Demo Lesson: Jigsaw Groups in Teaching Writing

Learners, especially in EFL/ESL classes, find writing challenging. Therefore, unless writing lessons are devised with careful planning, they will be more challenging – and maybe boring, too. Learners usually feel frustrated that they excessively experience writer’s block and cannot generate interesting ideas. To minimize the effect of such factors on learners in writing classes, instructors should teach this skill explicitly, especially with low achievers and slow learners. As such, teachers can try Jigsaw Groups as they help learners study the writing genre well, make writing as a skill less “painful”, and encourage collaborative work.  

In this post, EFL Collective demonstrates one way you can implement Jigsaw groups in writing. Throughout the phases of this lesson, students will be able to write a well-organized paragraph on the causes of dropping out of school.  At the outset of the lesson, the teacher allows students some time to brainstorm any relevant ideas and take notes. Elicited ideas could be copied on the board in a form of a list, graphic organizers, or mind map as in the picture below.

It is worth noting that prior to this lesson, it would be helpful if the learners are already familiar with paragraph parts; i.e., topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence. This lesson can help you teach the paragraph writing genre.

Later on, the teacher gives students numbers from 1 to 4 then has them team up in “family groups” of four members (See the picture below).

Now that students know the “families” to which they belong, members with the same numbers from all the family groups scatter to form new groups (See the picture below). The newly-formed groups are called Expert Groups. Each expert group is assigned one part of the paragraph to work on. That is, expert group 1 works on topic and concluding sentences, while the remaining groups (i.e., 2, 3, and 4) work on supporting sentences 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Groups 2, 3 and 4 are not asked to include any details. In other words, they are not required to give examples, explain, or elaborate on the supporting sentences. However, they are urged to paraphrase and write as many versions of the same supporting sentence as they can.

As soon as they are done, the students jot down the ideas they can come up with on their respective pieces of paper before they go back to their “family” groups. And now that they are experts in different parts of the paragraph, each student collaborates with his/her “family” group members to join all the ideas together and write well-articulated paragraphs. At this stage, students are asked to elaborate on the supporting sentences and include any necessary details to give some originality to the paragraph.

Peer editing is highly recommended when the groups “finish” writing their paragraph. The groups exchange their paragraphs for editing - and may be for grading, depending on a checklist. The students mainly check if the paragraphs are coherent and cohesive.   

Finally, spokespersons from each “family” group read out the "final drafts", while the other “family” groups listen attentively to give constructive feedback.