Keys to a Good Jigsaw Activity: 3 + 1

• So what would you do? Would you choose to save the one person you know or the 5 people you don’t?
• How do you say ‘human rights’ in Japanese?
• Really? You have this book? Can I read it? 

Yesterday we had great discussions in Honors English 10—with the added twist of some visitors. It’s an activity I love—jigsawing—plus a group of students from a nearby Japanese high school was doing a half-day exchange visit, and 3 of them along with their English teacher came to our class.  

I love a good jigsaw activity. The one we did yesterday I wrote about last year here. This year was even better with the added challenge of explaining to the visitors what was going on. A couple of students usually on the quieter side rose to the challenge of working to translate the sophisticated legal, psychological, and ethical terms and ideas. I realized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into over 500 languages—so I could just print a couple of Japanese copies! The 2 visitors in that group perked up considerably, and some of my students wanted to see what it looked like in Japanese. (They may be fluent in daily conversation, but that level of formality was opaque to them.)
 
Our topic is human dignity—what is it, and why is it important? Our central piece of literature is the Holocaust memoir Night. Before reading it, though, we did some background reading on the Rwanda genocide and watched clips from the movie Hotel Rwanda to bring the issue closer to the present and highlight that “us/them” divisiveness is not just white vs. black (as in our previous novel Cry, the Beloved Country)—it’s also Hutus vs. Tutsis and Germans vs. Jews and many other things in other times and places. As we read the book, we noted instances, causes, and effects of disregard for human dignity, as well as the few examples of people fighting the flow to stay human and treat others as such. We also note how the author uses the tools of literature to make those images powerful.

After reading, I wanted students to get even more background information on a variety of topics related to human dignity that they could pull into their final synthesis paper. So I offered 3 very different but very relevant pieces:

• The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a legal document, so difficult reading level, but shortest of the documents; written in response to the Holocaust and referred to in current political commentary. 
• “What Makes Us Moral?”—a Time magazine article citing psychological and sociological studies and experiments in an attempt to explain how humanity continues to produce both Mother Theresas and Adolph Hitlers. 
• An excerpt of the introduction to Half the Sky—a work by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on, as the subtitle says, Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. This has both statistics and stories of individuals. See Sheryl’s TED Talk, “Our Century’s Greatest Injustice,” for a taste. 

Students chose the piece they were most interested in reading Thursday night. They read and annotated it on their own, coming to class ready to discuss it. On Friday, first they  gathered with others who had read the same piece. In these groups, they asked clarifying questions to make sure they understood it themselves, then decided how best to summarize it for their classmates who had read other pieces, and which elements might be most relevant to and useful for the synthesis papers.

In my experience, there are 3 keys to a good jigsaw activity:

1. A topic that students have a stake in.
2. Jigsawed materials that are relevant to the topic but varied in content, style, and challenge, within which students have choice.
3. An end-product for which students have a felt need to understand both their material and everyone else’s.

The "plus one" key, which I can't always count on, is a real audience. It happened serendipitously yesterday, and it wasn't a disruption--it actually heightened the learning.

For the next class, when students will be brainstorming, planning, and doing any needed additional research for their synthesis papers on human dignity, I’ve posted additional optional sources (see page 2 of this Google Doc). 

Do you have a jigsaw activity that has worked well in your class? If so, please share it in the comments below! If not, consider trying it.