Turns Out — There's Considerable Research Validating the Teaching Methods I Thought I Had Invented

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

Recently, while doing some work trying to quantify and explain some of the teaching techniques I use and build into the Orion courses, I ran across some acronyms I'd never heard of. The actual published names for methods I assumed I had invented. Ironically, it was AI that recognized what I was doing and just labeled them for me. That sparked my curiosity and I dug in a bit. Turns out, there are official (fancy) names for most of what I have built into our courses and my teaching — I just didn't know it.

Instead, I learned it the hard way. 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 instrument and electrical systems, how to think through process control problems, and how to solve them.

It was interesting to read about the various methods and techniques. It was also humbling that I could have saved some time if I had learned some of them earlier... And it was also very validating to know that many of the techniques we have landed on and use heavily have serious academic research proving they work.

One interesting thing I did learn a couple decades ago while teaching at a Technical College. During one of our in-service training sessions, an actual neurologist gave a presentation on how the brain actually learns. 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 and learning. I realized I wasn't just delivering information. I was trying to program a biological processor. And just as an engineer has 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 so that I could teach material in a way that achieves the desired results. That short but useful in-service training session didn't just change my techniques — it changed my entire framework for thinking about learning. I feel that should be mandatory info for anyone involved with teaching, assessment, or even mentoring or coaching. I found it even helped my learning abilities. All from a short 4-hour seminar.

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. See my other posts on related topics: Alternative Way To Teach And Learn Basic Electricity

1. Predict-Observe-Explain (POE)

If you've ever attended an Orion Technical Solutions course, you know this one. Before most hands-on lab tasks, I ask students: "What do you think is going to happen?"

Students commit to a prediction. Then we observe what really happens. 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 (they are "invested" in the question). And when they're wrong, the correct answer sticks far longer than if I'd just told them upfront. For decades I've simply called this Opening the Box — I'm trying to create and open 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. After all — that is exactly how we learn in real life. We have a "why" or a "how" and we dig in. When we find the answer, it is burned in.

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? A huge number of people have misconceptions on various physics concepts and many are burned into the core. Once they see what really happens in a real-world setting though — they begin to believe. Once they use that knowledge to predict things or solve a problem, it is burned in deeper. And over time it is solid.

I use this approach for many areas where there are often assumptive-but-false beliefs. Examples are Pascal's law, Bernoulli's principle, DP vs. flow concepts, liquid head pressure, electrical power concepts, motor CEMF, and more. In my years doing assessments, I've found that the number of these incorrect assumptions in many physical, mechanical, electrical, and other conceptual areas is staggering. But how would they know? When is the last time they were trained on those core concepts (if ever)?

How we use it: In our BELTS (Basic Electrical Troubleshooting) courses, students build circuits, predict outcomes, and then observe. We deliberately design exercises like this where common assumptions 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." Of course, we handle that in a gracious way — but it is important for people to realize they have room to learn, for any learning to happen.

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 and has some great publications on the I&E world and on teaching technical content), 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 very 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 skills development program — a proprietary system designed to take technicians from wherever they are to wherever they need to be, with extremely detailed resources using all of these techniques along with our vast library of resources and guidance information, that asks, probes, redirects, and guides rather than just handing out answers. More on this program coming 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 Kor-English, "Touch elbow to knee." Later, as I advanced and better understood him, I realized that quote was a metaphor for "stretch" — try to do the impossible, and the possible becomes 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 very large deepwater gas & oil production platform — so he had to learn certain things to achieve competency in his role. I pushed him. Hard. He did not enjoy what probably seemed to him initially like trying to touch his knees to his toes. 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 told them in the past (grrrr) — to discover their true potential and gain confidence to move beyond those old assumed limitations.

We purposefully build numerous higher-level and more difficult options into our course lab exercises to flex and stretch each student. I have found that while it can be stressful during the stretching part — students love the outcomes.

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 test it and demonstrate it, they observe what happens when they change variables, they discuss the principles behind the observations, and then they 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."

We believe in the ideas of "Learn by Doing" and "Seeing is Believing" — and those approaches integrate 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.

Interestingly, we have found that the "Seeing is Believing" approach works very well even in our Live Online courses because the principle is the same — the student thinks and predicts what will happen, then they observe the responses and discuss them to lock them in.

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.

Check out our other blog posts with tips and input on teaching and learning in technical fields for related thoughts and information.

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