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Last week, I was standing in a 7-Eleven in Nara, Japan on spring break, and before setting off to explore the charming city, I stopped to buy an onigiri rice ball as a snack. While checking out of the 7-11, I remembered something from the time when I lived in Japan. My friend Soichiro taught me how to open onigiri about twenty years ago by following the numbers on the packaging: three tabs, a folded plastic wrap that keeps the seaweed crispy and separate from the rice until the exact moment you want them together. Precise folds, purposeful sequence, color-coding— to me, it was the kind of design that seemed to draw upon the wisdom of origami.

Check out the video below of me showing the packaging of an onigiri and how opening it is easy and leaves the seaweed dry and crunchy. Fun fact: 7-11 wraps their packaging in bioplastics!

Actually, Soichiro was not there the first time I tried to open one on my own. I just started pulling at the plastic like I was unwrapping a granola bar. I tore straight through the seaweed, the rice went everywhere, and I ate a slightly soggy, structurally compromised snack standing outside a convenience store, feeling very foreign. The packaging already had the answer, though; three numbered tabs, right there on the wrapper. The design was not the problem. I just didn’t stop to read it.

Over the remainder of my trip, I kept noticing the same well-designed logic everywhere, from vending machines to train exit gates to conveyor-belt sushi restaurants. One of my favorite designs was a paper cup dispenser with a single button to release exactly one cup from a locked stack. I watched a tourist wrestle with that type of machine for thirty seconds before noticing the button. Back when I lived in Japan, I learned that when I struggled with something like a paper cup dispenser, the right response was to self-correct. That is, if something is difficult to open, use, or do, you’re probably doing it wrong. In Japan, the user experience is often carefully planned and meant to be easy.

I came home thinking about teaching and learning, and I kept thinking: what if we applied the same logic to classroom instructions? Much like a wrapper with instructions, classroom instructions should be easy. The task should be where the energy is put. Students’ effort belongs to the thinking, not to decoding what you want them to do. In other words, opening the onigiri was not the point. Eating a delicious snack was. The packaging exists to serve the experience, and the best packaging gets out of the way quickly. Classroom instructions work the same way in that they are the vehicle for learning, and not the purpose or when learning happens.

Picture a high school student with four classes, each coming with lengthy instructions and teachers who carefully cover every edge case before anyone touches anything. By the time a student opens a task on their computer, they are more glazed over than a honey-baked ham! And because we live in an age in which everyone is using AI, they’ve probably got their favorite model running in the background of their laptops. Once they reach the point that the instructions become overwhelming, the internal monologue becomes: I honestly couldn't care less. I'm exhausted. I just want to get through this. This classroom and day-to-day experience sets kids up to have a mentality that is vulnerable to AI misuse. Kids who feel less engaged and disinterested will want to complete tasks quickly, and AI can provide a shortcut.

If your instructions lose them from the get-go, you’re heading in the direction of compliant task completion. Too much teacher talk that muddies the instructions might indirectly push them toward feeling overwhelmed and toward a desire to cognitively offload the task as efficiently as possible.

My suggestion is this: get into the intellectually engaging, stimulating process of active learning in class. The better you can design your instructions to be short, verb-based, and clear, the better. If you are noticing friction with instructions, processes, or any element, that difficulty is highly informative and can help us to adjust.

So in other words: difficulty is data.

The Look on Their Faces

A quick clarification before I go further. Direct teaching is a powerful tool (see Hattie’s work). There is absolutely a time to stand at the front of the room and teach. This article is not about that moment. This article is about when you ask students to do something, and you are explaining how to engage (e.g., create, discover, reflect, collaborate, analyze, build). The task is meant to generate learning, and before any of that can happen, you have to explain what to do. From my experience as a teacher and coach, fifteen minutes or less with an exemplar is the limit.

When teachers overexplain instructions, it leads to a kind of glazed-over, fading anticipation mixed with compliance. It’s funny too, kids will avoid asking questions because they just want to get on with it, even though they actually have many things they want to ask you, they bide their time and plan to ask a classmate what they are actually supposed to do.

Myth: good instruction means frontloading every common misconception and pitfall before students have touched the work. To be clear, anticipating roadblocks is good design; that is what Universal Design for Learning asks us to do. But there is a difference between designing for barriers and narrating all of them upfront before students have had a chance to think. When teachers over-explain every obstacle in advance, they usurp the learning; students never have to construct cause and effect for themselves because the teacher already did it for them. They arrive at the work with a head full of caveats and nothing left to figure out. That is not so different from handing a task to AI in that the thinking gets outsourced before it ever begins. Just as we don’t want AI to do the work for students, we also don’t want teachers to do the work for them either.

I used to be the over-explaining guy: I’d hover while students work, point at their screens, announce new pitfalls I just remembered or noticed, and announce that there are thirteen minutes left. I would not necessarily call that a rich thinking environment; you know what kids are thinking in that situation? I’m going to just get through this block so I can go home and do it on my own, and I’ll just ask AI and my friends if I get stuck.

Could you imagine if 7-Eleven sold onigiri that required 27 steps to open, and a lengthy training video that walks you through every possible way it could go wrong, and then you are given 13 minutes to do it, while in the back of your mind you know that you have a really important train to catch at the station? You would be exhausted, uninterested in the snack, stressed, and looking forward to the whole thing being over.

If we are explaining the instructions to an activity and the students have their heads down, that’s data. It is the equivalent of struggling with an onigiri wrapper. It does not mean your students are necessarily unprepared. It could mean your instructions have friction in them, or the students are just not paying attention due to distraction, confusion, or feeling overwhelmed. Every minute a student spends decoding your instructions is a minute they are not spending on the actual thinking you designed the task around. That thinking, the brainstorming, the analyzing, the revising, the reflecting, is where the learning happens.

Teachers are designers who are constantly testing their products and empathizing with their clients. So with that design thinking mentality, when students look lost before the learning starts, we can think of this as an observation in which we ask ourselves: what did I build here? What can I subtract? How can I activate thinking and step out of the way? How can I provide just-in-time feedback?

Monday-Ready Moves

Here’s a list of a few strategies that I have seen work as a teacher and coach. They directly support process-based learning in that a strong process can actually serve as clear instructions that do not necessarily require lengthy explanation.

1. Limit teacher talk. Read your instructions once and keep the total instructions to 15 minutes or less. The shorter your instructions, the more energy your students will have. If you are still talking after 15 minutes, something needs to come out, or additional instructions can happen later in the same lesson. Again, this is not for direct teaching in which essential information has to be taught; I’m talking about the instructions for an activity.

In terms of designing a slide, make the words large and easy to read from across the room. Don’t write all the instructions, just the main points so they can recall what they’re supposed to do.

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