Jigsaw

Jigsaw activities involve cutting up information in some way and getting the students to re-assemble it. An example of a “jigsaw-activity” would be the following:

The teacher prepares a topic that  he hopes the students will find interesting and fits into the curriculum if necessary. For example the students could be learning about the UK. The teacher splits the class into four or five groups a appropriate for the material. The groups will be named A, B C etc.

Every group gets a text containing different information on Britain, for example about politics, social life, entertainment, religion etc. The learners study their texts, take notes and help each other when questions arise. They are then rearranged into new groups each containing a person from group A, from B, from C, and so on. Now the learners discuss and exchange the information they worked on in the first groups so that everyone has all the information about Britain and is able to answer questions the teacher could ask. They do not take the original information with them, only their nots and what is in their heads.

This activity obliges the pupils to talk, even the ones who do not normally speak that much in class, because they are all dependent on the information another student has.