As an educational psychologist and educator for the past 20 years, I’ve come to appreciate the claims of constructivism more and more. In particular, I’m a firm believer that students learn by doing at a much higher level of quality than when they just sit in the classroom and listen to somebody else tell them what the facts are.
I also believe that students gain a tremendous amount from collaborating and engaging with activities that require them to be interdependent. Activities like the jigsaw classroom provide all these elements of good instruction. Additionally, it’s helpful for all human beings to experience a change of voice or demeanor or routine to stay focus. Even if you’re the most attractive, charming and wonderful person in the world, your students will become bored if all they do is sit and listen to you talk. So, imagine how bored and difficult it must be when they have to look at me and listen to my voice! (See my profile picture if you want to feel deep sympathy for my students.)
The purpose of this article is to walk you through a jigsaw activity that I created for my Experimental Psychology class. Hopefully, you can appreciate all the reasons why exposing students to information with a constructivist activity like the jigsaw can be far superior to just using a traditional lecture. Of course, you’re not going to be using this jigsaw activity word for word – it’s likely that you don’t teach Experimental Psychology. However, the steps that I describe here can be used to create a good jigsaw activity in any subject area.
The main idea behind the jigsaw activity is that you take a small section of course material and you break it up into even smaller sections. You then take each of those smaller sections and assign different groups of students to learn one of them. The students are assigned to small groups and the small groups learn the information that they’ve been assigned with one another. After the students have learned as a group, they are reassigned to another small group, which has one member from the groups they were with at the beginning.
For example, if you have a section of material that comprises 16 pages, you might divide the class into four groups and have group one study the first four pages, group two study the second four pages, group three study the third four pages, and group four study the final four pages. After a predetermined amount of time, each of these groups is disbanded and groups of four people are randomly created. Each one of these groups of four will include one person who was originally studying the first four pages, another person who studied the second four pages, a third person who studied the third four pages, and a fourth person who studied the final four pages. In these new groups, each person is required to teach the material that they learned at the beginning of the activity to the other three members of the group. The members of the new groups take turns teaching their group members the material they learned, and at the end a quiz is given to the class to test their knowledge of the entire content.
In my Experimental Psychology class, there is a section in one of our chapters that talks about “single-subject experimental designs.” At the beginning of the class session, I have a stack of pieces of paper that have the numbers 1- 4 typed on them. As the students come in, they are given one of the numbers and asked to sit in a part of the classroom that corresponds to the number on the piece of paper they’ve been given.
Here is the template I use to create the pieces of paper that are handed out:
Here is the picture I put on the board before class starts: When I’m preparing to do the jigsaw activity, I cut each of these squares out and put them in a pile numerically. I also need to get to class a little bit early and draw a picture of the classroom on the board and put something on the drawing that indicates where the students will sit, depending on the number they receive.
In my class, whenever I do this activity, I require the students to bring their textbook. The reason for this is that each of the groups in the first part of the activity must study a specific range of pages and if they don’t have the book, then they can’t possibly contribute to the discussion. Therefore, I announce to the students that the quiz they will take at the end of the class period will count as extra credit and a person is not eligible for extra credit unless they bring their book.
Recapping your preparation
The first step toward carrying out a jigsaw activity is to be prepared beforehand with the following:
- Cut of the grid with the numbers 1-4 and make your pile of slips of paper so that you can hand those out as students arrive;
- Have your attendance sheet or some kind of log available and ask the students to show you that they have brought their book. If they don’t have a book, they are ineligible for extra credit and can choose to sit in and listen to any of the four groups that they’d like. When you take your attendance, indicate whether each student is being assigned to group 1, 2, 3,4, or enter the number 0 if they didn’t have their book.
In the case of my jigsaw activity, there are 20 pages that are part of the learning the students were required to demonstrate. I assigned every student pages 261-264 and then told the group one members to study pages 264-267, group two to study pages 268-271, group three to study pages 271-276, and group four to study pages 277-280. Once the students are in their groups, they are given ten minutes to study their section of the book and discuss any concepts or terms that they don’t understand. I make it clear to the students that they are going to be responsible to teach the material that they learn to some of their fellow students who are going to be relying on them to provide the information they need to do well on the quiz.
This announcement motivates my students in two ways:
- to get the extra credit;
- to help their classmates succeed.
While the students are working, I take the attendance sheet and create new groups of four for the second part of the activity. As stated previously, each group will have one person who learned about each of the four parts of the chapter under review. When the allotted time has passed, I tell everybody to move to another part of the class that corresponds to their new group number.
Here is a picture of the room, the lists of students, and their new group assignments. In front of each name, you’ll see a number from 1-4, which corresponds to the original group to which they were assigned:
The students are asked to leave their seat and move to a new seat with their new group of four. The new groups have 16 minutes to teach each other the four parts of the chapter that they were assigned to learn. I announce time every four minutes passed just so they know that they should move on to the next person if they haven’t done so already. When the 16 minutes is over I hand out the extra credit quiz to the people who brought their book and were eligible for the extra credit. My extra credit quiz includes 13 items. I create two copies of the quiz so that I can give out alternate versions to each student and prevent cheating.
In my experience, students are highly engaged in this activity. They are motivated to study the material and then communicate that material to the best of their ability to their fellow students. In my opinion, this is good education vis-a-vis the content I want them to learn, and for helping them practice the life skills of collaboration, cooperation, and team work. Perhaps there is an area from one of your courses that can be taught with a jigsaw activity. Feel free to create your own version using the my materials and email them to me for feedback. I can be reached at info@drjohnrich.com.
Thank you note: A special thank you to Aanyah Bailey who assisted in preparing this article.
