Do you want to engage students beyond a lecture, but know that it’s important they master terms and concepts? Make students the experts through the Jigsaw Classroom method, developed by Elliot Aronson, professor emeritus at University of California Santa Cruz.
Six-step setup
If you’re interested in running a jigsaw activity in your course, follow this simple six-step guide:
- Step 1: Organize students into groups of 4-6.
- Step 2: Divide the session’s readings or lesson into 4-6 parts, and assign one student in each group to be responsible for a different segment.
- Step 3: Give students time to learn and process their assigned segment independently.
- Step 4: Put students who completed the same segment together into an “expert group” to talk about and process the details of their segment.
- Step 5: Have students return to their original “jigsaw” groups and take turns sharing the segments they’ve become experts on.
- Step 6: Have students complete a task or a quiz that’s reliant on them having understood the material from the contributions of all their group members.
Choose to conduct this activity for a portion or the entire segment you had originally slated for lecture. Make yourself available for questions or clarification.
Portions of this post were referenced from TeachHub’s The Jigsaw Method Teaching Strategy.