Observation Example #5

Brewster Academy ‑ Student And Observation Summary

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Jigsaw Lesson

Teacher: Ingrid School: Lower Dept: Science Team: Smith Observer: Hess, Peter Class: E Date: 2003-11-15 Record id: 194

The teacher has:

Observed Formed four to five member heterogeneous teams.

Not Observed Arranged the desks to facilitate group interaction.

Observed Prepared class with needed instruction in working cooperatively.

Observed Posted team score sheets.

Observed Assigned research or reading task.

Observed Made expert sheets for each unit with appropriate questions.

Observed Assigned students to expert groups.

Observed Modeled correct procedures.

Not Observed Provided direct instruction.

Not Observed Guided practice in the teacher presentation.

Observed Moved from team to team to assist.

Observed Maintained an awareness of the activity occurring in groups.

Not Observed Maintained a positive testing climate.

The students were:

Observed On task.

Observed Helping each other.

Observed Checking each other's work.

The evaluation of the activity was:

Observed Clearly defined.

Observed Implemented in a timely fashion.

Observed Well-designed and appropriate to the task.

Comments:

Ingrid, thanks for welcoming me to day 2 of a Jigsaw lesson. It became apparent that the last class involved students working in expert groups. I assume they received some initial direct teaching on this topic. These groups were provided with a few minutes at the start of class to make sure that every person in the expert group is prepared to teach their teams. Students were definitely engaged in actively talking to each other about their expert topics. It was great to see you circulating to test these expert groups on their understanding. There needs to be something in the design of a jigsaw that allows you the teacher to know that all experts have acquired the correct information and are prepared to teach their teams properly. Collecting one expert question sheet at random from an expert group and correcting that is one way to accomplish this. This way, the experts need to work together to be sure they all have the same responses to these expert questions.

At 25 minutes into class you asked students to move into STAD teams or close approximations of such and gave them directions. Students were instructed not to simply copy another's answer. You modeled for students how to share information and asked them to check to be sure team members understand what they need to. Experts were encouraged to be good teachers. This is the most difficult aspect of jigsaw and we always need to develop better ways to help students do this. Ensuring that there is task structures built to help students do this is the ideal.

What I observed while students were in expert groups was that students were doing some great sharing of information. The 'need‑to‑know' charts were really helpful in structuring this process. They were actively engaged and they were all really attentive to each other. The behavioral expectations (FIT) you presented helped with this. Again, the difference between sharing information and checking for understanding on the student's part is a subtle, yet important distinction to make. One way to get this happening would be to have a 'turn and test' activity that involves experts telling their STAD teams to turn over their 'need‑to‑know' charts and state the answer to questions posed by one expert at a time. I was glad to see you asking students to do a form of this testing for understanding with oral questioning. This is well done and ensures students are checking for understanding. The only difference would be to have students being tested turn their papers over.

As you solidify your curriculum, you will want to articulate these task structures you have put in place in writing. Giving students a handout to guide them in the cooperative learning process would help you be more efficient as you will not have to tell each group what to do one at a time.

Overall, I saw a nice job of doing a Jigsaw lesson. I know you have not done many of these, but you really did a nice job. I was impressed with how well you got this group to work together and share information and test each other. This is what is needed for effective cooperative learning and was in place. I was glad to see you relating performance on a quiz to STAD team performance and score sheets on the wall. Very good work!