I've Been Doing This for 30 Years. I Just Didn't Know the Fancy Names.

How decades of trial-and-error training led me to research-backed teaching methods — without ever cracking an education textbook.

I have a confession. For over three decades — first in the Navy Nuclear Power Program, then across power plants, manufacturing facilities, mines, oil & gas operations, and other industries (many while running Orion Technical Solutions) — I've been teaching technicians how electricity works, how to troubleshoot instrumentation loops and PLCs, how to think through process control problems, and how to solve them. Through trial and error, I found certain tricks and methods that seemed to work, and I continually refined those techniques.

Earlier in my career, I taught at a technical college for several years. During one of our in-service training sessions, a neurologist gave a presentation on how the brain actually learns. Most of my peers found it too technical and slept through it — but I was riveted. Learning about how neurons form connections through their branching dendrites, how repeated activation strengthens those pathways through a process called long-term potentiation, and how the brain essentially "wires together what fires together" — it fundamentally changed how I thought about teaching. I realized I wasn't just delivering information. I was trying to program a biological processor. And just like you have to understand a PLC's scan cycle and memory structure to write effective programs, I needed to understand how the brain stores, retrieves, and connects information to teach effectively. That session didn't just change my techniques — it changed my entire framework for thinking about learning.

Recently, while doing some work to explain the teaching approaches we use at Orion, I ran across some acronyms I'd never heard of. The actual published names for methods I assumed I had invented.

It turns out that nearly everything I've been doing has a formal name, a body of research behind it, and in most cases, decades of peer-reviewed studies confirming it works. I'd arrived at these methods the hard way — by watching what worked, throwing out what didn't, and constantly evolving the approach based on real results with real technicians in real classrooms and their performance in the field.

Here are some of the teaching methods (by their published names) that I now realize I've been using all along.

1. Predict-Observe-Explain (POE)

If you've ever attended one of our courses at Orion Technical Solutions, you know this one. Before I power up a circuit, change a setting, or demonstrate something on the bench, I ask: "What do you think is going to happen?"

Students commit to a prediction. Then we do the thing. Then we talk about why it did (or didn't) match their expectation.

I've been doing this since my earliest classes because I noticed something powerful: when students predict first, they pay closer attention. And when they're wrong, the correct answer sticks far longer than if I'd just told them upfront. For decades I've called this Opening the Box — I'm trying to create a "WHY" box in their brain that the answer will go into. My reasoning is that the WHY tag on that little memory node is how they'll access it in the real world.

Turns out this is a formally researched teaching strategy called Predict-Observe-Explain, or POE. It was formalized by Australian researchers White and Gunstone in 1992 and has been extensively validated in science education worldwide. It's classified as a constructivist technique — a category of teaching that respects the fact that students come in with existing mental models (often wrong ones) and that real learning happens when those models get challenged.

What the research says: POE is especially effective when students hold strong intuitions that don't match reality. Sound familiar? I use this to explain Pascal's law, Bernoulli's principle, electrical power concepts, motor CEMF, and more. That's basically the entire instrumentation and electrical field — full of experienced techs who have never been challenged on why they do what they do.

How we use it: In our BELTS (Basic Electrical Troubleshooting) courses, students build circuits, predict outcomes, and then observe. We deliberately design exercises where common intuitions are wrong. One of the most powerful learning moments in any class is when a student is absolutely certain of an outcome — and the circuit proves them wrong. That's not embarrassment. That's the exact moment the brain opens the box and says, "OK, I'm ready to learn this for real."

2. Cognitive Apprenticeship

Here's one I'd never heard of until recently, but it describes exactly what happens in our classroom every day.

In a traditional apprenticeship, a novice watches an expert do physical work — building a cabinet, welding a joint, laying pipe. The process is visible. But in highly technical fields like instrumentation or electrical, the most important work happens in the expert's head — the reasoning, the hypothesis formation, the logic of which measurement to take next and why. That's invisible to the learner, and it's often missed. The apprentice learns the steps but misses the reasoning. This is the root cause of big problems once the expertise retires and the stepwise apprentice is now the person the team is counting on at 3 AM.

Cognitive Apprenticeship, introduced by Collins, Brown, and Newman in 1989, is a teaching model designed to make expert thinking visible. The expert thinks out loud while demonstrating, the student watches, then the student tries it while the expert coaches, and gradually the support is pulled back.

How we use it at Orion: When I'm demonstrating on the bench in our live online or in-person sessions, I'm not just showing what I'm doing — I'm narrating WHY. "I'm going to check voltage here first because based on the symptoms, I can eliminate half the circuit with one measurement." Then during labs, I walk around coaching — not fixing their circuits, but asking questions like "What does that reading tell you?" and "What would you check next, and why?" After each troubleshooting scenario, we do a class debrief: What was the logic? Where did the process get off track? What could have been more efficient?

That sequence — model, coach, debrief — is textbook cognitive apprenticeship. I just called it "teaching."

3. Socratic Questioning

This one at least I'd heard the name of, thanks to some great work by Tony Kuphaldt (who has developed some of the most successful public I&E programs in the world), though I didn't realize how deeply it runs through everything I do.

The Socratic method, at its core, is about using questions to guide students toward understanding rather than simply delivering answers. The teacher becomes a facilitator of thinking rather than a transmitter of information.

Being able to think and solve problems is paramount in most technical I&E roles — so teaching with questions seems like an obvious win. But I'm continuously surprised at how many courses and programs focus only on the broadcast-transmission style of teaching.

How we use it: Over the years, this has become automatic in my teaching — especially during the hands-on labs that make up over half of our course time. I ask questions about supporting concepts and let students piece the picture together. Having built competency programs from the ground up, I think deeply about all the pieces that underlie each topic, and that helps me in the classroom by being able to visualize the root structure of the concept at hand. Each of those roots has How's and Why's, and I've found that if I can ask questions to get students to ponder those, they can usually piece the whole picture together in a useful way.

This isn't just a classroom nicety — it fundamentally changes how the brain processes information. When a student generates the answer (even with guided help), the neural pathways are significantly stronger than when they passively receive it.

This is also one of the core philosophies we're building into Orion's upcoming online developmental program — a system designed to take technicians from wherever they are to wherever they need to be, with an AI mentor that asks, probes, redirects, and guides rather than just handing out answers. More on that soon.

4. Scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development

Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist from the 1930s, proposed that learning happens best when a student is working just beyond their current capability — but with support. He called this the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The temporary support structure provided by a teacher or mentor is called scaffolding.

Funny note — I've always called this "touching your toes with your elbows" in my classes. It's actually a reference to a Karate instructor I had as a teenager who always said in broken KorEnglish, "Touch elbow to knee." Later, as I advanced and better understood him, I realized that quote was a metaphor for "stretch" — do the impossible, and the possible seems easier. You can reach beyond what you once thought possible.

How we use it: Every one of our courses is built on this principle. In our Basic Electrical Troubleshooting course, we start with a battery and a lamp. By Day 3, students are troubleshooting multi-branch relay circuits with timing logic, contactors, and more. Each new exercise adds one layer of complexity while reinforcing everything that came before.

Years ago, I was coaching/mentoring a technician who had entered the field via a non-traditional path with no formal training. He told me, "I can't learn math, Mr. Mike." But he was an instrument technician on a deepwater platform — he had to learn certain things to be capable of the role. So I pushed him. Hard. He did not enjoy the stretching exercise. But in time, he learned what he needed — and then some. He's now a very successful Instrument Technician who contributes technically as well as still being a very hard worker.

One of the favorite parts of my career has been seeing people go past what they assumed they could do — or past what some teacher or relative had told them — and discover their true potential. We purposefully build options into our courses to flex and stretch each student, especially during the hands-on exercises.

5. Experiential Learning (Kolb's Learning Cycle)

David Kolb formalized this in 1984. His model says effective learning follows a cycle: Concrete Experience → Reflective Observation → Abstract Conceptualization → Active Experimentation — and then the cycle repeats.

In plain language: Do something. Think about what happened. Understand why. Try it again with that understanding.

How we use it: This is the backbone of our 50–75% hands-on approach. Students don't just hear about Ohm's Law — they build circuits that demonstrate it, observe what happens when they change variables, discuss the principles behind the observations, and then apply those principles to new circuits as we layer on new topics.

The research is extensive and clear: for technical skills especially, experiential learning produces dramatically better retention and transfer to real-world application than lecture-based training alone. This is why Orion has always insisted on real experiential practice built into each key topic — not animated videos or multiple-choice quizzes pretending to be "interactive."

The Orion motto is "Learn by Doing" — and that approach integrates extremely well with every method covered in this article.

6. Cognitive Dissonance and Discrepant Events

When a student predicts one thing and observes another, a kind of productive mental discomfort occurs. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. In education, the deliberate use of surprising or counter-intuitive demonstrations is called using discrepant events.

How we use it: We design specific exercises that target the most common misconceptions in our fields. A classic example: to teach concepts of motor operation and counter-EMF, we ask students what will happen to the circuit current and speed of each motor if two small DC permanent magnet motors are wired in series and we load one of them down by feathering the spinning wheel. Lots of guesses, but about half the students typically get it wrong. Once they've committed to their answer, we try it.

Eyeballs open and they all get that look — head tilts up, finger touches chin, brow wrinkles, and then they look at the instructor with an almost visible question mark above their head. Talk about a receptive audience. Then I explain what counter-EMF is and why it changes. Then we try the same lab with one motor and predict again.

I build as many of these "hmm" and "aha" moments into each course as possible, because they're incredibly powerful at creating lasting cognitive paths. In most cases, I try to mimic the way that question will actually come up in the field — so when it pops up in a month, a year, or a decade later, the answer is neurologically "labeled" with that exact question.

That moment of "wait, what?" is not a failure of teaching. It's the engine of real learning. The brain flags the old mental model as unreliable and becomes primed to build a better one. We don't avoid these moments — we build them in on purpose.

7. Spiral Curriculum

Jerome Bruner proposed this concept in 1960: key topics should be revisited repeatedly throughout a course, each time with increasing depth and complexity.

How we use it: In our courses, early labs teach basic voltage measurement and component testing. Later labs use those same skills within more complex circuits. Troubleshooting exercises apply and reapply the same fundamental principles — series circuit rules, Ohm's Law relationships, proper measurement technique — in increasingly challenging contexts. By the end of a 3-day course, students have practiced the foundational concepts dozens of times without doing the same exercise twice.

This isn't repetition for its own sake. Each pass adds new context and new connections. A student who has applied Ohm's Law in five different circuit configurations doesn't just remember it — they understand it at a level that lets them apply it to circuits they've never seen before.

8. Situated Learning

Lave and Wenger introduced this concept in 1991. The core idea: learning is most effective when it takes place in the same context (or a realistic approximation) where the knowledge will actually be used.

How we use it: Most of our training incorporates real-world industrial equipment. Students work with Rosemount transmitters, Fluke process meters, Allen-Bradley PLCs, real HART communicators — the same equipment they'll encounter on the plant floor. Our custom-built troubleshooting training stations use real industrial components with real wiring, real terminal blocks, and realistic faults.

Even our online courses use HD cameras pointed at real bench setups, not animated slideshows. When we demonstrate a transmitter calibration, it's a real transmitter being calibrated with real tools. The similarity to real-world conditions is deliberate — because skills learned in context transfer dramatically better than skills learned in abstraction.

9. Metacognition — Teaching Students How to Think

Metacognition means "thinking about thinking." It's the skill of monitoring your own thought process, recognizing when you're stuck, and adjusting your approach.

How we use it: Our 7-Step Troubleshooting Methodology isn't just a troubleshooting procedure — it's a metacognitive framework. It is actually a derivative of the Scientific Method. We explicitly teach students to be aware of their own reasoning:

• Did you gather all available symptoms before starting to take measurements?
• Are you testing based on a hypothesis, or are you randomly poking around?
• Can you explain why you chose that test point?
• What did that measurement eliminate, and what's your next logical step?

We focus on "the process and the logic used to find the fault" rather than just whether students found it. This is what separates a skilled troubleshooter from a lucky one. A lucky tech occasionally finds faults quickly by chance. A skilled troubleshooter consistently finds them efficiently — because they can monitor and direct their own thinking.

10. Formative Assessment

Not all assessment comes at the end of a course on a written test. Formative assessment is the ongoing, real-time evaluation of student understanding during the learning process.

How we use it: Every question I ask during a demonstration, every observation I make while coaching during labs, every class discussion after a troubleshooting exercise — these are all formative assessment. I'm constantly reading the room: Who's nodding? Who looks confused? Who got the right answer but for the wrong reason?

I often tell my classes at the beginning to always question anything that doesn't make sense. I tell them it's OK to give me the "confused dog look" — tilted head, squinted brow — anytime something isn't clicking. That body language feedback is invaluable. I also jokingly tell them to question anything I say as if it may be wrong, because it will be several times during the course. I say that if I don't make mistakes on purpose, I'll make them by accident — and I usually prove it within the hour.

Being able to individualize attention and read each student is why we keep class sizes manageable and why our instructors are experienced practitioners rather than "facilitators" reading from a script. Real-time assessment lets us adjust pace, re-explain concepts that aren't clicking, and make sure nobody falls through the cracks.

11. Psychological Safety and Instructor Vulnerability

That last point about freely admitting mistakes? Turns out that has a name too — several, actually. Psychological Safety is a concept pioneered by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, defined as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up, asking questions, or making mistakes. In education research, the related concept of Instructor Vulnerability (bell hooks, 1994; Huddy, 2015) describes what happens when a teacher willingly shows their own imperfections and creates permission for students to do the same.

How we use it: I've found that the instructor being very willing to freely admit weaknesses, mistakes, or past blunders — or even ask questions in areas I may not be fully up on — is extremely helpful because of the way it relaxes people and makes them more willing to admit their own weaknesses or ask questions. Admittedly, I lean into this more in beginner classes than advanced ones, but I still say things backwards on occasion and make genuine mistakes in every class. When the instructor — the supposed expert — can laugh at their own errors, it sends a clear signal: this is a safe place to not know everything.

The research backs this up strongly. When teachers model vulnerability, students are more willing to take intellectual risks, ask questions, and engage deeply with material rather than playing it safe to protect their ego. In a technical troubleshooting classroom, where admitting "I don't know" is the first step toward learning, that psychological safety is everything.

The Honest Bottom Line

I didn't learn any of these terms from a teaching methods textbook. I learned them from nearly four decades of watching technicians learn — and not learn — in classrooms and on plant floors. I developed these approaches because they worked, refined them because some worked better than others, and kept the ones that consistently produced results. They became the foundation of everything we do at Orion Technical Solutions.

Finding out that education researchers have been studying and validating these exact methods for decades is both humbling and reassuring. Humbling because I could have saved some trial-and-error time. Reassuring because it confirms that the approaches we've built our entire training philosophy around aren't just gut instinct — they're backed by solid research.

But here's the thing I want to be honest about: knowing the names doesn't make the training better. Doing them well does. There are plenty of training programs out there that can name every pedagogical concept in this article but still deliver mediocre, forgettable instruction. The names are just labels. The execution — the thousands of small decisions made in the classroom about pacing, questioning, exercise design, and when to let a student struggle versus when to step in — that's what actually matters.

And another thought I always come back to: a quote I heard years ago that a student had written on a college course evaluation. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like: "There's an incredible amount of teaching going on in that classroom — but there's very little learning happening." I've seen seemingly brilliant teachers who created very little actual progress in their students, and I've seen others who truly changed the game. I strive to be the latter — but I even catch myself sometimes teaching without thinking about the actual learning. Anyone who teaches, tutors, coaches, or mentors has to stay vigilant on the objective of learning, because it's easy to just want to share our knowledge and experience when sometimes that isn't what's actually needed.

We're not going to start putting "POE-compliant" or "Cognitive Apprenticeship Certified" on our marketing materials. We're just going to keep doing what works: real equipment, real questions, real expertise, and an obsessive focus on making sure every student walks out better at their job than when they walked in.

What's next: Now that I actually know the formal names for what we've been doing, we're putting that knowledge to deliberate use. Orion is building an online developmental program that incorporates every one of these methods — designed to take technicians from wherever they are today to full competency in their craft, with AI-guided (and human expert backed) guidance, based on our thousands of pages of targeted resources, competency matrices, developmental materials, thought questions and challenges, interactive simulations, demonstration videos, guided hands-on lab exercises where applicable, and structured skill-building that follows the same philosophy that's worked in our classrooms and developmental programs for decades. We'll have more to share on that in coming months. If you'd like to be among the first to try it, reach out — we're looking for people to be part of the early access group.

And if some education researcher out there has input on what other fancy names of educational methods I'm accidentally using (or missing) — I'm all ears.

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Mike Glass | ISA CAP, CCST III
Owner, Orion Technical Solutions LLC | orion-technical.com
(208) 715-1590 | [email protected]