I’ve honestly found this to be one of the toughest things to balance in library instruction. Students need some basic technical knowledge, but dumping that on people all at once is just torture. I’ve tried two things to liven up the process: first have students work in pairs or threes, so the more advanced teach the others, and second split up the demonstration portion into really tiny chunks, no more than five minutes. I demo a really small task, and then have the class do that task themselves. Is that tapping into higher order thinking? I don’t know, but it’s a little less boring (for me, at least).

I primarily see students through one-shot library sessions, but in a semester-long class I wonder if you could also make your groups of students responsible for teaching some of the basic technical skills, having them lead an in-class tutorial section. That group at least would have to synthesize knowledge about the tool enough to teach — possibly more engaging?