The following information has been provided by Eric Buhs, Associate Professor, Educational Psychology during CTT's Fall 2019 Teaching Learning Symposium.
Overview:
Why? I’ve found small group role-playing exercises to be very useful in helping prepare future teachers and helping-career professionals. The Jigsaw method can be useful with anyone preparing for a career where work in collaborative teams with different training is common.
Who? The Jigsaw method was originally designed by social psychologist Eliot Aronson (ca. 1971 – see www.jigsaw.org) to help reduce competition and decrease racial conflict in multi-cultural school classrooms. Jigsaw uses a cooperative goal structure to reduce competition and also helps students develop skills as group leaders and expert collaborators.
How? Jigsaw breaks students into two different sets, or phases, of collaborative groups. Let’s imagine, for example, you have a 25-student classroom group and you need five groups of five members each where you want them to learn about a specific topic or role-playing perspective in a small group (the Learning Group phase) and then B) teach what they learned about that topic/role to a new group (the Expert Group phase).
In an education classroom, for example, your goal might be to have students learn about different professional roles and how those different staff might collaborate to problem-solve strategies for a student experiencing difficulties. The school might typically create a support group with 1) a teacher, 2) a school psychologist, 3) a parent (of the targeted student), 4) a special education teacher, and 5) a paraeducator.
Benefits and Technique:
To roleplay such a group using Jigsaw, you would use two sets of groups for two learning phases:
- Learning Groups. Place students in their phase 1 “subject area” Learning Groups – in this phase, groups of students will brainstorm (or do research) to generate goals and strategies appropriate to their shared “occupation” and perspective. All students in Group #1 will brainstorm goals and strategies from a teacher’s perspective, those in Group #2 will brainstorm goals and strategies from a school psychologist’s perspective, etc.
- Expert Groups. Once students have completed their phase 1 Learning Groups discussion/brainstorm, they break into phase 2 Expert Groups – the new Expert Groups contain one student from each of the initial Learning Groups. The new Expert Groups now have one member each from the previous teacher group, one from the school psychologist group, etc. The Expert Groups can now role-play the situation with one expert from each of the initial Learning Groups and will benefit from the ideas and perspectives developed in the learning groups.
Benefits. The Jigsaw structure improves student small group interactions in that students become informed and more expert on a topic in their Learning Groups without the competitive pressure of doing a quiz, etc.
Some classroom exercises may devote an extended amount of time to Learning Groups and create a short paper or set of learning materials which each Learning Group member can then take with them to their new Expert Group where they would then function as the “expert” in that content area.
This method also presents the benefit that each student in the Expert Groups would have the role of a leader (or “explainer”) – classroom research on small groups has shown that students in the role of leader/explainer are also better at retaining more new information.