Ritual-enabling opportunities-to-learn in mathematics classrooms Talli Nachlieli 1 & Michal Tabach 2 # Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract Ritual teaching, which provides students with ritual opportunities to learn, is common worldwide, notwithstanding extensive research calls for more reform-oriented teaching. Such resilience to change suggests that there are gains for ritual teaching. Therefore, in this study, we search for possible goals of ritual teaching. For this purpose, we suggest two notions: ritual- enabling and exploration-requiring opportunities to learn and seeking possible goals that could be achieved by ritual-enabling opportunities to learn. We adopted the commognitive frame- work and developed a methodological tool for analyzing lessons using the ritual-exploration lens. We analyzed 11 videos and transcripts of eighth-grade mathematics lessons from the 1999 TIMSS study. Our findings suggest that ritual teaching is essential both for object-level and meta-level learning as it serves as a basis for explorations, and for helping students in their initial steps of entering a new discourse. Keywords Ritual teaching . Opportunities to learn . Ritual-enabling . Exploration-requiring 1 Introduction Despite vast research calls for more reform-oriented teaching, traditional teaching is still common worldwide. The traditional approach views teaching through a lens of knowledge transmission and therefore is often referred to as Bteaching by telling^ (Brown, 2003) or Bpedagogy of control^ (Draper, 2002). In those classes, classroom discourse is tightly con- trolled by the teacher and often follows an IRE pattern (Cazden, 2001). There is an emphasis on formalized mathematics: mathematical knowledge is viewed as discrete, hierarchical, Educational Studies in Mathematics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-018-9848-x * Michal Tabach Tabach.Femily@gmail.com Talli Nachlieli talli.nachlieli@gmail.com 1 Levinsky College, Tel Aviv, Israel 2 School of Education, Tel Aviv University, 30 Haim Levanon St., 6997801 Ramat Aviv, Israel