Flipping with a Jigsaw, part 3

Part 3: The Jigsaw Classroom

Full disclosure: Elliot Aronson, creator of the Jigsaw classroom, was a graduate advisor of mine. That largely explains my exposure to the technique, and my fondness for it. If you don’t know who Elliot is, it’s worth your time to read up on him. He’s the only person to receive all three of the American Psychology Association’s major awards, for teaching, research, and writing. He really is a gifted teacher, in both large lecture courses and small graduate seminars. Even though I was only one of his students for a relatively short time his impact on me as a social psychologist and academic cannot be overstated.

That said, a brief journey back in time to set the stage for the development of the Jigsaw. It was the early 1970’s in Austin, Texas. School integration was going poorly. Kids were fighting across racial lines and the school system asked the University of Texas if anyone could help. Elliot stepped forward – without any plan or intervention in mind. He observed the classroom as it existed in those schools and came to the conclusion that competition dominated the atmosphere, and that this inevitably lead to conflict. His solution was to radically reorganize the classroom. In a distant foreshadowing of the flipped classroom, his plan was to move the teacher from center stage to more of a stage manager role, and transform the divisive competition into cooperation between students.

Say the lesson plan is about the life of Abraham Lincoln. The traditional way to teach this would be for the teacher to lecture to the students about his life, perhaps asking questions along the way (“Who knows where Lincoln was born?”), to which a few students would shoot their hands up, begging to be called on, while the rest sit on their hands. Some even might be hiding from the teacher’s gaze because they don’t know the answer and fear the embarrassment of being called on. (Guess who was more likely to be begging or hiding in the Austin classrooms.) This competition for the teacher’s attention and praise created jealousy from those not called on and condescension from those who were. A toxic environment. Elliot knew he had to turn this around.

The Jigsaw works like this: the teacher breaks the class into groups, let’s say three groups. I’ll call them learning groups, although others use different terms. One learning group learns about Lincoln’s birth and childhood, another learns about his life as a young man, and a third learns about his presidency and assassination. All the kids in each group have to master their material, and they are encouraged to work together.

Then the teacher would reorganize the groups, taking one person from each of the three groups and forming a new group with those three students. I’ll call them teaching groups. Now the groups have an expert on all three phases of Lincoln’s life. Each student then takes a turn teaching the other two students what they know, and listens while the other two teach their material. 

It’s important that the students know that, in the end, they must know about Lincoln’s entire life, not just the part that they learned about in the first groups. This ideally turns them into good questioners of the other students in the second group; the other students have the information, and they need to get it out of them. A great way to accomplish this is to give the students a quiz or test after the Jigsaw about all the material.

Notice that the teacher is not really involved in the teaching or learning; the teacher creates the materials, organizes and reorganizes the groups, and stays out of the way for the most part. I usually walk around answering questions during the learning groups. But largely I do nothing, and let the students do all the work.

I won’t bother you with the social psychology of why the Jigsaw helps with racial animosity, but suffice to say that it has a lot to do with the cooperative nature of the Jigsaw. The students must rely on each other for the material, and this teaches them that their classmates, once their competitors, are now their allies. And that the students that once never said anything, and they assumed knew nothing, actually know quite a lot, know things that they themselves do not know, and are pretty smart if given the chance. But for present purposes the important thing is that the Jigsaw turned out to not only help with racial animosity, but also turned out to surpass (or at least equal) traditional teaching methods: students in the classes with the Jigsaw in Austin did as well as or better than the other control classes on the same assessments. There’s a great official website about the Jigsaw with history, research, and tips.

Next up: The Jigsaw Classroom in my flipped class

Flipping with a JIgsaw, Part 2

Part 2: The Mechanics of Flipping

On one level, flipping is merely an extension of an approach that instructors have been using for decades: active learning. While listening to lectures has been around for centuries, pedagogical experts have been pushing active learning in various forms. And many instructors have heard and heeded the call for active learning, myself included. Flipping changes the typical way of thinking about active learning, from an occasional interruption of lecture to its replacement. The logic behind flipping is that students are most likely to benefit from instructor attention when they are trying to engage with the content, and if they are doing this outside of class time they are unable to make use of that help. Here’s a way to look at typical and flipped courses:

Traditional: deliver content in class, ask students to engage with content outside of class

Flipped: deliver content outside of class, ask students to engage with content in class

The benefits of flipped classes are easiest to see in classes where there are problem sets students must complete, like mathematics and science. Asking students to do these outside of class often leads to frustration (for instructor and student) and incomplete assignments. So a flipped class turns it around so that the more passive (and I say ‘more’ because there are ways to make even this more interactive) activity of listening to lectures is done outside of class. This saves class time for students to work on the problem sets while the instructor is there to answer questions and help them when they are stuck. But this can work in other disciplines as well, as my experience shows.

I guess the other event that facilitated my flipping was the emergence of technology that allows instructors to easily create content that can be delivered remotely, asynchronously. I simply mean the ability to record lectures or presentations so that students can view them on their own time. While there are quite a variety of methods for doing this, the most significant are narration in Microsoft PowerPoint and screencasting. PowerPoint is of course the ubiquitous presentation software that can assist in sublime lectures or bog them down in mind-numbing volumes of text and distracting transition effects. In any case, PowerPoint is easy to learn and use, and the last two versions included the ability to record narrations of the slides and save the file in a format (.mp4) that makes it into a video that can be watched, paused, rewinded, and rewatched like a YouTube video (in fact they can be uploaded to YouTube). If an instructor already has PowerPoint presentations for traditional classes, it is an easy matter to record the audio that goes with the slides (although this approach has some dangers). Screencasting has grown in popularity recently, and there are now several companies that offer screencasting software or services. Screencasting simply means recording whatever appears on the screen of your computer (or tablet, or smartphone) in real-time, including recording the system sound and/or narration. I use Screencast-O-Matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/), and can recommend it for its ease-of-use and low cost (free for basic accounts, $15/year for a Pro account), but there are others as well. I have used screencasting to demonstrate features in MS Word, give a guided tour of a LMS course site, record lectures using Prezi, and much more. The more I screencast the more uses I think of for it. Truly a revolution for me.

So for me the cost of flipping in terms of creating the content was nearly zero: I had already created narrated PowerPoint presentations, uploaded to YouTube, and embedded them into my course in our LMS for the online version of the course. It was simply a matter of copying them to the LMS course for my flipped class and I was set to go. (I should mention that I also use a textbook for the class, and I assign chapters, or parts of them, for each class meeting.)

But that’s only half the challenge of flipping; the other half is what to do in class with all that time that used to be spent lecturing. Here’s where the jigsaw comes in.

Next up: The Jigsaw Classroom

Flipping with a Jigsaw

Part 1: Why I Flipped

I flipped my Social Psychology course for the first time in the spring 2014 semester. At that point I had been teaching that course for nearly 20 years, with some success. My teaching evaluations had always been at least adequate, the written comments were generally positive, and I enjoyed teaching the class. My approach to the class was fairly typical for a mid-level course: mostly lecture, with some sort of active learning activity in nearly every class meeting. I had revised and crafted many of these activities over the years until I thought they accomplished the goals I had for them. I also enjoyed lecturing, and I even thought some of my lectures flowed with increasing tension, cliffhangers, and surprise endings. But several events conspired to prompt me to radically change my entire approach to the course.

One of those events was attending a session on campus by Dee Fink (http://www.deefinkandassociates.com/). If you get a chance to see him speak, I encourage you to. Perhaps it was a matter of fortuitous timing, but I walked out of that session thinking differently about my teaching and determined to change what I did in the classroom. One of Fink’s most important ideas for me was his emphasis on significantly learning experiences. Up to that point I focused my teaching on trying to force-feed my students the entire content of my courses. Fink got me to think about what I thought the most important outcomes of my teaching were – was it remembering every detail, every concept or theory, every researcher’s name? How would that affect my students a year after taking my class, or 20 years later? He also asked us to remember the most significant classes from our college years. The memories shared by the attendees made it clear that those memorable classes were not typically the ones that resulted in mastery of the most content. Instead they were significant for other reasons; an anecdote that stuck, an instructor that cared about the students, a skill they used to this day. And this was a crowd of faculty, who were typically the better students in class, the ones with all the motivation and ability to do well in the course, and who likely did do well. Still, it was not the content mastery that was most memorable, most significant. It was often not even a class in the attendee’s major, where you might expect the most motivation to engage in the class. Fink challenged us to create courses like this that would be significant learning experiences, memorable years or decades later.

He also asked us to consider what would happen if we had the ideal group of students in class, the most motivated, intelligent, diligent, gritty students we could imagine. What would the outcome be then? What could they accomplish? In then, importantly, do we have the course design to take advantage of that opportunity? Would we change our lectures, our assignments, our expectations? If we would, then how do we know if we made those changes with our actual students they wouldn’t produce the same results as the ideal class? How can we expect passionate and inspiring work from our students if we don’t give them the class design that would allow for it? Why not design our courses for the ideal student and see what happens? This is what having high expectations really looks like.

The other key events were my increasing exposure to flipped instruction and my increased involvement in online instruction. Flipped instruction has been building in popularity in the last ten years, with several books published about it [Bergmann & Sams’ (2012) Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and Bretzmann’s (2013) Flipping 2.0: Practical Strategies for Flipping Your Class are good choices] and even more websites (http://flippedclassroom.org/) and twitter hashtags (e.g., #flipclass) devoted to flipping. Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/) has also played an important and high-profile role in the rise of flipping. Flipping has been identified by the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition (http://redarchive.nmc.org/publications/2014-horizon-report-higher-ed) as an important development in education technology. In short, flipping is a hot topic and promising trend in education.

As I will point out below, flipping a class requires instructors to devise a way to deliver content outside of class time. Online teaching has the same requirement, as there is no in-person class time. I had recently developed my Social Psychology course for our new online psychology major, meaning that I had created videos of narrated presentations, essentially my in-class lectures repackaged for an online audience. This took considerable time and effort. It also made the idea of delivering live a presentation that I also had recorded seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort.

So those three events, plus my penchant for trying new things, lead me to undertake the flip.

Next up: The Mechanics of Flipping