Self - direction and its implications in our lessons

The concept of self-direction has really influenced my ELT situation, because I always expect students to be more independent and to develop strategies to learn by themselves. Anyway, this is not very easy to achieve, because there are always some students that need the teacher in order to learn. However, I think that maybe I should help these students develop self-direction, because they might profit of it. The problem is that sometimes I do not know what I have to do to achieve that. In my opinion, it would be desirable to have self-directed students, but maybe if we think about it in the institutional area, these students might feel that they do not need to attend the lesson because they have the ability to learn by themselves, which at the same time could be a constraint for their learning process.