Abstract:

Teachers are no longer the only adults in the Czech classrooms. The involvement of teaching assistants brought some challenges to all participants in education processes and new situations arose. This study seeks to understand how both groups (teachers and teaching assistants of 1st grade, primary schools) perceive their cooperation. The authors implemented a self-constructed questionnaire consisting of 23 questions as a research tool for both representative groups. The results revealed that empathy, reliability, and independence are the ways for effective communication and collaboration. Nevertheless, there is still some space for improvement since 15 % of both research groups reflected on cooperation as unsatisfactory. The presented research results are part of a larger research investigation, which focuses on a comprehensive analysis of the teacher-assistant relationship, in particular, on the identification of the basic patterns of their mutual communication and on the identification of competence structures and their creation within the implementation of the educational process.

Keywords:

Teaching assistant, cooperation, well-being, inclusion, Czech Republic.