Why I Teach as I do...

The Socratic Method in Industrial Automation Training

Most industrial training follows the same formula. A manufacturer sends a presenter. The presenter opens a slide deck. The slide deck has 80 pages. The audience sits, watches, and forgets 90% of it before they get back to the floor.

That is not training. That is a product demo with a captive audience.

When I designed the Wayward Leaders VFD training program, I started from a fundamentally different question: how do you make someone actually think through a problem instead of memorizing someone else's answer? The method I landed on is not new. It is over 2,400 years old. And one of the most powerful depictions of it ever put on film comes from a 1973 movie about Harvard Law School.

"You Come In Here With a Skull Full of Mush"

In The Paper Chase, John Houseman plays Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., a contract law instructor who refuses to lecture. Instead, he asks questions. Relentless, probing, uncomfortable questions. He does not give students the answer. He forces them to find it, defend it, and then find the next question hiding behind it.

Houseman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role. It remains one of the most iconic portrayals of a teacher in American cinema. And while his version is deliberately dramatic, the core method is sound.

Why This Matters on the Plant Floor

The Socratic method was developed by Socrates in ancient Athens as a form of cooperative dialogue. The instructor does not deliver knowledge. The instructor asks structured questions that expose gaps in the student's reasoning, forcing them to examine their own assumptions and arrive at understanding through their own thinking.

In a law school classroom, this develops the ability to construct and dismantle legal arguments. On a plant floor, it develops something equally critical: the ability to troubleshoot under pressure when the manual does not have the answer.

Consider what happens when a VFD faults in the field. The technician does not have a professor or a slide deck standing next to them. They have a drive with a fault code, a motor that is not running, and a production line that is losing money by the minute. The only thing that will save them is the ability to reason through the problem. What is this fault code telling me? What conditions would cause it? What did I just change? What should I check first?

That chain of reasoning is exactly what the Socratic method trains. Not memorization. Not recall. Thinking.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I set up a scenario on the training rig and start asking questions.

"What is the drive doing right now?"

"Why is the motor running at that speed?"

"If I change this parameter, what do you expect to happen?"

Then the student makes the change. And we deal with what actually happens, which is often not what they expected. That gap between expectation and reality is where learning lives. My job is to keep asking the questions that force them to close that gap themselves.

This is not comfortable for everyone at first. Industrial technicians are used to being told what to do and how to do it. The Socratic approach asks them to figure it out, with guidance but without a script. By the second day, something shifts. Students stop waiting for the answer and start reasoning toward it. They start asking each other the kinds of questions I have been asking them. That is when you know the method is working.

Why Nobody Else Does This

The honest answer is that it is harder. It is harder to design. It is harder to deliver. And it requires the instructor to have deep enough expertise to follow wherever the student's reasoning leads, even when it goes somewhere unexpected.

Most industrial training is designed around efficiency: get through the material, cover the product catalog, hand out the certificate. The Socratic method is designed around effectiveness: make sure the student can actually think through a problem when they are standing in front of a faulted drive at 2 AM with nobody to call.