Jigsaw+(Patchwork)+Groups


 * During Reading Strategy: Jigsaw/Patchwork Groups **

The Jigsaw Groups strategy (also known as Patchwork Groups) is a collaborative learning activity that is useful for helping students to unpack copious amounts of dense information. Each person belongs to a home group, these are the group members who will help each other to get the "whole picture." However,each member of the home group is also designated a different expert group each with a different set of information to unpack. This strategy is a test of students' cooperative learning skills (and the teacher's classroom management) and is not something that I would recommend as a beginning of the year activity. It takes a large amount of cooperation and trust between students. For that reason I would most likely assign the groups so that I could minimize classroom management issues. I would also go through the for the activity and model how to do the activity with a linear and piecewise function before students disperse into their expert groups.

After a short meeting with their home group and designating which group member would be in each expert group students will disperse into their expert groups. Assigning students an expert group based on their skill/ability levels is an easy way of differentiating for this activity and can be done covertly by numbering students of each home group based on which expert group topic(s) would be best suited for the individual student. The goal is for students in each "expert group" to delve into their designated topics thoroughly by cooperatively completing the task assigned. For my activity each expert group has a set of 8 cards with 4 different representations of each of the groups functions. Each expert group is responsible for completing the task of sorting their cards into the appropriate category based on the different function and representation types. Students will then fill out a chart with the information for their group. To make the activity a higher level task, instead of just sorting cards I increased the level of difficulty by leaving missing information on each card, which students needed to use the other cards in the set to solve for the missing information before filling in their charts.



After each expert group is done filling in their charts for their two functions and have a good understanding of their assigned functions, the members of the expert group will disperse back to their home group. I also added an independent task for the members of groups that finish first to work on while waiting for the other members of the home group so that they are not just sitting and waiting (also to prevent classroom management issues that arise from lack of direction). When the students are back in their home groups they will teach their home group members about the functions which they learned about in their expert groups. As each group member learns about the other types of functions from their group members the student use this information to fill out the rest of the chart.

Ideally you should also incorporate a whole class review of all the material and a form of assessment after implementing this strategy.

For more information about Jigsaw groups see the following sites:

Aronson, E. (2014). The Jigsaw Classroom: A Cooperative Learning Technique. //The Jigsaw Classroom: A Cooperative Learning Technique//. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from @http://www.jigsaw.org/

Instructional Strategies Online - Jigsaw. (2009). Instructional Strategies Online - Jigsaw. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from @http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/DE/PD/instr/strats/jigsaw/