During my student teaching, one aspect of social learning that I liked to use was the jigsaw activity. Instead of trying to explain the activity to you in my own words, I am going to make reference of a great website I was introduced to this week in our text that does a great job summarizing the activity in addition to providing a great resource for any teacher (experienced or unexperienced) wanting to utilize this strategy.
1. Divide students into 5- or 6-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, and ability.
2. Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially, this person should be the most mature student in the group.
3. Divide the day's lesson into 5-6 segments. For example, if you want history students to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt, you might divide a short biography of her into stand-alone segments on: (1) Her childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work after Franklin's death.
4. Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students have direct access only to their own segment.
5. Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and become familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.
6. Form temporary "expert groups" by having one student from each jigsaw group join other students assigned to the same segment. Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.
7. Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.
8. Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.
9. Float from group to group, observing the process. If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.
10. At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material so that students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.
From: http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm
Trust me, that was a lot more coherent then my explanation would have been. Anyways, if you have not used this technique before, it is a great way to give your students new information while at the same time giving them a new activity that breaks up a class period into a few different sections. If executed properly, I think this activity exemplifies my opinions of the benefits of social learning in the classroom.
First of all, as the creator of the groups, you have the ability to arrange the groupings in a way that places students of various abilities and strengths/weaknesses together in a way that can hopefully benefit everyone involved.If you have a student that struggles with something, they can watch another student in their group succeed at that specific task to gain insight into how they can become better and hopefully master the particular skill. In addition to this, it allows students to put information into their own words which might benefit their peers that end up learning the information from them. Regardless of whether or not you relate well to your students, sometimes the way we teacher phrase particular items or explain certain topics simply is difficult for our students to understand. Some students may have a better time understanding information if it is facilitated to them by one of their own peers. The last thing I will mention (although there are plenty of other things) is the real world value this activity includes. These students are put into a group of peers (coworkers) who then have to interpret information so they can pass it on to another group of peers (coworkers) who are learning (working on) something else. It is my opinion that many of our students would benefit from this type of routine not only in their future careers, but also in college, if that is the path they are taking.
Overall, I believe that social learning has a valuable place within our classroom to help students learn together and to prepare our students for their futures. That being said, I do not believe that social learning should be the sole strategy used in the classroom because I believe it can be misused or manipulated by students fairly easily. Therefore, it is my belief that social learning techniques and strategies should be used on occasion within the classroom in addition to a variety of other teaching strategies.
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Hi Marcus,
ReplyDeleteI also really like using the jigsaw activity with my students. It is a little different than the normal routine but it does have students work well together.
I also like your reference to the real world perspective. I, too, wrote about how the cooperative learning in the classroom will help prepare them for the real-world occupations. Too many times they want to just be with their friends, but that is not [always] realistic to a group setting and students may not always complete the assignment in the way expected. However, when placed into groups with multiple learning abilities, it is important to keep track that the same, more advanced, students are not always doing the work and being taken advantage of.
Grace,
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. I found that delegating certain "jobs" within the jigsaw groups was a good way to ensure that some students weren't the ones doing all the work and this seemed to be a good way of preventing that issue.