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The Jigsaw Strategy
The jigsaw cooperative-learning technique promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and allows greater amounts of content to be studied and shared by students in a group. The jigsaw technique was first developed by Elliot Aronson and his college students. The technique allows for:
- An efficient way to learn content
- Development of listening, engagement, and empathy skills
- A way for students to work independently
- Interaction among all students
Students are divided into small groups of five or six. Each group’s task is to learn about one aspect of a subject area and become ”experts” on the subject. In this “expert” group, students do research together and collaboratively create a report or presentation. Each student is also individually responsible since they will teach others about the content. Once students have become “experts” they are reassigned a new group. Each new group is formed with “experts” from the original groups. The task for each “expert” is to teach the others in their group about the content they have studied. Once all “experts” have presented, each group member has learned five or six new aspects of the subject area and is ready to take an exam, write an essay, or group with another “expert” to create a multimedia presentation.
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