http://www.edutopia.org/blog/5-highly-effective-teaching-practices-rebecca-alber

This article, from edutopia, has five incredibly helpful teaching strategies.  I loved the idea of formative assessment, which gives us an idea of what our students are grasping, what they are struggling with, and even evaluate how we teach based on what worked well and what did not.  Formative assessment allows adjustments to be made and everyone, students and teachers, to track progress instead of waiting until the end of a unit to test.

Also, feedback is another strategy that I found incredibly useful.  I think papers should be given feedback in a conference setting.  Too often English teachers write corrections in the margins or draw arrows, but do our students always know what our notes mean? Could we have not processed what our student actually was trying to say?  I also think it is also important, as the article mentions, that we allow our students to give us feedback as well.