, while they stress out the importance of motivation and activities of students. They try to develop quality lessons with careful planning. The main factors they consider in doing so are the curricula, age of students, individual peculiarities, prior knowledge and interest of students. Most frequently, in teaching, teachers consider the principle of student activity and the principle of clarity. At the same time, they attribute the most value to those two principles and the principle of structuredness and systematicity. Teachers use didactic principles spontaneously and do not write them into learning preparations. They do not have greater troubles with their use, but have the most trouble with the use of the didactic principle of rationality and economy. We found that the change of use of didactic principles during several years of teaching is mostly affected by experiences, evaluation of one’s own work and cooperation among teachers