Using the Jigsaw activity in a coursebook reading

When doing a reading activity in class, I find my students mostly going at it trying to find the answers than actually trying to understand the text in any way. This leads to many mistakes in questions that need understanding or gist. By using a jigsaw activity, I wanted to show them that understanding can come in a number of different ways and also show them that you can understand a text quickly by using a number of different techniques. What I thought will help them is to use the Jigsaw activity to revamp a reading exercise from my coursebook to make sure that all my students are trying to understand the text before attempting to answer the questions. I particularly liked the Jigsaw II method I had seen from the ‘Cult of pedagogy’ blog so I am going to use this activity in my class. Here is a rundown of the activity.

The Jigsaw activity explained by the Cult of Pedagogy

My implementation of the Jigsaw II method

1. Start a whole-group discussion of the reading activity to activate background knowledge. Use title and or any other medium you have, like some photos, or images from google. You can preteach some vocabulary words here.
2. Break up the groups into ‘expert’ groups to go over the junk of text as a team. Here each student will share what they understood of the paragraph and clarify any misconceptions. As for my activity, I will break up the students into four different groups to go over the four parts of the reading text.
3. Next, I will create new groups having students with a different paragraph join the group. Here each student will present their paragraph to the other students. Here the other students are not allowed to look at the paragraph themselves.
4. As a group, I will have them dicuss some genreal questions about the text.
5. As a group, I will have them answer the questions from the reading activity.
6. As individuals, we will correct the activity and get a summative score.
7. As small groups, I will calculate their group average to see which group got the most points.

How I implemented it in class

My resources

What I did was open my coursebook and took screenshots and via Canva.com I made a worksheet of my Reading activity section and split up the text into 4 parts. This is the number of students I will use in each group.

Source: Coursebook: Express publishing Right On 3. Module 5a Reading

jigsaw-reading-activity-senior-c-module-5aDownload

General questions to be asked when students form the final group.

jigsaw-reading-activity-senior-c-module-5a-general-understanding-questions-before-activityDownload