DEMO: Teaching the 21st Century Student

1.2.4

Jigsaw

The JIGSAW constellations may at first appear to be more difficult to coor- dinate, but, they serve as a very powerful cooperative learning technique. The class gets divided into small teams of 3+ students. Either a single resource is divided into a number of sections, one per team member, or a set of varied materials of a common theme is distributed to individual students in each team. Every learner in the team works with his or her as- signed part. Students start studying individually first. Then, they explain the content of their part or resource to each other within their home team. When finished, they leave their home teams to form expert teams com- posed of the students who worked with the same material or section in the other teams. In case of a larger class, more expert groups or pairs may be formed for efficiency. Expert groups exchange their understanding, clarify meanings, or work toward an assigned task for the given section (e.g. they search for arguments, identify keywords). Then, they return to their home teams to complete their mutual task (e.g. design a strategy, suggest a solution, defend a point).

Jigsaw constellations are a very powerful cooperative learning technique, as they help handle and actively involve larger groups. The technique is ideal for sessions of 6+ participants. When applied in larger groups, though, the teacher needs to expect the task to be more technically chal- lenging and time consuming. The more students in each home group or the higher number of these groups, the more time that needs to be allo- cated for the activity. This technique also provides opportunity for work- ing with varied levels of learner competencies. The selected study mate- rial can either be split into equally demanding sections, or can be divided so it reflects varied levels of expertise by content or length. This cooperative learning technique is ideal for content analyses (Ch. 3). It was originally designed for working with text, but it can be applied to other types of material as well. The teacher can assign each expert group

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