Page 367 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 349

called our method the jigsaw classroom because it works very much
like a jigsaw puzzle. 97
An example will clarify: In a 5th-grade classroom, the children
were studying biographies of famous Americans. The upcoming les-
son happened to be a biography of Joseph Pulitzer, the famous jour-
nalist. First, we divided the students into groups of six—making
certain that each group was as diverse (in terms of race and gender)
as possible. We then constructed a biography of Pulitzer consisting
of six paragraphs. Paragraph one was about Pulitzer’s ancestors and
how they came to this country; paragraph two was about Pulitzer as
a little boy and how he grew up; paragraph three was about Pulitzer
as a young man, his education, and his early employment; paragraph
four was about his middle age and how he founded his first newspa-
per; and so forth. Each major aspect of Joseph Pulitzer’s life was con-
tained in a separate paragraph. We copied our biography of Joseph
Pulitzer, cut each copy of the biography into six one-paragraph sec-
tions, and gave every child in each of the six-person learning groups
one paragraph about Pulitzer’s life. Thus, each learning group had
within it the entire biography of Joseph Pulitzer, but each student
had no more than one-sixth of the story. To get the whole picture,
each student needed to listen carefully to the other students in the
group as they recited.
The teacher informed the students that they had a certain
amount of time to communicate their knowledge to one another. She
also informed them that they would be tested on their knowledge at
the end of that time frame.
Within a few days, the students learned that none of them could
do well without the aid of each person in the group. They learned to
respect the fact that each member (regardless of race, gender, or eth-
nicity) had a unique and essential contribution to make to their own
understanding and subsequent test performance. Now, instead of
only one expert (the teacher), each student was an expert on his or
her own segment. Instead of taunting each other, they began encour-
aging each other—because it was in each student’s own best interest
to make sure that the youngster reciting was able to communicate his
or her material in the best possible way.
As I said, it took a few days; cooperative behavior doesn’t hap-
pen all at once. The students in our experimental group had grown
accustomed to competing during all of their years in school. For the