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