teacher profession; educational research; educational policy; language skills; language literacy; quality of working life, job satisfaction

The publication was prepared by representatives of three universities ? from Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The first chapter deals with the review of educational research focused on the teachers. Bronislava Kasáčová focuses on main and large parts of researches during the 20th century and start of 21th century, search causes, tendencies, international and interdisciplinary contexts. Paper is structured according to general historical periods, and it accents the main topics of researched targets of contemporary contexts. In the second chapter Anna Szafrańska focuses on the issues of educational policy and sociocultural determinants of teachers? functioning in Poland. In the third chapter Simoneta Babiaková focuses on the first grade grammar school teachers, who have to consider individual differences in the language skills and literacy of their scholars during the teaching process. They should approach the teaching of elementary reading and writing differentially and in accordance with the concept of cognitive-communicative learning. In the fourth chapter Alena Seberová endeavour to explore the teaching profession in two perspectives in the first and second chapters. At first, professional specifics of teaching are discussed from the academic point of view in the context of critical analyses and in comparison with the dimensions of Fred Korthagen?s model of teacher professionalism. The second perspective then deals with pedagogical reality through quality of working life, namely job satisfaction, which is one of the fundamental characteristics of subjectively experiencing the profession performance by teachers themselves.