Resolved?

I'm a New Year's grinch.  I don't understand why we celebrate this non-event.  I mean, I get that there has to be a day when the year switches number, but it is so arbitrary that we changed it from April to January (making those who celebrated it on the old date April fools).  Other holidays celebrate something of religious significance, honor some aspect of culture, or commemorate an important event.

When I point out that we are celebrating nothing, it bothers some people.  One friend, who took particular offense, reminded me that it is the only holiday celebrated by everyone in the world.  That doesn't help me.  It just makes me question why we have collectively decided to celebrate nothing.  So, yeah, I'll be going to bed at a normal time and wake up to 2020 anyway.

Perhaps the part of this holiday I find most ridiculous is the practice of making resolutions.  I have a co-worker who regularly works out at a gym.  He hates going there in January because it is packed with all of the people who have resolved to work out, but he says that he knows it will be normal again in three weeks, so he just has to time his visits well until MLK weekend.  Every television morning show does a segment on how to keep your resolutions while acknowledging that you will make it to Valentine's Day at best.  Resolutions are lies we voluntarily tell ourselves, knowing they are lies when we tell them.



Why don't we keep resolutions?
- First, it is because we know we won't follow through when we make them.  We know, in spite of touting the nonsensical phrase, "New Year - New You," that we will congratulate ourselves for even kinda sorta keeping them for a few weeks.  We don't actually RESOLVE; we just make a list.
- Second, overcoming a habit or forming one is difficult and requires a the energy of a powerful motive, which a non-holiday is not.  You are not a different person on January 1st than you were on December 31st.  You know this during the rest of the year.  No one says, "Once July 13th gets here, I'll be different."  The fact that the number on the year part of the calendar changes doesn't inspire change.

If you identify something that needs changing and tell yourself that you will make that your New Year's resolution, you don't actually want to change.  If you identify something in your life that needs changing, that is the time to change it.  That's when there will be motivation and energy to do something.  That's when you might have RESOLVE.

Love Your Colleagues. Love Your Job.

I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but I love my job.  I love it.  I see people post online on Sunday nights about how much they are dreading Monday, and I just think, "Wow, you people are in the wrong job." 

You might be thinking that I probably have a really easy job.  Not true.  I teach middle school and high school. I teach science and yearbook, both of which are quite time-consuming.  I am at work for an average of 55 hours a week, but it can be as high as 75 when I'm near a yearbook deadline.  (Fortunately, I am single, so I don't have to deal with the emotional toll of a work/homelife balance.) 

I learned something in my early twenties when I was working as a janitor in an arena.  Your love for a job has less to do with your task than it does with your co-workers.  I really liked that minimum wage job, and it wasn't because I lived for vacuuming (except for the super-satisfying sound popcorn makes in the roller) or that I enjoyed scrubbing urinals.  In fact, that latter task taught me how to do something else in my mind while working.  It was because I loved my boss, Tracy Jackson.  He assigned me tasks with an end result in mind, but he trusted me to figure out the best way to accomplish it.  I know it doesn't seem like a job that involves a lot of creativity, but I enjoyed figuring out more efficient ways to do things, and my favorite memory involved chasing a mouse, trying to trap him in a corner in a room with curved walls.  We finally caught him we ran into a bathroom stall.  At the end of each shift, Tracy thanked me for my work.  It was never explicitly said, but he had a way of making me feel like I was doing something important by keeping the arena a pleasant place to be.  I liked him so much that when I was in need of a job a year later, I went back to him to work at the housekeeping office.  I've had jobs I liked more than others because of the work, but I've always found something to like in the people with and for whom I worked.  Except once.

The only job I've ever hated was, in fact, a teaching job.  The work I did there was the same as what I had done in the place I had loved working at before, so it wasn't the work I hated.  It was the culture.  The atmosphere of that school district was not one of encouragement and trust.  When test scores were lost, the assumption was that the teacher had not sent them in spite of the fact that the central office lost everyone's scores at least once.  Some of the administrators in that school believed what students said over what teachers said, and my mentor teacher (who had been teaching the same amount of time I had) insisted on multiple videotaped observations.  There was nothing in that school that implied trust in a teacher's professional judgment.  When I left, no one cared.  I had replaced someone, and someone would replace me. 

The job I have now is one I intend to keep until I die.  Seriously, I plan to die at my desk.  Don't get me wrong, there are hard days.  There are long weeks.  I've even had what I would describe as a difficult year.  I look forward to snow days and long weekends as much as any other teacher who needs rest.  Yet, I love my job. 

The work is hard but satisfying.  Most of the students I work with are hard-working and kind.  They learn enthusiastically and appreciate teachers who try hard for them.  The administration believes that if they have hired the right people, they don't need to micromanage them.  They encourage us to take academic risks and help us clean up the ones that don't pay off.  They want students to have experiences that enrich their academic and spiritual lives. 

My colleagues at GRACE are amazing, and there have always been some that I feel especially close to.  I've written about Blue Pod before, so you know how close I feel to them.  Some of my past favorite friends have left for different paths God had for them.  Jessica, who started our theater program and doubled our number of AP classes (at the time, we only had one) now lives in Colorado, but we still keep up with each other's lives and ministries through facebook.  Cheryl, who I wrote about in the post called the Teacher Next Door, left us to become a dean at ECPI, but her impact on our math department still continues.  Tomorrow, I will spend the day with the English teacher who left just last year, the one I wrote about in a post called My Co-Conspirator.  My friend next door recently told an open house group that he had worked here for 13 years, and I had to remind him that he had been here 17, so I guess he loves working here enough that the time seemed shorter.  And, of course, new friends have joined us that we love so much.  I laugh with my colleagues almost every day, and we've cried together on many others.  We pray together several times a week.  We give each other advice, and no one is protective of their ego over the school's good.  We just do life together at a deep level.

If you are one of the poor people who spend Sunday night tweeting about how much they dread Monday morning, my advice is that you either find a new job or find a friend you can like at the one you have.

   

Final Reflection from Learning and the Brain - Putting it All Together with John T. Almarode

There were more sessions than those I have developed in these posts, but some were so involved, you would need to have heard the entire speech because notes (even ones that have been reflected on) wouldn't have done them justice.  If you are interested in the development of the adolescent brain, you should definitely read Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's book Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, but her talks were too intricate to be explored on this blog.  The same goes for two incredible keynote speeches by Dr. John Gabrieli and Dr. David Rose.  Linda Darling-Hammond presented three day worth of information in just over an hour.  Sorting through their speeches here would not give a good representation of their speeches.  

This is the last of the posts on the Learning and the Brain conference, which is fitting because this was the final keynote speech during the actual conference.  And, if your brain is tired from three days of learning, you want the final presenter to be John T. Almarode.  He's delightful, charming, thoughtful, and practical.  

One of the first things he said was one of the most important things that got said at the conference.  There is no one technique that is universally effective all of the time.  It must be adapted to the local context and timing of your students in your classroom and it must generate evidence of its effectiveness.  The reason education is so fad-driven is that everyone is looking for the magic bullet.  It's hard to realize that there isn't one. 

We Remember What We Encode

There are two types of encoding, rote and elaborate.  Rote encoding involves just knowledge.  Elaborate encoding explains why something is true, allows students to find patterns and relationships, involves emotional engagement, and includes multiple ways of representing the learning.

When people hear this, they want that silver bullet to be elaborate encoding and decide that all rote encoding is old-school garbage.  Life is more interesting than that.  Elaborate encoding should be first, but it can be strengthened by using rote encoding for retrieval practice.   

We Remember What We Retrieve

I did a whole post on spaced retrieval practice, so I won't go into it here.  The interesting part of this session was when he asked us what we thought this image had to do with retrieval practice.  There were so many interesting ideas, including:

• The brain has a capacity, so you can't keep adding to it.
• If you guzzle the entire glass, it won't do much for your body's hydration.  You need to drink it in sips.  Retrieval practice can't be over every single thing you learned all at once.  It must be done in smaller doses.
• A good waiter doesn't refill a glass every time you take a sip from it.  They also don't wait for the glass to get totally empty.  They refill it just before it is empty.  The time for retrieval practice is just before students are about to forget.

When you ask smart people to tell you their thoughts in a free-form way, you may get answers you didn't expect but that reflects excellent thinking.  This reminded me of a story Kevin Washburn tells about a math teacher who put radishes on her students' desks.  She didn't know how it related, so she asked them what they thought.  They gave answers that she didn't expect, but it made their thinking visible.

Some ways to make thinking visible:

• Ask students to observe and describe
• Have them construct examples
• Insist that they give a reason why an answer is right or wrong.
• Ask them to write how things connect to authentic situations.

Learning Takes Time

Interleaving and distributed practice is more difficult for the brain, but that is what makes the learning more permanent.

Teach students that learning takes time and is often uncomfortable.  It's what we call desirable difficulty.  It's desirable because it works.  The struggle is not only real; it is valuable.  Telling students why it is helpful makes it even more helpful.

Give and Receive Feedback

As John Almarode said in both his previous session and his keynote address, "None of this works without feedback."  None of what we learned at the conference means anything without giving feedback to the students and receiving feedback from them.  This is why relationships and classroom climate matter.  

We live our lives with feedback from others, whether they intend it or not.  If someone slips and falls, after you help them up,  you make sure not to walk in the place they just walked.  How can we expect students to operate without feedback in our classes?

For a long time, feedback has been used to say "I gotcha."  In a loving classroom, it should be used to say, "I've got you."  In order to make it supportive, we should ask the following questions.

Reflections on The Science of Memory - Spaced Practice

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

I started reading about this over the summer in the book Powerful Teaching by Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain.  While I don't recommend reading the book from beginning to end (the writing is distracting because they make jokes that don't work in text and over-use exclamation points at an alarming rate), I totally recommend going to the end of each section and using the techniques.  It is based on the current research into remembering and forgetting and advocates for a concept known as Retrieval Practice.  This concept came up in at least four different sessions at the Learning and the Brain conference because it is powerful.  To be most effective, it should be

• Spaced
• At a level of desirable difficulty
• Mixed (interleaved)

Spaced - We all know that cramming is a bad idea if we want long term learning.  It may help you perform well on the quiz you have 10 minutes from now, but it will not help anything go into long term memory.  Adults, you know this.  The all-nighter may have helped you pass the test the next day (although you kind of cancel it out from the lack of effect that sleep has on memory development), but you probably don't still know the stuff you studied that night.

Spaced retrieval is the most effective way to study, and increasing the spacing each time is necessary.  If you teach something on a Monday, ask a few questions on Tuesday.  Your students will probably remember it well, but that is misleading.  It hasn't been long enough for spaced retrieval practice to be helpful.  Wait until Thursday before asking again.  The weird key is that you want them to have ALMOST forgotten it but not quite.  Only you can use your professional judgment to figure out the exact spacing that works for your class.  If they answer really quickly, you haven't waited long enough.  If they have to go look it up, you have probably waited a day too long.

The diagram below is a powerful illustration of how much you retain with each spaced review. 

 

As you can see, the forgetting curve gets shallower with each revisiting of the material.  A line connecting the dots of each revisit becomes a remembering curve.

Desirable Difficulty - As teachers, we often want to make things easier for our students.  Their parents certainly want us to do that.  The problem is that our brains don't remember things that are easy to learn.  When you have to search around for the answer, you tell the brain that remembering this is worth the effort you are putting into it.

Again, this is a matter of professional judgment and experience.  We always know when we have made something too hard.  It's not from student complaints; in fact, if you never get complaints about your level of difficulty, it is probably a sign that you have made things too easy.  We know it is too hard when a student cannot proceed at all, not even with a little prompting.  It's harder to diagnose too easy, but the guiding principle is this.  There should be some need to think, some little bit of searching to remember.  

Interleaved - I used to do this wrong.  I taught velocity on Monday and gave velocity problems for homework.  I taught acceleration problems on Tuesday and gave acceleration problems for homework.  Then my school instituted a policy that we would only have homework in a class for a maximum of three nights each week (exceptions for math and AP classes).  I already couldn't give homework on Wednesdays (Christian school), so I had to figure out a way to consolidate some assignments.  (It sounds like I give a ton of homework, but I promise I don't.  Some things that require it (like math practice) just end up near each other in the same week.)

To deal with this issue, I started consolidating homework assignments.  I began teaching two or three concepts and then giving a homework assignment with mixed practice on all three.  What I had stumbled upon was a better understanding of how to choose the right equation to solve the problem.  When I first read an article about interleaving, I realized that I had accidentally done was a research-proven method.

After reading this, I started teaching it to students as a study method.  Shuffle your flashcards between each round.  Better yet, flip it around and put it back at a random spot in the deck.  Based on the suggestion of the book Powerful Teaching, I have a basket of questions in my room that I add to with each chapter.  When we have those five minutes of time you sometimes get at the end of a class, I pull them out and start randomly asking them.  Sometimes, we play it family feud style with a bell.  The spacing is a little random, and the method of pulling them from a basket automatically mixes them.  Sometimes at the beginning of class, I'll ask students to take out paper and write down five things they remember from the day before or the week before.

We are all pressed for time, but we usually have a few minutes here or a bellwork there that we can use for retrieval practice.  Since we know it has powerful effects, we should take advantage of that time.

Reflections on the Science of Memory - Dual Coding

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. We are nearing the end of these.  I have two more after this one.

In the last post, I poked at education's sacred cow of learning styles.  Even when presented with evidence, there are many teachers who still hold on.  I think it is because they have found that teaching in multiple styles is helpful.  That part is true.  Teaching in multiple ways creates a rich environment for the coding of information in the brain.  This is called the science of Multiple Modalities.  It's not just a semantic difference.  Teaching in multiple modalities frees you from thinking that you must address three different learning styles for every single thing you teach (which I found overwhelming for the first decade of my career).  Pairing visuals and words is good for everyone.  You don't have a "visual" student learning from the pictures and "verbal" student learning from the words.  Also, text words on a page are processed by the same part of your brain as spoken words, so it isn't about the path of input.  Having kids play with content specific manipulatives helps all of your students when paired appropriately with content.  It's not just for a mythical "tactile" student.

While this is initially upsetting to teachers, it should ultimately be freeing.  Incorporate multiple sensory inputs where you can, and relax about not being able to include the others.   The reason teaching in multiple modalities works is because of something called Dual Coding.
The idea here is that when words are combined with visuals, we have two pathways into the brain being processed for meaning by two parts of the brain and then being integrated and connected.  Your brain can assign meaning in a richer way.
The processing of words happens sequentially as you must hear or read one word at a time.  When looking at an image, your brain takes in a lot of information at once.  Combining them has a powerful effect on the brain as it processes them separately and puts them together.

There is more than one way to accomplish this.  As an input tool, it involves simply including images while you are talking.  Most of us do that already, but it could be done better by carefully choosing the images you use.  The image should not just be related, but one which assigns meaning to the concept or definition.

The second use of this is having students draw pictures to go with the words or concepts they are using.  Using these six steps could result in better learning of vocabulary.

1. Show or say the word.  Ask students if they have ever heard it before or any word that sounds like it (Words with similar roots often have similar meanings, so if they know a similar word, it could be a good connection.
2. Show or tell the definition - The brain reacts to spoken and visual words the same way, so it does not count as dual coding to read the words while projecting them.  They are both being processed in the verbal center of the brain.
3. Ask the students to use the word in a sentence they create.  
4. Ask students to draw a picture that represents the definition or concept.  It's important that the drawing be simple, so artistry is not an advantage.
5. Explain the picture to a neighbor. (This involves retrieval and the social aspect of learning which will be addressed in another post.)
6. Label the picture with words from the definition.

If your students are including these in their notes, the words and pictures (including the labels) should be as close to the image as possible.  

This is a great way to make thinking visible as well as making the knowledge sticky.  I'd start by doing this in class the first time you try it because you will be available to answer questions and make your expectations clear.  After that, this seems like a great homework assignment for the vocab list at the beginning of each new chapter.

Reflections the Science of Memory - What is Thinking?

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

I am going to say something that will make many teachers angry.  Learning styles are a myth.  They are a kind, well-intentioned, and humane myth.  I know you can tell me about a kid in your class who suddenly started doing better when you . . . In science, we call that anecdotal evidence, and I teach my 8th graders that it is poor science.  I can give you evidence of people who died after drinking water, but it doesn't mean water kills people.  Science is based on research, not an isolated story.  MRI scans show that there is nothing different in the brain of someone who is a "visual learner" and someone who is an "auditory learner."  It is a preference in the same way favorite colors are preferences.  The reason you can point to classroom practice and say it works is because the brains of all students respond to teaching in a richer learning environment that includes multiple modalities.  It's called dual coding, and there will be a separate post about it.

This post is to explain the cycle of thinking and learning.  Let's start with a few terms.

• Sensory memory - What happens as you take in data from any of your senses.  It lasts microseconds while you decide what to attend to.
• Working memory - What happens in your brain while you are learning something.  When you rehearse a phone number over and over so you can remember it when you get to the phone, you are holding things in working memory.  It can hold an average of 4 items at one time. 
• Cognitive load - When the working memory reaches the maximum it can hold.  
• Retrieval - This is the intentional process of remembering.  When you have to think about a question in order to answer it, you are engaging in retrieval.
• Long term memory - These are the things you can still remember a week, a year, a decade after learning them.  When someone says, "Who you gonna call," and you respond with, "Ghostbusters," it's because it is in your long-term memory.

This cycle happens every time you learn something.  

• First, you take in thousands of pieces of information through your senses.  
• You choose one to pay attention to.  You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.  Multi-tasking is just rapid switching between single tasks. Something is always lost in the switch. 
• What you pay attention to goes into your working memory, where you make meaning of the relationships between the items.  You rehearse the information by writing it down or repeating it to yourself.  As you do, it makes its way to your long term memory.  If you relate it to things you already know, your brain makes connections to those neurons, creating richer meaning and increasing the likelihood that it will stay in your long term memory.
• Occasionally, you retrieve information to tell someone else about it or write it on a test or use it in some meaningful way.  The act of retrieval thickens the myelin on the neuron, which causes it to work faster.

The bad news is that you 

• Have limited working memory.
• Only remember things you work hard at.

The good news is that

• Pictures have power
• Spaced interleaved retrieval practice is the way to work hard.
• While you cannot increase your working memory capacity, you can trick it through chunking.

Let's talk about chunking for a minute.  Much of what you teach is related in a way that can be categorized.  Asking kids to do that will make their brains think of each category as an item.  

Since this post is getting a bit long, I'll do separate posts on dual coding and spaced and interleaved retrieval practice.

Reflections on Strategies for Unforgettable Learning with Marcia Tate

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

Marcia Tate is a woman of boundless energy and humor.  If you ever have the chance to see her, you should.  She used 10 of these twenty techniques during her 1-hour presentation.  She talks about the following twenty strategies, which have been shown to help your dendrites grow spines and reach out toward each other. 

1. Writing - The brain remembers what it writes, but it doesn't mean you should ask your students to take copious notes, especially WHILE listening to your lecture.  Some note-taking is needed, but it is more valuable as retrieval practice.  Periodically, ask students to write what they know.
2. Storytelling - The brain remembers stories, especially ones that contain emotion.  If you can make your content into characters, you will keep kids' attention and make them want to know what happens.  This works especially well in English and History, where you have characters kind of preset for you, but it would also work through metaphor in math and science.  (The elements in a reaction are dating and then break up and start dating other elements, tons of drama.)  While typing this, I remembered this TED Talk, in which a science teacher encourages us to focus less on perfect accuracy (especially in middle school) and use story to draw kids in.  Once they are in, you can make the adjustments for detailed accuracy and teach them the jargon.
3. Mnemonic devices and hooks - Did you take music lessons?  You probably still remember what "Every Good Boy Does Fine" means.  You may not remember how to apply PEMDAS from your math class, but you likely remember what it means.  Did you learn the colors of the spectrum by calling it ROY G BIV? (Setting aside that Indigo is not actually part of the spectrum, it's a great tool.)  Giving these to kids works great, but having them come up with them is far more powerful.
4. Visuals - Dual coding was addressed in an earlier post, but we all know that visuals help.  It's just common sense.
5. Movement - The human body was designed to move.  One of the things I appreciated most about Marcia Tate and John T. Almarode was that they practiced this advice.  I don't think I was in the same part of the room for longer than ten minutes.
6. Roleplaying - When I teach ionic bonding.  I have a students come up and put on a t-shirt that has 8 pieces of velcro.  I assign them to be sodium or chlorine.  Then, I ask students how many valence electrons each has velcro that number of flowers (the cheapest thing I could use because you buy a stem at dollar tree with 6-8 blooms on it) to the shirt.  They can then see that chlorine has a velcro spot open that sodium can give to it.  In college, I remember a biology professor making each of us the part of the cell that copies and divides during mitosis.  Then, we looked like square dancers as we underwent cell division.  I can't call it perfectly to mind right now, but if I had to learn it, it would take less time for me to re-learn it.
7. Visualization - This is not the same as using visuals.  This is asking students to paint a mental picture.  Our imaginations are incredibly powerful.  
8. Metaphor, analogy, simile - These can be used as part of storytelling or not, but I have found that it to be a very powerful tool.  Sometimes, it is too powerful because they remember the analogy better than the actual concept.  When I ask kids to explain dissolving on a test and get answers that start with "It's like when a couple goes to a party," I know that I have done a good job telling the story, but a poor job connecting it to the material.  When done well, however, this is a great tool.
9. Reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning - The efficacy of cooperative learning is lower than most teachers think (although I do believe collaboration is a skill they will need in the future - It's not always just about the material).  Explaining something to someone else, however, works very well.  Why?  Because it is retrieval practice.  
10. Music - Elementary school teachers have a song or chant for just about everything.  If you wonder how powerful music is for memory, think about how many times you still hum the alphabet song when you need to alphabetize things.  Content related music helps memory so much that I sometimes have the quadratic formula song pop into my head while I'm watching TV.  You can write your own songs, but there is also a plethora of content-related music on youtube.  
11. Graphic Organizers - Used alone and disconnected, they do not work.  Taught in the context of chunking information, they can be great.
12. Drawing - Drawing causes brains to engage in analogy and visualization.  An elaborate drawing can be used for the mind to engage in storytelling.  It can be powerful for dual coding as well.
13. Humor - Barbara Oakley's talk on focused and diffuse modes of the brain.  One of the ways to allow the switch is to give the hippocampus a rest.  Telling a joke or taking a moment to laugh in your class allows the brain to go from focused attention to diffuse attention for a bit.  It's not a distraction.  It's a powerful tool.
14. Discussion - One student’s idea triggers another student’s idea.  As these thoughts travel through the brain, it constructs relationships between each idea, creating a third, richer idea. 
15. Games - Like humor, it lets the brain go into diffuse mode.
16. Project-based or Problem-based Learning - Challenging the brain to solve problems causes activation in multiple parts of the brain.  Solving it releases dopamine, which is helpful in memory formation.
17. Field Trips - These usually involve storytelling, and they for sure give the brain things to visualize later.
18. Manipulatives - There’s a strong connection between the hands and the brain.  Some people can't talk without using their hands.  This is especially useful when something consists of related parts, like anatomy and math. 
19. Technology - Appropriately timed and applied, technology can give visuals, role-playing, and storytelling.  It can allow creation and discussion.
20. Work-study - Apprenticeships and internships cause real work for real audiences.  The stakes make the brain strengthen the dendrite connections.