How to improve teaching skills?

[advice]

I've finished my first semester as a TT prof at a LAC. My evals were good, but not great. Overall, I think students like me, but I don't feel like I inspire them in the ways that my friends and colleagues (who have won teaching awards) do in their classrooms. Granted, this may be because I am teaching the less-fun courses (i.e. Theory, Stats), but I still think it's doable. 

Any general pointers for how to go from a good prof to a great prof? 

[part]

Part of this is teaching prereqs like stats and theory. Those classes will always have lower evaluation scores because teaching students who are taking a class because they have to will invariably have less interest,motivation,etc than the ones who self select into taking sociology of culture or whatever because they were interested in. N of 1 and all, but my average student evaluation teaching intro (required course) was around 4.0, while teaching culture (elective) was 4.6 on a 5 point scale. Same methods, frequently same students, but prior interest was enough to make a huge different.
That said, I've found that for theory and methods, the more hands on the better, because a frequent problem is getting students to understand why they are taking those classes. So in stats, I get them to play around with GSS data. I show them how we can find the gender pay gap using it, for example, and then get them to write their own report. In theory, I generally have fairly applied readings (see the Kivisto textbook suggested elsewhere), and then have them go into groups and discuss other things that theory may explain. I also got something like clickers (or, if you don't have clickers, poll everywhere type services) to make things more interactive. But, again, none of those compare to just teaching electives.