The Power of the Jigsaw Classroom

The jigsaw classroom, an invention by the speaker and their graduate students, involved creating situations that forced kids from diverse backgrounds to cooperate. Each group had individuals with different races and genders, and each person possessed a piece of a puzzle, like a section of a biography. They could only access the entire puzzle by listening to each other's reports. This arrangement compelled kids to listen and pay attention to each other, resulting in remarkable outcomes. The groups began functioning like a cohesive basketball team, where everyone contributed, leading to consistently spectacular results in multiple experiments.