The Beginning of An Answer

I went to an INSET day last week, and there was a teacher who'd explained how she taught 'instruction', it's such a good idea! It's so simple!

"Today, we'll be learning about 'instructions?"... is one way to turn off your students, but anyway in this case that was how the teacher began, the usual way of starting off a lesson with an explanation of the learning objectives.

Next, she split the children into three groups, and placed scissors and paper on each of the three tables.

To Table 1, she instructed them to "Get started," and went to talk to the next group.

To Table 2, she told the children to "Fold the paper and use the scissors to cut some patterns..."

At the last group, she said to them, "We are going to make a... First cut the paper into a circle, fold it in half... then fold it in half twice more... Next..."

The teacher continued going around the three tables in this way, but didn't say anything else to the first group.

As you can probably guess, the children on the Tables 1 and 2 became pretty frustrated, not least the group who weren't spoken to. By the end of it, Table 3 had made a decent snowflake, Table 2 had produced something that somewhat resembled a snowflake, while Table 1 came up with something that was nothing like a snowflake.

The children had a great discussion afterwards about what they learnt from the experience i.e. how they felt, what was good/bad about their instructions, what makes a clear instruction etc. What a great lesson!