I'm a strong believer that students have to "complete a circuit" with new concepts. That means they have to be able to express as output what they just took in as input. If they read or hear something, they have to be able to explain it back in both writing, speaking and demonstration. Knowledge has to go in and come out of a student so it exercises as much of their brain as possible and the semantic links are built. I model this a little on language acquisition, you have to be able to both recognize and produce in your new language before you can say you've learned it. I think the same is true for any subject.

In terms of pedagogy, the best I could do was to make sure each lesson in the curriculum provided as many modes to learning as possible with as many opportunities for them to produce as possible with a very strong focus on high interactivity with the instructor and the material:

For visual learners: strong visual presentation with every idea possible presented as pictures as well as with a written description. Presentation was both in detailed slides, a take-home textbook as well as supporting dynamic whiteboard versions of what was on the slides. This covered people who "think in pictures" who "think in words" and who "think in sequences" (provided by the whiteboard portion).

For auditory learners: Detailed lecture explaining each part of the presentation, try to provide stories and catch phrases for each part of the presentation. For each subject, learn your script so you aren't inventing the material on the fly and end up confusing the students while you figure out what to say next. Use key phrase repetition for minor concepts to build up a kind of mnemonic vocabulary and assemble that vocabulary into major concepts. Explain each topic in at least two different ways. Get the class to repeat back difficult terms and phrases. This covers people who use different kinds of memory aids (mnemonics, catch phrases, stories, etc.) to semantically find things in their memory, and verbally constructs ideas into language-like features. The presentation above acts as a primer for the teacher as well and provides links between the visual and auditory worlds.

For tactile/kinesthetic learners: phase 1) a live demonstration first to show, phase 2) a hands-on demonstration (students followed along with the teacher step by step) to teach, phase 3) then a student only exercise for mastery -- followed by a step-by-step review of the student only exercise to fill in gaps and cement in the ideas. Kinesthetic opportunities are also provided through instructor interactivity, getting students provide some of the whiteboard demonstration, exaggerated body movements during class (I even eventually introduced some silly dances, teachers have to have no shame), hand motion, physical demonstrations, consistent object positioning in real space and on visual material. The 3 phase exercise system also provided plentiful hands-on time. I found that all students are kinesthetic to some extent. Part of being a mammal I think. I modeled this off of big cats teach their young to hunt.

The lessons were all carefully ordered to ensure prerequisites were properly covered, then reused as the foundation for new knowledge. New knowledge was always presented as single items, then slowly grouped into pairs and triples of concepts, with interactions and complexity between concepts explained. Often time examples of a new concept were demonstrated in 2 or 3 forms to help reinforce the concept as distinct from the specific implementation we were going to use for the exercises.

Groups of lesson blocks were then collected into mastery exercises to reinforce what they learned up to that point (which were reviewed step by step like in phase 3 of the three phase kinesthetic exercise above) and then entire courses had a capstone exercise (where the students were encouraged to break the exercise down and assign pieces out to each other, to work together and to ask questions of each other, even across teams) with full blown presentation at the end of each capstone. The capstone exercises were purposely open to interpretation so there was no "right" answer (but there were definitely wrong answers), but the students were encouraged to ask questions to each other during the presentation and the instructor was to ask students to justify specific claims.

Realistically, every single class breaks down into 3 categories of students:

The top of the class, who are eager learners and who know how to pay attention and apply the lessons immediately. They never get bored, even when the subject was boring, they always find something to learn or reinforce. There's almost always at least 1 of these in every class.

The middle of the class, the bulk of the students. They represented the typical student, interested in learning, but not willing to put lots of effort into it. Smart enough, but require frequent reinforcement and enormous efforts on the part of the instructor to ensure interactivity. Usually by the end of the class most of these students were engaged, paying attention and at least minimally passing all portions.

The "1". There's always one student who's completely unreachable. No matter how much time or effort you put into them, they're unable to learn the material. I've observed that most of these people have some kind of strong singular personality trait: usually people very self absorbed into their own personal problems, whatever they might be (family trouble, divorce, work issues, car having trouble, chronic health problems, etc.). They typically were bored in class, frequently absent or tardy, and consistently lacked basic and fundamental skills.

Most often they just wanted a procedure guide to follow or list of steps to remember -- the worst possible educational outcome, rote memorization. When those students finished the course and went back to their workplace, very few of them maintained long-term employment in their job as well -- often resigning once the first complex task landed on their desk.

This "1" usually emerged by the end of the 1st 8-10 hours of instruction. After a while you learn as a teacher you really have no choice but to leave this person behind. If they ask questions or show interest, always help them, but don't pace the class to that person. Their fundamental problems are something they brought with them as a burden into the class and you will not be able to overcome those even if the entire class is turned into an extended 1-1 session with them focused on nothing but teaching that individual student the material at the expense of every other student.

Classrooms are not navy flotillas, moving at the speed of the slowest ship. You have to reach the bulk of the students. With these "1" students, there's simply no magical teaching method or style that's going to suddenly overcome their years of personal educational neglect and bring them up to speed with the class and make them excel.

They have more remedial and fundamental issues with learning attitude that they have to solve. Perhaps they were taught that rote memorization and procedures are the correct way and they've come to believe that and feel uncomfortable and insecure in more open-ended environments -- but non-procedural fields can never be adapted to fit this mental model they've grabbed onto and they've never exercised the parts of their brain necessary to figure out things on their own (to learn how to learn, critical thinking and problem solving). You won't solve these kinds of lifelong issues in your class. They need a separate and specific educational approach that focuses not on a specific subject but on how to learn. Not learning is an addiction to them and until they're actively seeking help to break out of it, no teaching method will solve it.