One easy thing you can do to improve your teaching is to get students to move. I’m not talking elementary and middle-schoolers who should be moving a lot more than sitting but even college-age adults. Find a pretext to have them get up and move around, and you’ll see a completely different level of engagement after that.
Example. I needed to do an overview of formal and informal commands. I could have brought worksheets and bored everybody to death. Instead, I told students to break up into teams, walk around the department and translate the numerous announcements and notices we have posted around the place. The team that translates the most and with the best quality wins. Immediately, everybody started running around, looking for notices and announcements, laughing, enjoying themselves. In the meantime, I came up to each team and practiced with them individually. “So how would you say “don’t bring beverages to the lab?” How do you say it formally? How about informally? How about in the plural? And in the singular?” This way I identify everybody’s individual weakness – which can be completely different from one person to another – and help them in a targeted way.
As a result, everybody practiced without even noticing, received individual attention, and had an opportunity to move and oxygenate their brain. This was yesterday, and the engagement on Friday mornings is usually not great. But with this activity literally zero people snoozed in the corner while others pored over worksheets.
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