What age/grade/level of people are you teaching?

Go for observational teaching. I learned in my college course for Ed. Psych that most of your students (no matter what age/level you are teaching) will learn more from an observational teaching method. Observational teaching with a hands-on approach allows for many different apporaches that you can take with an experimental approach as well. A ‘new’ teaching method that most teachers are shy to take on is one that was tried in a Salt Lake City school system where the teacher was the main ‘instructor’ but the parents of the students would take turns also instructing the class as a whole. Each parent would contribute a certain amount of hours per week corrisponding teacher instruction. I found that method the most interesting, yet none of my teachers whether it be elementary, middle, high school or college have ever attempted it. The students had an 80% success rate in subjective tests and worksheets through this particular teaching method. That’s all I can think of to help!

I think B. F. Skinner’s programmed education is tragically neglected. I used it to study algebra in college 40 years ago and it was great, but the educational system decided it was only good for remedial classes. Another thing I liked was the audio-lingual system for teaching Spanish. The teacher actually stood up in front of the class and drilled us and there was almost no grammar. We also practiced with tapes. I was the only one who actually went and I was always the best one in the class. We also had the same method in high school, but I hated high school with a passion and I was totally unmotivated. I wanted to take the GED and just get out of there, but at the time you had to be at least 19 years old to do that in Virginia. That is no longer the case. Recently I briefly attended a Spanish class and there were so many bells and whistles that it was chaos, switching between computers, CDs, tapes, two books, Argentine soap operas and worst of all grammar. Don’t even get me started on law school. That was just goofy.

I did have one piece of luck in high school. I suffered a detached retina playing dodge ball. That kept me from getting drafted. Now schools are banning dodge ball.

I would say do inquiry based learning. You could test if the students are actually learning the material as opposed to studnets who learn in traditional settings. This is a controversial issue for math educators.