Research has shown that there are some specific instructional strategies that effective teachers can use in their classrooms that have a positive impact on student learning.  The Savannah-Chatham County Public School district supports the following 9 Instructional Strategies That Work:

1. identifying similarities and differences
2. summarizing and note-taking
3. reinforcing effort and providing recognition
4. homework and practice
5. nonlinguistic representations (to ask students to use mental images, diagrams, models, graphic organizers, etc. to represent the content that is being taught)
6. cooperative learning
7. setting objectives and providing feedback
8. generating and testing hypotheses
9. using questions, cues and advance organizers to help students focus on new content and what they need to learn. 

This is based on the work of Robert Marzano, What Works In Schools - Translating Research Into Action (2003).