A Hundred-Year-Old Pedagogical Theory That Elevates AI as a Thinking Partner
thoresson.se
A century-old idea — Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development — says teachers should meet learners just beyond what they can do alone. Combining that with Ethan Mollick’s “jagged frontier” of AI shows LLMs can sometimes help stepwise but also leap too far or fail. So when using ChatGPT or similar, prompt the model to gauge your level and guide you forward without replacing your own learning.
26 Oct 2025
As users of large language models, we benefit from relating to both Vygotsky's and Mollick's theories. We need to understand both in which areas they are actually better than us, and how we best utilize the models when we want them to help us in our learning. Translated to the use of a language model and Mollick's idea of a jagged edge, the zone of proximal development exists in the space between what I can do myself and the knowledge represented in the model.