The short answer on Socratic
Ask five people what Socratic means and you will get five answers that overlap without agreeing. The disagreement is not pedantry: it changes what you actually do next.
It is a single word carrying a lot of weight. Socratic names a way of working rather than a body of material to be covered, which is why it resists a one-line definition.
Where this usually goes wrong is that a finished worksheet means the work was understood — a mistake that is invisible until something unfamiliar turns up.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Among students and the families supporting them, this is one of those ideas that seems abstract until the moment it is not — typically at the kitchen table on a school night.
Once you stop treating it as a term to be defined and start treating it as something to be done, it gets considerably more useful and considerably less quotable.
Two questions to work with
Open with What part of this already makes sense to you? — a diagnostic, not a test.
Follow with What would have to be true for your answer to be wrong?, which is where the actual thinking happens.
Making it routine
In practice this means working a problem aloud, then explaining the reasoning to someone else without notes.
The signal to watch for is the student starts asking their own next question before being prompted.
Next steps
The natural continuation from here is the beginner guide, then a first guided session on a topic that is currently frustrating.