Background of the study

In this chapter, in the first part, we provide detailed accounts of the context of mathematics teacher education in the five “MaTeK countries”, with a particular focus on how lesson planning and reasoning and proving (R&P) are implemented in teacher education in MaTeK institutions. In the second part, we focus on R&P in the intended curriculum in the five countries. In both sections, we only consider teacher education and curriculum related to the school grades in which the participants of the intervention acquired their teaching qualification, namely 6–13 in the Czech Republic and Italy, 5–10 in Norway, 5–13 in Slovakia, and 5–12 in Türkiye. This choice ensures that the description of teacher education and curriculum is directly aligned with the professional scope of the pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) involved in the study.