Week 18: Fiction Jigsaw

At CATE 2015, I attended a session presented by Daniel Reynolds on postmodernism. Reynolds gave us a number of strategies and resources for not only reading postmodern texts but also for teaching in a postmodern way. One of the strategies he mentioned was the jigsaw. (For information on how to "jigsaw" your classroom, go here.) He asked the crowd what types of texts we traditionally use with jigsaws; we mentioned nonfiction texts, texts that we just need to "get through," texts that help provide background knowledge for our students, etc. Reynolds explained that we typically jigsaw pieces of nonfiction because there isn't usually a story line those texts follow, and since there's no story line, we don't have to worry about our students missing something or not understanding something by only reading the piece that they are assigned. If we jigsaw a fictional piece, we are playing with the order of the narrative, much in the same way that many postmodernist authors play with the order of their narratives. (In fact, Reynolds told us about a book called The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, which was published in 1969. It is a "book in a box" - all of the pages come, unbound, in a box, and you can essentially read them in any order you want.) On the handout he gave us, Reynolds noted, "This approach pushes into stark awareness for students how meaning is constructed, and how we understand plot, characterization, and other literary elements as steps in a process of meaning making." While I was sitting in the session, I immediately decided to use the jigsaw with The Awakening.

I'll be honest ... I have actually used the jigsaw with fiction during my student teaching with The Crucible; it didn't go very well, and I felt guilty when other teachers espoused strong opinions about how students need to read texts in their entirety and not in bits and pieces. Now, however, I have a new rationale behind the method - it is a postmodernist approach! It's perfect, especially since I am having them read "A Rose for Emily" soon after finishing the novel, and my students always have difficulty with the fact that the story isn't told in chronological order. Also... and, again, I will be honest... I am getting really bored with The Awakening because we have been reading it for so long! It is just over 100 pages, and we have been reading it since the beginning of February! If I am bored, there is no doubt in my mind that my students are bored. We need to finish this book, and we need to do so as quickly as possible.

I introduced the strategy Monday right after the conference. In groups of four, each student read a different chapter and then was responsible for teaching that chapter to the rest of the group. At the end, the groups were to write a one-sentence summary on what happened in all four chapters. By coincidence, my student teacher used the strategy again this past Tuesday and Wednesday in much the same way for a lesson she needed to videotape for her school. Her jigsaw got the students through chapter 28 out of 39. Toward the end of 2nd period on Wednesday, one of my students told me that he really liked doing the jigsaw because meeting in the "expert" group to hash out the details of his chapter helped him to really understand what happened in that chapter.

Wednesday afternoon, I had a decision to make: we could keep plowing ahead and take another week and a half to finish the novel, or I could use the jigsaw on a larger scale to finish the novel by the beginning of this coming week. I opted for the latter.

At the start of class on Thursday, before I even explained what we were doing, one of my students asked, "Ms. Lewis, why do we keep doing that jigsaw thing? Is it because we need to finish the book?" I smiled and, as always, answered honestly, "Yes, we are doing it to help us finish the book. However, it is also a postmodernist approach to reading because it forces you to read the plot out of order. Do you remember how in your project on postmodernism you learned that postmodern authors often play with the sequence of events?" He did. "Well, the jigsaw does that same thing. Also, it will help prepare you for a story we are going to read called 'A Rose for Emily,' in which the events are not told in order." He nodded. The rest of the class nodded. I introduced how we were going to jigsaw the rest of the book.

In my classroom, my students are sitting in groups of three or four because I often have them work in groups. In 1st period, I have ten groups, so I assigned each table group a chapter between 29 and 38; these table groups would become the expert groups on their assigned chapter and would report on their chapter to the rest of the class. I told the groups to read silently. Then, when they finished reading, they were to begin working on a poster, in the form of a Frayer Model, that should include the following information:


On Thursday, students read and began working on the posters. Yesterday, after their vocabulary quiz, they told me they wanted to keep working on their posters. (!) I will give them about five minutes to finish on Monday, and then they will "teach" their chapters to the class. During the presentations, I am going to force my students to practice their listening skills by telling them that they are not allowed to write anything down while the expert group is presenting. However, after each presentation, the students will be responsible for writing down notes on the chapter. (I don't want them writing during the presentations, because then they will just copy what's on the poster, which doesn't help them internalize the information.) At the end of all the presentations, they will write a 3-5 sentence summary of what happened in chapters 29-38. Then, on Tuesday, we will finish the book together.
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Ease of use: Honestly, the jigsaw is very easy to implement once you have a text you want to use, especially if that text is already "chunked" for you. The most important thing is to make sure students understand what they are responsible for.
Would I use this again: Yes. This isn't a strategy to use all the time, but in certain scenarios, it can be very valuable, especially in getting the students to work together.
Downsides: The students don't actually read the entire text. (Not all of them got to read the part in which Edna finally kisses Robert!!! I still feel a little bad about this...)
Applications: As Daniel Reynolds explained and as I've illustrated, you can do a jigsaw with fiction as well as nonfiction. The website I linked at the top of this post - The Jigsaw Classroom - gives detailed instructions on how to use the jigsaw in your classroom.