The seventh seminar of the Spring Semester of 2018-2019 will be given by Gülseren Karagöz-Akar, Serkan Özel and Esra Bukova-Güzel.
Education of prospective teachers is an ongoing challenge (Chapman, 2016; Grossman & McDonald, 2008). Although there has been considering effort in methods courses on the change of prospective teachers' practices, there is still need for focusing on significant change in prospective teachers' thinking about mathematics teaching and learning (Chapman, 2016). In this multi-case study with six out of twenty-six prospective secondary mathematics teachers, we investigated the change in prospective teachers awareness on important areas: focusing on students' reasoning, describing the mechanism of conceptual learning, and, derived from the characterization of these mechanisms, selecting tasks and designing instruction for fostering mathematics conceptual learning. Results point towards prospective teachers' developed insights into these areas. Implications for initial teacher education are the inclusion of quantitative reasoning, focusing on tasks differentiating empirical and logico-mathematical learning processes, fostering conceptual analysis and the use of clinical interviews during methods courses. With this study, we attempt at developing a framework for initial teacher education building on such processes.