Enabling teachers to enact core elements of mathematics in the classroom: a retrospective design-research analysis of interrelated course conceptions and their development phases

Mathematics education in secondary schools should not only provide content knowledge but also an understanding of the fundamental processes by which new mathematical knowledge is created – students should experience how mathematics 'works' as a discipline. Initiating this, however, has been shown to be a major challenge for teachers. We therefore undertook a developmental project to design courses that would better prepare pre-service teachers for this task. In this article, we conduct an analysis of the project from a design-research perspective, which provides as a result the theoretical output of the project in the form of an articulated design principle.