7. Gradual release of responsibility

Instructional sequences and other learning processes are structured according to pedagogical guidelines and principles and specific teaching methods. For reasons of brevity, we chose one commonly employed method – the gradual release of responsibility (Fisher & Frey, 2021). In an instructional sequence, the responsibility for the process and its outcomes is shifted from the teacher to the learner. Starting with Focused Instruction (I do it) and moving to Guided Instruction (We do it), more and more responsibility is transferred to the student in the latter two phases Collaborative Learning (You do it together) and Independent Learning (You do it alone). It is mainly the locus of control that shifts gradually from the teacher to the learner.

With this one, all seven lessons have been prepared. All parts are based on a manuscript for a book chapter that I wrote recently. Prepping lesson #7.

If the sequences of learning activities and the algorithm for guidance and feedback are hardwired in the system and hardly adapt to an individual learner and their behavior – as was the case in most ICALL and in tutorial CALL in general – then the control of processes is largely with the machine. To put it polemically, the learner’s choices are limited to using the ICALL or tutorial app or not. At first sight, this is different with GenAI. Learners can request specific texts and then request something different. Everything can be translated from one language into another, all questions will get an answer – it might not be correct – and all prompts get a reply. The student decides what and how much will be generated at what time. The generation is fast and often faster than most humans can type. This means that the locus of control is largely with the learner in this respect.

My inspiration for this title came from the book  
Snyder, T. (2017). On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. Tim Duggan Books. 

I am sharing these early drafts of a book chapter I published in 
Yijen Wang, Antonie Alm, & Gilbert Dizon (Eds.) (2025), 
Insights into AI and language teaching and learning. Castledown Publishers. 

https://doi.org/10.29140/9781763711600-02.

The GenAI controls the generation process. The many hidden layers of the ANN mean that how the GPT transforms the input, for example the prompt, to the output the learner can read, for example an answer to a question. The problem here is for learner to be able to learn, they need to be able trust the truth value and relevance of text they received. Since the GPT with its LLM remains impenetrable even for the computer scientists who ran the deep (machine) learning to train the model and thus the artificial neural network due its enormous complexity, it is almost impossible to check the generated text output within the system. Currently, because all GenAI users are new users, teachers and students can rely on previously learned information – information that was not generated by a GenAI – to compare the output they received to what they know already. However, one can conduct a thought experiment already: if we learn more and more from generated texts, then we have less and less prior ‘independent’ information that we can use to check the GenAI output for errors …

The more immediate conundrum is the trust all learners need to put into information they are being taught and do not know (and thus cannot check easily). Because of their institutionalized power and prior training and accreditation, teachers normally get the trust of their students; students trust the information they are taught. Especially during the phase of Focused Instruction, if this instruction is given via GenAI generated text, learners do not know how much trust they can place in the information they obtain from the text. Here again, it is the responsibility of the teacher to control the process and, if need be, check the taught information. This means that the gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the student must be almost parallel to the ‘release of responsibility’ from the teacher to the machine. Whereas an ICALL ITS was a rigid and often limited ‘tutor’, GenAI must not replace the human teacher and can only be useful as the learning partner in the third phase of Collaborative Learning (You [learner and GenAI] do it together) and as a helper in the Guided Instruction phase (You [teacher, GenAI, and learner] do it) with the teacher in the lead. It appears that the current GenAI does not have a role in the individual teacher phase (Focused instruction [I do it]) nor in the individual student phase (independent Learning [You do it]). Teachers should not abdicate their role in the initial teaching of new material; and students cannot have their independent learning done for them by a machine.

To be concluded …

References

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2021). Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility (3rd ed.). ASCD.