Learning to teach is a complex matter, and many different models of pre-service teacher education have been used to support novice teachers' preparation for the classroom. More recently there have been calls for a focus on core high-leverage teaching practices and for novice teachers to engage in representations, decompositions, and approximations of practice. This study focuses on novice teachers' learning about core high-leverage teaching practices through engaging in a problem-solving approach to explore the learning and teaching of mathematics. Findings indicate experiencing this approach is an important first step towards novice teachers' learning about practices congruent with an ambitious teaching agenda such as justifying mathematical reasoning, emphasising conceptual understanding, and catering for all learners. Novice teachers also began to envisage how such ambitious mathematics pedagogies could be enacted in their future practice.