What are "Best practices"?

1. Limit straight lecture time to 20 minutes (the attention span of most audiences, according to research).
2. Allow students time to engage the concept, grapple with it and explain their understanding of it to others (research shows this improves comprehension and retention).
3. Break up your lectures with activities that require students to look for connections, evaluate arguments, make use of the information they are learning.
4. Require students to do more than just remember what you have taught.
5. Use the SRS as an assessment technique: use student response sessions to identify course concepts the class needs help mastering.  
6. Teach by questioning; avoid teaching by preaching.
7. Use questions as a "teaching tool," not just as an assessment.
8. Concentrate your lectures around the fundamental concepts of your discipline. After a 20 minute lecture, give students a concept test. These short conceptual questions generally require qualitative rather than quantitative answers.
9. Have students turn to their neighbors in class and discuss the logic of their responses to questions.
10. Align your teaching methods with the learning outcomes you want to achieve.
11. Require students to master a concept.
12. Instructors sometimes ask students to memorize models. Instead, require students to predict outcomes based on a conceptual model.
13. Give students the results of an event and ask them to decide what the model says would have caused this outcome.  
14. Ask students how they would change the model to make the outcome now fit the conceptual model.
15. Have students engage in thinking done by specialists in your field.