blog #3 Jigsaw method

After reading about the jigsaw method of teaching I realized that is how my summer foundations of education teacher ran his class. We all had sections to do and then after a few minutes we gave our parts and in the end the entire class learned all the topics. I was not impressed with and did not have fun doing this. After reading the article outlining the jig saw method I think I understand why I have such a hard time with that kind of classroom. Go to http://www.jigsaw.org/overview.htm if you would like to read it yourself. It says that older students have been taught to compete with each other. I would like to take that thought out farther and say that I have been taught to be independent, want to be graded for my own work, and because of that I hate group projects. What is odd considering how I feel about my own student work I picture my classroom as groups of students working together as families, armies, etc. so that they can have a better understanding of how diverse groups lived through the same historical incident. If I only had five computers in the class this jigsaw idea would work just fine because I will have books, magazines, and other information in the room for the students to work with while someone is on the computer. The advantage to only having a few computers would be teaching students to use many different forms of information to meet their needs as well as cooperation. The bad part of only having one computer is time. Sometimes it takes a while to find what you are looking for and middle school classes are not very long each day. I like the jigsaw idea and planed to do something similar in my class before I had even found out it existed.