Jigsaw for greater student engagement

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

We've all been there. Maybe your students all have a major exam upcoming in another class, or maybe your class is right before or right after lunch, or maybe it's a full moon on a Tuesday and Mars is in retrograde and Monarch butterflies have all migrated to Mexico. Whatever. For some reason that you can only imagine, you just can't get students to engage in class discussions.

Years ago, I hit upon a handy tool for times like these, a tool I only later learned had a name--jigsaw.

There are a lot of variations of the jigsaw technique so I'll just share how I set it up in my face-to-face writing classes. Because they're capped at 25 students, it’s convenient to have students form five groups of five students each. However, this exercise can be easily scaled for different-sized classes. 

To begin the exercise, I hand each group an envelope containing enough copies of a prompt for each member of the group. Each group gets a different prompt, and individual copies of each prompt are sequentially numbered. So, for instance, if I’m working with five-member groups, each group will get an envelope containing five copies of the same prompt numbered one through five.

I then give students time to read the prompt and complete whatever task it requires. For instance, I might give them the introduction to a published scientific paper and ask them to identify the theme of the paper and the primary research question the study addresses. Once they’ve completed this individually, I have students discuss their responses to the prompt with the other group members, usually with the goal of having the group reach some kind of consensus answer to the prompt.

Once I get a sense that students have had enough time for this task, I tell them that each person will now become an ambassador for their group, that they'll be responsible for explaining their group's consensus to other students. 

I point out that each of their prompts has a number on it and that they will use that number to form new groups. For instance, everyone in the room with the number "one" on their prompt will form a new group, everyone with a number "two" will form a group, etc., and I give them some instruction on where in the classroom each new group will meet. In this way, if I start with five groups of five, I end up with five new groups of five, each member of which came from a different group. I then have students share what their group’s prompt was and what consensus response they came to. Finally, I bring the class together for a large discussion to debrief them about the experience.

While it may seem a bit convoluted, it’s actually much simpler in practice than it sounds, and it is well worth the effort. Through these exercises, students have the chance to reflect carefully on a focused topic and to sharpen that focus through the lenses of other students in their group. The shuffled groups then give them practice in communicating synthesized information to others at the same time they get to consider how other groups responded to different material. It also encourages them to get to know more people in the class than just those students they regularly sit next to. 

In all, then, this technique promotes fantastic discussions, even in classes filled with students who are otherwise reluctant to speak up. Simply put, it works. Every. Single. Time.