Flipping with a Jigsaw, Part 4

Part 4: The Jigsaw Classroom in my flipped class

So that’s the generic Jigsaw. The Jigsaw requires a lot of prep work. In social psychology we aren’t studying biographies or other material that easily divides into parts. Instead we are learning about theories and perspectives, studies and findings. So I had to come up with prompts for each learning group based on the course material. I decided to take advantage of another existing resource: the essay questions I had crafted over the 20 years of teaching the class. I used to give a list of 7-10 essay questions for each chapter and I would select 2 to be on the exam. Students might answer every question in preparation for the exam, but they also might not even look at them. What I decided to do is give each learning group an essay question about that day’s assigned material that they have to find the answer to. The questions typically require higher-level Bloom’s taxonomy thinking (analysis, application, etc.), and often the groups have to come to some agreement about the best answer as there is no clear right or wrong one. One nice consequence of using the essay questions in this way is that students get the answers to all (or most) of the essay questions that I used to give out in my non-flipped version, not just the few they work on alone or have to answer on an exam in a traditional class. In a class of 20-25 students, I typically create 5-6 prompts from the essay questions, so this means I can cover most or all of the essay questions in the Jigsaw.

After the Jigsaw I give a short, 12-question multiple-choice quiz that covers the material from the Jigsaw (the quizzes are only worth 10 points, meaning they can skip 2 questions). A few of the questions (and I tell them this the first day of class) come from the text or recorded lectures but are not covered in the Jigsaw. This means that if they don’t read or watch the presentations and only come to class they can theoretically still get 8 or 9 correct – a good grade, but if they want an A or B they need to do some work outside of class.

I also go over the quizzes immediately after they complete them. I collect the Scantron forms, letting them keep the quiz questions, and go over the correct answers (and the reason they are correct). Students leave class not only knowing the score they got on the quiz, but why they got the ones wrong that they did. As I’m learning from reading about metacognition, tests and quizzes are really best thought of as retrieval exercises, and retrieval practice is essential for learning. Students in my flipped class take 25 quizzes with 12 questions each, or 274 multiple choice questions. That’s more than they would in my non-flipped course. Plus they are thinking about every essay question! And they are working in groups, practicing cooperation, and getting to know their classmates.

Another benefit to the Jigsaw is that every student speaks in class. After 20+ years of teaching I can say that this flipped class with the Jigsaw is the first one in which every student speaks and is engaged in every class. I’ve struggled to get even half of the students to participate in seminar courses, and my non-flipped social psychology course only prompted the occasional brief discussion, usually from just a few students (aside from the active learning interludes). There’s no hiding in a Jigsaw class! If you want student engagement I don’t know of a better way to do it.

Next up: Student perceptions and performance