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Jigsaw group work

The Jigsaw is a collaborative technique where the students are split into home groups and expert groups. Each student is a member of one home and one expert group, and no group has the same students in it.

The main advantage of the Jigsaw method is that it allows no freeriders - each member of each group is critically important. If someone is slacking off, the whole group's work is disrupted. This means that there is social pressure for everyone to do their part in the group process.

Here are some advisory steps which you can follow when organizing jigsaw group work in your classroom:

1. Make groups of 4 to 6 learners in each. These groups are called home groups.
2. Ask the groups to appoint their leader. The leader should be the most mature learner on the group.
3. Divide your study topic to as many sub-themes as there are learners in the groups. For example if you are studying HIV/Aids the themes can be: (1) History of HIV/Aids, (2) health care, (3) cultures and society, (4) common misconceptions, etc.
4. In the home groups ask each learner to select one of the sub-themes.
5. Learners selecting each sub-theme form an expert group on that theme.
6. Ask the expert groups to study their theme by using different sources of information. Ask them also to prepare a presentation about their findings.
7. Bring the learners back to their home groups and ask each of them to teach the rest of the group what they learned in the expert groups.
8. Ask the home groups to prepare a presentation where they combine issues from all the sub-themes.

• Each home group can select a topic from the general theme that they would like to focus on. In the example above, the topics could be a) economic impact, b) local viewpoint, c) situation in other countries, d) education, etc.
• All of the steps above can be adapted to the particular learning scenario.
• Expert groups can meet several times, to gather more information on their specialized topics.
  

Homepage URL:

http://www.jigsaw.org/

Tags:
group work, collaboration

Language:
English

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.