In 1971, Elliot Aronson walked into an Austin, Texas school that had just been desegregated. White, Black, and Latino students shared a classroom for the first time, and the tension was obvious. Students clustered by race. Academic competition ran high. Teachers were uncertain how to bridge social divides that ran deeper than any single lesson.
Aronson's solution was structural, not motivational. Change how students depend on one another, and the social dynamics shift alongside it.
The jigsaw method was born in that classroom. Fifty years of research later, it remains one of the most evidence-backed cooperative learning strategies in K-12 education — and the core mechanism has never changed: every student holds one piece of the puzzle, and the full picture only appears when the group works together.
What Is the Jigsaw Method?
The jigsaw method is a cooperative learning strategy in which each student is assigned a unique portion of the learning material, becomes an "expert" on that portion alongside peers who share the same subtopic, and then teaches what they learned to their original group.
Aronson's original design was deliberate about its social purpose: because every student holds information that others need, the group cannot succeed without each member's full participation. Competition gives way to cooperation through the structure of the task itself, not through appeals to goodwill.
The method involves two types of groups. Home groups are the students' primary teams, typically 4-5 members, where they begin and end the activity. Expert groups are temporary gatherings of students who share the same subtopic; these groups form in the middle of the activity to allow deep study before students return to teach their home groups.
Variations have since emerged, including Jigsaw II (which adds individual quizzes and team scores), Jigsaw III, and Jigsaw IV (which incorporates an overview of all material before expert groups form). Each iteration preserves the defining feature: positive interdependence.
Positive interdependence is the condition in which students can only reach their goal if every group member reaches theirs. It is the structural foundation of jigsaw — and what separates it from group work where one student does the work and others attach their names to it.
The 10 Steps to Implementing the Jigsaw Method
Effective jigsaw requires more preparation than most teachers expect. Run through this protocol before your first session.
Before Class
- Select appropriate content. Choose material that divides into 3-5 roughly equal, non-sequential subtopics. A chapter on world religions works well; a chapter on solving multi-step equations does not, because each step depends on the one before it.
- Build expert packets. Create one packet per subtopic. Each should include a short reading, key questions the expert must be able to answer, and a simple teaching guide.
- Plan your groups. Aim for groups of 4-5. Mix students by ability, language background, and social dynamic.
During Class
- Form home groups. These are students' primary teams. Assign each member a number or letter corresponding to a subtopic.
- Brief the whole class. Explain the task, the timeline, and each student's role. Be explicit: the group's success depends on every expert doing their job well.
- Form expert groups. All students assigned to subtopic 1 gather together, as do those assigned to subtopics 2, 3, and 4.
- Expert groups study and prepare. Give 10-15 minutes to read, discuss, and answer the key questions. Circulate to check understanding before anyone returns to their home group. This step is where implementation most often breaks down — and where your attention matters most.
- Return to home groups. Students go back to their original teams.
- Experts teach. Each student teaches their subtopic, using notes, diagrams, or prepared summaries.
- Assess individually. Close with a quiz, exit ticket, or graphic organizer that covers all subtopics, not just the one each student taught.
"Piece learning," where students understand only their own subtopic because a peer's explanation was incomplete or confusing, is the most common jigsaw failure. The quality check in Step 7 is the most important safeguard. Do not skip it.
Benefits of the Jigsaw Method for Student Outcomes
Academic Performance and Retention
Research consistently connects the jigsaw method to stronger academic performance and better material retention than traditional instruction. This holds across multiple subject areas. The mechanism is straightforward: teaching content to peers forces a level of processing that passive review does not. Students who can explain a concept clearly understand it at a deeper level than students who can only recognize it on a test.
John Hattie's Visible Learning meta-analysis, which synthesized findings from tens of thousands of studies, places cooperative learning among the highest-effect instructional strategies available to classroom teachers.
An effect size of 0.40 sits well above the typical classroom intervention. For context, Hattie's threshold for "hinge point," the minimum effect worth pursuing, is 0.40. Cooperative learning consistently meets or exceeds it.
Social- Emotional Development
Studies show that regular jigsaw participation improves empathy, communication, and teamwork. In Aronson's original Austin classrooms, students in jigsaw sections showed measurably lower levels of racial prejudice than peers in traditional lecture-based classes. The social-emotional gains were a design goal from the beginning, not a side effect.
Individual Accountability
Group work earns a bad reputation partly because strong students often carry weaker ones. The jigsaw structure counters this directly: each student is responsible for content that no one else in their home group holds. There is no passenger role. The individual closing assessment reinforces this — a student who coasted through the expert phase will struggle on a quiz that covers every subtopic equally.
Digital Jigsaw: Implementation in the Modern Classroom
The structure of jigsaw translates well to digital and blended environments. The main challenge is replicating the fluid movement between expert and home groups.
Zoom. Use Zoom's breakout rooms to simulate the expert phase. Pre-assign breakout rooms by subtopic before class. After the expert discussion timer runs out, bring everyone back to the main session, then open new breakout rooms organized by home group.
Google Workspace. Create a shared Google Slides deck with one section per subtopic. Expert groups collaborate on their assigned slides, adding key points, visuals, and embedded questions, before their peers need to learn from them. The completed deck becomes the teaching resource during the home group phase.
Flip. Flip (formerly Flipgrid) works particularly well for asynchronous jigsaw in blended courses. Expert groups record a 2-3 minute video explanation of their subtopic. Home group members watch all the videos and respond with questions before a synchronous debrief session. This format also creates a built-in record of each expert's contribution for assessment purposes.
For fully asynchronous courses: assign a Flip video as the expert group's teaching artifact. Require home group members to complete a graphic organizer covering every video before the live debrief. The organizer doubles as an accountability check and a study guide.
Subject-Specific Templates: STEM vs. Humanities
STEM: Biology Unit on Cell Organelles
Divide the unit into four parallel expert packets: (1) nucleus and nucleolus, (2) mitochondria and chloroplasts, (3) endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus, (4) cell membrane and cytoskeleton. Each expert group receives a labeled diagram, a short reading, and three questions they must answer before teaching their home group.
This works because the subtopics are parallel, not sequential. A student can understand the role of mitochondria without first understanding the nucleus. For STEM content that is procedural and sequential, such as solving quadratic equations or balancing chemical equations, jigsaw is a poor fit. Research from literacy scholar Timothy Shanahan suggests jigsaw is more effective in social studies and literature than in procedural content areas, and that finding is worth taking seriously when selecting topics.
Humanities: Historical Document Analysis
Assign each expert group one primary source from the same historical moment: a political speech, a newspaper editorial, a personal letter, and a government policy document — all from the same period. Expert groups analyze rhetorical strategy, identify the author's perspective, and prepare two discussion questions for their home group.
Students return to home groups holding four distinct perspectives on a single event. The discussion that follows is richer than any single-source analysis could produce. This format also teaches close reading and perspective-taking at the same time.
Inclusive Jigsaw: Adapting for Neurodiversity and ELL Students
English Language Learners
The jigsaw method is well-suited to ELL students when the expert group phase includes appropriate scaffolds. Provide bilingual glossaries, sentence frames for teaching ("My subtopic is ___ . The most important point is ___ . One example is ___ ."), and visual supports such as labeled diagrams and graphic organizers. The Bell Foundation's guidance on EAL learners recommends pairing ELL students with a bilingual peer during the expert group phase before they teach a mixed-language home group.
Building in rehearsal time, where students practice their teaching with a partner before returning to the home group, reduces the anxiety that can prevent ELL students from contributing fully.
Neurodiverse Learners
Students with ADHD, dyslexia, or autism spectrum disorder often respond well to the concrete role clarity that jigsaw provides. Each student knows exactly what they are responsible for, and the task structure is predictable. Supplement the protocol with visual timers to signal transitions, role cards that specify expected behaviors ("When your expert is teaching: look at them, take notes, write one question"), and graphic organizer templates for capturing notes during peer teaching.
Keep expert groups at 2-3 students for learners who struggle with larger group dynamics. Pre-teaching key vocabulary before the expert phase reduces cognitive load and gives struggling learners the foothold they need to participate meaningfully.
Assessment and Grading in a Jigsaw Classroom
Individual accountability requires individual assessment. Close every jigsaw session with at least one of the following tools:
- Individual quiz covering all subtopics, not just the one each student taught. This is the most direct accountability measure and the clearest signal of whether piece learning occurred.
- Graphic organizer completed during the home group phase. Collect these at the end of class. An organizer with gaps in sections beyond the student's own subtopic points to a problem in the expert teaching phase.
- Peer evaluation rubric where home group members rate each expert on clarity, accuracy, and preparation. Use this formatively rather than for grades; it builds metacognitive awareness and helps students give each other useful feedback.
For grading, weight individual quiz scores heavily. If you incorporate a group component, tie it to the quality of the expert artifacts (the prepared slides, summaries, or Flip videos) rather than to the home group's overall quiz performance. This rewards the preparation work that drives jigsaw outcomes while keeping individual accountability intact.
What This Means for Your Classroom
The jigsaw method takes real investment. Done well, it requires deliberate content design, careful group composition, and active monitoring during the expert phase. Done carelessly, without the quality check before experts return to home groups or with content that is too sequential to divide cleanly, it produces exactly the fragmented understanding it was designed to prevent.
The return on that investment is substantial when conditions are right. Students who teach a concept remember it at a deeper level than students who review the same content passively. Students who depend on peers for information they genuinely cannot get elsewhere learn to listen carefully, ask precise questions, and communicate clearly under mild social pressure. Those are durable skills.
Start with one well-planned jigsaw session on a unit where the content naturally divides into parallel subtopics. Observe how students perform in the expert phase. Adjust the preparation time and quality check protocol based on what you see. The structure Elliot Aronson built in 1971 has outlasted most instructional strategies that followed it because it was never fundamentally about the content. It was about engineering the conditions under which people genuinely need each other to succeed.
