Cliffhangers - leave your students wanting more. At the end of a lesson or class period, consider leaving your students with a question for tomorrow on the topic at hand. Or carry over an exciting concept or idea until the next day. Discussion - generate discussion about ideas and concepts, encouraging students to work together to talk through ideas. You can have them list their ideas on poster board and share them with the class, or you can collect ideas on the white board as you go along. Some topics work very well with entire class discussion. Be sure to get everyone talking and involved. Group Work - have students work in small groups to solve problems, discuss literature, practice skills, and even teach one another. Different roles can be assigned to individuals in the group to ensure that everyone participates. Warm-Ups and Pre-Thinking - One way to do this is pair the idea with Cliffhangers where you may assign a question to be considered overnight to start the lesson the next day. Pre-thinking gets your students ready to delve more deeply into a concept by thinking about generalities or one small part of a lesson. For instance, consider having students speculate on the subject of a book based upon its title. Warm-Ups can be any activity that gets the class motivated and focused on that day's learning. They might pique interest, relieve tension, get things moving, encourage laughter, etc. Role Playing - This technique can get students involved, thinking, and moving, holding their interest and sparking their creativity. Make sure that everyone gets an opportunity to play. You can make role-playing spontaneous and allow students to design their own roles, or you can shape and direct role-playing with scripts or general information about roles. Providing general information can help students who are less comfortable with this technique. How you choose to use it depends on several factors, including the concept being delivered, and your comfort level with the unexpected. Draw Complex Ideas - This technique allows students to use both sides of their brains and it's not about being the best artist. Rather, the idea is that students can express their understanding of an idea through pictures and then explain it to others. This strategy can bring out surprising ideas from students. It can be applied to even the most abstract concepts. The key is for the students to use their critical thinking skills to represent information in new ways. For example, suppose you are teaching about the concept of "Main Idea" in reading. Have students represent the concept graphically. Or perhaps you are teaching about mean, median and mode in math. Have your students represent these concepts by drawing and then explaining their drawings to their classmates. Visual Maps - Visual maps combine words with pictures and symbols. If you are studying a complex topic in science, math, history, or literature, have students work individually or in groups to connect the various ideas and concepts visually. Using descriptive words, passages, symbols, and pictures, students can illustrate processes and the interactions of the various components. Multiple Presentation Methods - Vary your teaching by using more than one strategy or method in a session. You might use the overhead for part of the lesson, computers for another part, an audiotape for part, and the board for another. When you are presenting information, consider different ways for that information to be conveyed.