THE STRATEGY IN A SENTENCE

Students break into expert teams to learn one particular aspect of the content, so that they can teach peers in their base teams prior to producing a knowledge product, or participating in a knowledge check (quiz or discussion). 

SITE: The Jigsaw Classroom
"4 THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE JIGSAW METHOD"

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THE WHY

Purposes

FROM JIGSAW.ORG: "The Jigsaw Classroom is a cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict among school children, promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience."

Research Check

VISIBLE LEARNING EFFECT SIZE: 1.2
The Jigsaw Method, which has a fascinating history of development for class cohesion purposes in the 1970s, is one of the most effective strategies in the Visible Learning meta-analysis research of John Hattie. 

THE WHEN
​& WHAT FOR 

WHEN TO USE IT: Surface lessons, Deep lessons, and potentially Transfer lessons (depending upon how it is structured and where it is placed in the unit). The cool thing about the Jigsaw Method is how versatile it is.
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SURFACE / BACKGROUND: The Jigsaw Method can be used to help students learn core content in the unit at an initial surface level. The way this works is that each student specializes in a "sub-area" of related content, and is accountable to teach the material to their peers. Peer instruction would be followed by an accountability knowledge check, in some form (ranging from a quiz to some type product students create that requires them to use the knowledge taught by their peers). 

DEEP: Perhaps students have already learned surface level content (whether by direct instruction or some other method), and now go into Jigsaw groups in order to support a deep lesson objective, such as analysis (breaking down concepts into component parts) or evaluation (students might have different pieces of evidence, or different examples, that represent potential strengths or limitations of a concept that they are evaluating). 

​TRANSFER: Furthermore, there are many possible extensions. John Hattie, Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher (writing in Visible Learning for Science; Corwin, 2018) mention a next step in which students return to their expert teams and discuss how the different content components relate to one another (this can be an opportunity for moving from surface to deep learning or transfer learning). Base teams could also take the information learned in expert teams and combine it to solve a problem, apply the knowledge to make something new, or to create an interpretive project. 

​The important thing, as usual, is to understand what you want students to learn and be able to do as a result of the Jigsaw activity. 

THE HOW
​& SUPPORTING RESOURCES

You're probably familiar with this method, which starts with 4, 5 or 6 students assigned to home groups. The students then break out into expert groups to double check their understanding and make sure they can teach the material to other students. Then they return to their home group and take turns teaching the material. 

The part we often forget is the next one, but it's arguably the crucial part: check every student's understanding of every important piece of content (whether with a quiz or other method). The super helpful video summary by Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy) provided above has some cool ideas about how to combine individual and group score aspects into the quiz / check finale of the Jigsaw lesson.