Navigating the mind maps

Moving into a slightly more abstract layer of discussion.

What are the teaching techniques we employ while teaching our subjects?

I will start with presenting my technique and I will be very happy if you can probe and criticize the ideas. Please post your thoughts and ideas too.

Here it is for physics.

Like every teacher, I typically have a goal of teaching a set of concepts and skills in 2 to 3 periods.

Following are the steps I use to go about teaching them.

1. I try to understand what students know about the things that I am planning to teach.

2. I also try to understand their mind maps around the area of the topic to be covered.

3. I create a "common factor mind map" by combining the mind maps of most of the students (I leave out the extremes for now)

4. I create a set of interesting experiments, narrations, thought experiments and connecting logical explanations to navigate them from their existing mind map to a new mind map that now includes my new topic.

5. I predict the questions they might ask based on the "common factor mind map" and my path of navigating to the new topic. If students ask the exact same questions in the classroom, I conclude that my mind mapping exercise was accurate. Else, I will fine tune it next time. So, very rarely do I get "wrong" questions.

6. My idea of teaching is navigating the students from their existing mind map to a new mind map that includes the new concept.

7. Wherever skill development is involved (problem solving, conducting experiments etc), I plan sessions where they can learn the skills by exploring and committing mistakes and then becoming good in the skill.

8. I have experimented and found some techniques to deal with higher extremes (top 20%). This, I will explain in another post (this post already is too big). But I am still struggling to find techniques for the bottom 20%.

If someone has found techniques for bottom 20% that will not involve rote learning, please suggest.

Thanks.