ToST: A Tree-of-Thought Socratic Teaching Framework for Multi-Path Guidance and Parallel Thinking· ToST：多路径引导与并行思考的苏格拉底教学框架

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong problem-solving abilities, positioning them as promising agents for Socratic teaching to guide students through step-by-step heuristic questioning. However, existing approaches typically adopt a one-problem-one-solution paradigm, restricting the teaching guidance to a single linear reasoning path. This design limits instructional flexibility, weakens error recovery, and restricts students' ability to engage in parallel thinking to explore multiple valid solutions. To overcome these, we propose ToST, a Tree-of-Thought Socratic Teaching framework that explicitly supports multi-path guidance under a one-problem-multiple-solutions paradigm. ToST employs Parallel Sowing, a parallel-thinking-oriented questioning strategy to encourage students to approa