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My suggestion: Keep them playing as much as possible during the lesson and most importantly keep interrupting them when you notice something off with their playing so you can help them fix the problem.

Steve

My point was never to dispute the fact that children should be instructed in short sentences. I break things down to the bare minimum. Even a short command like "Put right hand 3rd finger on treble E" won't work for some kids. You'd have to make sure the kid knows which hand is the right hand, which finger is the 3rd finger, and which key to press down. Anything can go wrong at any segment.

However, I don't think we have enough information to conclude that's the OP's problem with that specific student.

OP could be talking about my 7 yo except we don’t live in Australia and she’s not a boy and she can sit still for a long time.

She loves music and has been composing, improvising, and arranging for years. She also respects and adores her piano teacher but she often assumes she already knows what her teacher has to say so she stops listening.

As it has already been mentioned, Socratic method works better for these kids. Maturity helps too. What has really helped my little one is making her aware of her own shortcomings. So I record her practice sessions and she goes to her lessons knowing what she needs help with and when her teachers point out additional issues, she seems more receptive too. She says until she started listening critically to the recordings, she had no idea her physical playing didn’t match what she heard in her head.

This.
I'm not sure it applies to the thread, but I think it is of vital importance. Our head voice can nearly always drown out our physical voice.

Good idea. Recording during lessons is one thing that I do not do much of. I can think of a couple with whom I would like to try that.

To me it seems perfectly applicable to the thread. It is much easier for this kid to get the message by listening to the recording than through any verbal explanation.

Recording? As the old credit card commercial said ‘priceless’. There is a huge discrepancy between what I hear in my head versus what I am actually doing. At first, it was disappointing, But I’ve done it so much now that I recognized it just helps me know what really needs work. Right now, I’m just recording using my cellphone

Her composition wouldn't happen to be a German language opera, would it? And her name wouldn't be Alma Deutscher, would it?

My 25yo is as unprepared for lessons now as she was 20 years ago

That is my experience too. One of my goals in recording is to calibrate my ear, so that the discrepancy diminishes. I think it is a learned skill that we pay too little attention to.

I also suspect that one of the characteristics of the prodigy is that they learn that listening skill faster, or maybe even have it innately, and therefore can learn faster.