Methodology

In this book, we use the term intervention in the sense of Stylianides and Stylianides ( 2013 , 2017 ), who use it for any action taken to improve a situation in relation to the teaching and learning of mathematics at all levels of education, in our case, teacher education. Our intervention fulfils the basic requirements they place on education research that has good potential to support improvements in the classroom, including teacher education ( Stylianides & Stylianides, 2017 ). First, the intervention is conducted in teacher education courses that are part of the university curriculum and in close cooperation between researchers and mathematics education course leaders, “thus increasing the likelihood that the results of the research will be directly applicable (instead of merely potentially relevant) to practice” (p. 334). Second, our intervention directly addresses problems of pre-service teachers’ learning (namely, learning to design lessons) and how this learning can be better supported by teaching. Third, our intervention “seeks to develop empirically tested and theory-based solutions” and “also to explain how/why things ‘worked’” (p. 334).