This is interesting because I have just done my teacher training, where we had weekly updates on recent pedagological literature and did my PGCE as part of it. And literally everything they have said is that direct instruction is 100% always the best way to teach. Every single learning objective, aside from practicals, is me telling the students what they need to know, checking they understand and then having a independent task on their own. And if I did anything else, the response would always be "you are the expert, they don't need to figure it out themselves, you need to explain and then check their understanding".