The Jigsaw pedagogical strategy is a teaching approach that promotes students’ critical thinking skills, analysis and dialogue while encouraging student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction around challenging curricular content. This pedagogical approach entails dividing the class into several teams, where each team prepares separate but related assignments. The pedagogy enables student groups to tackles an assignment together that pulls all elements of content together to form a full picture, hence the name jigsaw.
- Jigsaws can be implemented in college-level classrooms across grades.
- If students instruct one another, they must have a strong grasp of the material.
- It is important that students do hands-on labs to fully understand the material.
- Divide the class into several teams, assigning each team separate but related assignments.
- When all team members have completed their assignments, the class is re-divided into mixed groups, where one member from each original team is transferred to a new group.
- The new transferred team member then teaches the rest of the group what he/she learned from their assignment.
- The new mixed group then tackles a new assignment where they combine all of the differing content knowledge pieces to form a new a perspective on the material, hence the name jigsaw
- Jigsaws are an effective way of engaging students with course material and with each other.
- The jigsaw teaching strategy increases student’s level of learning and produces positive social and attitudinal gains.
- Short jigsaws are easy to construct and are invaluable tools in helping students learn to plot data, interpret graphs, and use formulas and equations.
- Jigsaws are versatile in that they can be used in class, in the field or in a lab.
- Team assignments can be based on field exposures, graphs, equations, maps, photographs and articles from literature.