Last changed 6 Feb 2012 ............... Length about 900 words (7,000 bytes).
(Document started on 5 Feb 2012.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/localed/jigsawpresent.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [localed] [this page]

How to communicate a Jigsaw design

By Steve Draper, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

This page concerns how to communicate a Jigsaw (or similar) learning design. Brief statements of what these designs are, and references, are currently given not here but in its parent page.

I'm interested in a number of published designs that seem to me related to Jigsaw, and the representations here may be useful for some of them, although I'll focus on Jigsaw itself here. My current list of Jigsaw cousins is:

Jigsaw link
Patchwork text link
Reflexive / reflective learning diaries; e.g. in Mahara, where a small group reads and comments regularly on each individual's diary. link
Sugata Mitra's self-organsing education link
The snowball technique/pyramid. This is ancient: get each individual to write down their own view/answer; then discuss it in pairs; then in fours; then in plenary. Bowskill's application of it
Socratic dialogue (Nelson's sense of this) link
Reciprocal peer critiquing link

Those of us who have given talks or written reports on Jigsaw-related designs have had trouble conveying clearly and concisely what our particular design was. There is probably some killer diagram showing it, but I haven't managed to invent it yet. In two separate cases I actually couldn't understand the design which colleagues were trying to describe in their draft reports. And after a talk I gave on my design, an audience member told be (trying to be tactful) that they had been doing groupwork for years: clearly I had failed to convey any real difference between Jigsaw designs and routine groupwork. So it's a bit trickier than it seems to the practitioner whose design is so clear in her head.

The difference

What makes the Jigsaw learning design different from the groupwork many courses do anyway?

A. The mutual dependence of students. The main aim for Aronson originally was to create group bonding by making students dependent on each other, not on the teacher or themselves alone.

This idea has a long history (traditional seminars are supposed to be like this, but seldom are in practice), but also has promising modern reincarnations such as have students write test items for each other. This is sometimes called student generated content (SGC), and/or Contributing-student pedagogy (CSP).

B. The cross-cutting groups. In a true Jigsaw, each student is a member of not one but of two groups of different kinds.

One kind (the "self-teach", expert groups) are co-experts helping each other prepare material for teaching other students; the other kind (the "cross-teach", home groups) are where students teach each other different parts of the overall topic. However in many near-Jigsaw designs, the home groups are either the whole class, or individuals learning different things from each other (example1: as in a traditional seminar, each student constructs something different for the class; example2: each reflecting on their own different, personal professional practice; although helped overall by comments from a group).

Representations

A number of different representations are useful. Here are some crude examples.

Representation 1: Bullet list

Use numbers; get across there are 2 group types; tell the size of the class, the size of each type of group, and the number of people in each type of group; and the cycle time (once per week or once per course?).

Aspects of Aronson's version of Jigsaw:

Each learner is a member of not 1 but 2 groups.
Total number of learners (class size) ≈ 20-30
Group size of cross-teach groups ≈ 4 (number of groups ≈ 7)
Group size of self-teach groups ≈ 7 (number of groups ≈ 4)
No information / communication technology, nor virtual learning environment used.
Done every 1-2 class meetings; repeated throughout the term (i.e. about ≈ 10 times). (So not one piece of "groupwork" per semester.)
School (not HE) level

Representation 2: Table (in a handout, probably generated in a spreadsheet)

If giving a handout to a class, you need to create and distribute a list of students, with TWO group names from two different, cross-cutting, sets against each student (because each will be in 2 not 1 groups).

Put up (part of) one of my Ss handouts, listing these; as a table.

Representation 3: Slide for showing an audience where to go now

If getting the class to break into groups to talk to each other, then one kind of slide to display is here. They need to move physically, and they need to have a map visible as they move: so a projected slide is what is needed.

Put up SLH's slides here?

Representation 4: Diagram showing how individuals connect groups

Try to create a diagram, in excel.; And display it here.

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [localed] [this page]
[Top of this page]