In the Netherlands, students with intellectual disabilities (ID) attend practical education (PE). Teachers generally use demonstration as a form of direct instruction (DI) and students have difficulty working independently. Strategy instruction (SI) is a question-answer-based method that stimulates students' autonomy by getting them to verbalize task strategies. A small scale teaching experiment involving a total of 33 students (aged 14 to 15 in four classes at two schools) was conducted. Classes were randomly assigned to SI or DI. Students who received SI had higher quality post-test assignments and were able to verbalize them better than students in the DI group.