Are you familiar with jigsaw reading?

Though this is a very famous and trendy technique, many teachers and student teachers may not know what this is exactly about.

Jigsaw is a cooperative learning strategy that enables each student of a "home" group to specialize in one aspect of a topic (for example, one group studies habitats of rainforest animals, another group studies predators of rainforest animals). Students meet with members from other groups who are assigned the same aspect, and after mastering the material, return to the "home" group and teach the material to their group members. With this strategy, each student in the "home" group serves as a piece of the topic's puzzle and when they work together as a whole, they create the complete jigsaw puzzle.

In the jigsaw form of instruction, the target material is divided, usually into four parts, and distributed to small groups to learn.

When these homogeneous groups have mastered their material, students regroup into heterogeneous groups to present material and complete a task.
Peer teaching and group problem solving are used to complete the jigsaw.

Initially, your classroom would look like this:

A A            B B            C C            D D    

A A            B B            C C            D D

Once students have mastered their material, your classroom would look like this:

A B            A B             A B            A B   

C D            C D            C D            C D

watch an example !

•  Advantages of this techniques

1. Students have the opportunity to teach themselves, instead of having material presented them. The technique fosters depth of understanding

2. Each student has practiced it in self-teaching, which is the most valuable of the entire skill teacher can help them learn.

3. Students have can practice in peer teaching, which requires that they understand the material at deeper level than student typically do when simply asked to produce an exam

4. Students become more fluent in use of English

5. Each student has a chance to contribute meaningfully to discussion, something that is difficult to achieve in large group discussion. Each student develops an expertise and has something important to contribute.

6. Asking each group to discuss a follow-up question after individual presentation fosters real discussion. (Tewkesburry (2008 : web.grcc.edu))

•  Disadvantages of this technique

1. It takes much time to organize the group

The teacher should make groups that combine the students who have different intelligences

2. If students don’t get into their group quickly enough or read their initial texts quickly enough, it will run out of time.

3. If one or two obstinate students don’t participate a whole group or two will lose out on a piece of the text.

4. The class situation become noisy, so the teacher needs to control the students

5. A teacher cannot monitor all groups at once.

-Sources-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtm5_w6JthA
http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/jigsaw/
http://www.k12academics.com/pedagogy/jigsaw-classroom