The “Step by Step” educational program is an open didactic system that offers quality and comprehensive education for preschool and younger school-age children based on constructivist pedagogy and a respectful approach to the child. The programme is part of an international educational network and its ideas are applied in more than 30 countries around the world. One of the basic principles is common education for all. “Step by Step“ promotes diversity in schools and sees it as an integral and valuable part of society. It respects the needs of all children, regardless of their social or ethnic background and current ability level. It tries to build mutual trust, respect and cooperation.

          The philosophy of “Step by Step” is based on the premise that each child is a unique individual with a rich inner developmental potential that must be supported by learning approaches that best suit the child, that develop the child as a whole person, and that motivate the child to continue learning naturally. The emphasis is on integrated learning (learning in thematic units) and cooperative learning (working in activity centres, project-based learning). The emotional aspect of the learning process is also taken into account, where it is assumed that the child learns new things better if the learning is also linked to an emotional experience. Thus, one of the priorities in the learning process is to create a supportive and stimulating environment where the child can move in a fearless and natural way, learn through his/her own practical activities, try new things, discover and test their validity and functionality without fear of making mistakes.

          In the Czech Republic, the Step by Step programme is implemented under the name “Start Together”. Currently, 70 primary schools are teaching under it. The aim of our two-year research project was to evaluate the impact of “Start Together” on pupils.

The research question was set as follows:

What abilities, skills, knowledge or mental processes (necessary, applicable in life) in children are strengthened and developed by the constructivist approach to teaching in the Start Together programme?

          On the basis of research of foreign and Czech texts, interviews with "Start Together" programme methodologists and our own observations of teaching in Czech schools focused on inclusion (Šíp et al., 2022), we came to several important areas of research. We have proposed a research design consisting of three distinct parts, which, however, intersect in the final interpretation and help to answer the research question in a more plastic way. These are an analysis of the National Survey of Pupil Achievement, quantitative research conducted in Start Together classrooms, and qualitative research conducted in these classrooms. These three parts are described in more detail in the Methodology section.

ANALYSIS OF THE NATIONAL PUPIL ACHIEVEMENT SURVEY In May 2022, the Czech School Inspectorate organised a national comparative testing of 5th grade pupils in all schools in the Czech Republic. The project presented here involved a comparative statistical analysis of the academic achievement in mathematics and Czech language of 5th grade pupils educated in the "Start Together" programme and outside it. Learning achievement is traditionally conceived as the solution of typical tasks in the subject under study (mathematics, Czech language) or the level of skill (e.g. reading comprehension). However, the nature of these tasks is such that they do not, by design, take into account any group aspects, which are key in the “Start Together” programme. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH CONDUCTED IN START TOGETHER CLASSROOMS In this part, the so-called softskills, which contribute mainly to the way knowledge and skills are formed and the way they are used in the long term, in which pupils are developed and supported in the Start Together programme, were investigated. Data collection was carried out in 24 classes (500 pupils) of 4th and 5th grades. Children's self-concept was measured with the Piers-Harris 2 questionnaire. In addition, pupils' creative abilities were measured. The My Class Inventory questionnaire in its Czech version created by J. Lašek was chosen to measure the social climate of the classroom. Due to time constraints, we asked only about the current situation. We chose 2 instruments to measure emotional competences. The first one is the Emotion Recognition subtest of the IDS tool (Grob & Hagmann-von Arx, 2018). The second instrument selected for the emotional competence survey is the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire, TEIQue-SF (Mavroveli, Petrides, Shove, & Whitehead, 2008). It is a trait emotional intelligence questionnaire, for which there is a Slovak version, and in the pilot phase we created a Czech version of the questionnaire and tested its comprehensibility for students. The next concept to be investigated was motivation. Since there is no standardized questionnaire for this age group in the Czech Republic, we created and validated our own instrument based on Self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). QUALITATIVE PART - ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH The aim of this part of the research was to understand the structure of the "Start Together" programme teaching, identifying recurrent patterns of behaviour, rules of operation, modes of communication, typical didactic resources and ways of working with the environment, based on an analysis of real classroom events.

A comparative statistical analysis of academic performance in mathematics and Czech language showed that pupils in “Start Together” classes did not have lower academic performance. This is important because there is still a prejudice in the general public in the Czech Republic that children from alternative schools have lower knowledge. In our quantitative research we detected significant positive values related to children's intrinsic motivation, their creative abilities and the classroom climate in the “Start Together” programme. The results regarding emotional abilities appeared problematic. This is generally explained by the methodological complexity of measuring emotional skills. It is generally assumed that there is a core set of so-called primary emotions that are mentally, behaviorally, or neuronally encoded. Therefore, most research designs attempt to detect emotions using presumed mental, behavioral, or neural coding. Nonetheless, research presented by Barrett (2006; 2017) shows that the recognition of these emotions is socially conditioned much more than scientists have assumed. Therefore, it is necessary to perceive the emotional setting of education as closely related to its social dimension. For this, however, the proper research method miss. Our combination of research methods focused on the broader field of "soft skills" seeks to fill this methodological gap. In the qualitative part of the research, we combined two basic analytical methods - framework analysis and the construction of themes that emerged from the analyzed data. The framework analysis served to inform us about the expected themes; the construction of emerging themes allowed us to grasp those themes that were not anticipated. Comparing the results of the two analyses led to the final identification of the most important themes. These themes are: the community nature of teaching, the emphasis on reflection and self-reflection, modes of communication, differentiation of teaching, thinking in context, building a community of “Start Together” teachers.

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