Jigsaw

This is a little delayed, but I wanted to talk about the jigsaw activity I tried on Wednesday.

With a jigsaw the students start with a group of students. This is their original group. Each person in that group is given a different piece of information about a subject. They immediately get up and form new groups with the other students who have the same piece of information that they do. Within the new group they discuss their information and learn together. They all have the same information and a question or two to help them think about and understand their part. After a period of time, they go back to their original groups to teach the other students about what they learned. Each student has a part of the "puzzle" and they must work together to get all of the information.

We did this in one of my classes at GSU, and it was pretty neat. I tried it in my 7th grade class and it was a spectacular failure. I am pretty sure that the students understood the assignment. They knew that they were supposed to learn about something with their group and then go back to their original group and share. Unfortunately, very few of them actually wanted to work. 

The group stuff doesn't really seem to work. Once they are in groups, they do not concentrate on what they are supposed to do. They want to talk about themselves or others. Part of my issue is that I don't have enough control of the classroom yet. If they do not listen to me, they are not going to do the work I assign. 

Once they got back to their original groups, they either 1) just sat there, 2) passed their information around for others to copy instead of "teaching" each other, or 3) gossiped some more. Many of them didn't even have paper out. I got quite frustrated. The entire day was wasted, and we did a PowerPoint on the same information the next day.