Jigsaw--it sounds like the title of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Like Psycho, Spellbound, Notorious, or Vertigo. I can imagine the opening credits coming up with irregular jigsaw edges showing fragments of the actors' faces and their names floating across the screen. There would be some dark music, including perhaps a zither. It would be filmed in black and white, of course. The plot would surely be just as fragmented, given to us piece meal, forcing us to try and fit the whole thing together until the denouement when all would be revealed. Jigsaw, he would call it. Hitchcock would.
Jigsaw was the name of a teaching technique devised by Harold Aarons many years ago. It is a cooperative learning strategy that he developed as a teacher of physics. The method is simple enough in principle. The instructor has students working in groups. Each group is given a specific piece of a problem to study from a particular viewpoint. They become experts in that part of the problem. Meanwhile, other groups are working on other parts of the puzzle and becoming experts themselves. Each group only sees the part they are focusing upon. Finally, when the time is right, the teacher asks the class to reassemble in new arrangements. One person is drawn from each group and put together into new groups. So you end up with "experts" from different groups sitting together where they pool their information to form a complete picture. That's jigsaw.
Jigsaw puzzles have been around since 1762 when they were devised by John Spilsbury, an English printer. They have good educational credentials, for they were first created to teach geography and were called dissected maps. They were printed in black and white and put on a wood backing where a jigsaw would be used to cut a map into cockeyed bits for the titillation of fascinated students. The Daily Mirror in 1909 wrote enthusiastically: "A jigsaw map of England. These jigsaw geography puzzles should be introduced into all of the Council Schools in London."
It wasn't long before dissected maps were followed by dissected pictures of alphabets, of historical events, of botany and zoology. A good educational pedigree, indeed. Punch magazine always with a comedic counterpoint contrarian outlook asked in a 1910 cartoon caption, "What if the jigsaw epidemic spreads?" Well it did. Once the die press was invented in the mid-1800s then puzzles no longer had to be cut by hand and could be placed on cardboard. This turned a costly item fit only for the classroom or the parlor of a wealthy aristocrat into the playthings for "Everyman."
Over the next hundred years we have jigsaw this and jigsaw that. Jigsaw decorations were used throughout the mid and late 18th Century America and England where "gingerbread" or "Steamboat Gothic" was all the rage, prompting Rudyard Kipling to speak disparagingly in his 1921 Letters of Travels "of the jigsaw days, when it behooves respectability to use unlovely turned rails and pierced gable ends." The popularity of jigsaw puzzles waxed and waned; they were a craze in 1910 America and again in the Great Depression-that is, until 1933 when the Internal Revenue Service decided to tax them!
Jigsaw puzzles have been made of virtually every famous art piece-certainly you wouldn't expect the Mona Lisa or Whistler's Mother or American Gothic to escape their notice. Interestingly, some artists have turned the tables and used fractured media in their art, making the final painting look like a completed puzzle. Even Native American artists have been captured by the concept. I'm thinking of Navajo-Hopi painter Sherwood Begaye who is noted for his paintings on fragments of limestone resembling broken shards of pottery that are pieced back together completing a jigsaw picture.
So it was entirely appropriate for Harold Aarons to hearken back to the jigsaw's educational roots and steal a page. Here I wish to enthusiastically state that the jigsaw arrangement is a terrific way to devise a case. Before turning to a case example, it must be apparent that you can use the jigsaw idea without involving cases.
I have used jigsaw for years in a basic biology course called Evolutionary Biology. In some of the biodiversity labs, I have the students dissect groups of animals in order for them to get a sense of the structure of arthropods or echinoderms or mollusks. The particular approach that I use is to have students work in four person teams. Each person in a team receives a different animal. When we study mollusks, the animals will be a clam, a snail, a chiton, and a squid. The person with the clam will now join people from other groups who also have clams to dissect; the squid people get together too, as well as the chiton folks; the same with the snail people. Their job is to analyze the anatomical and physiological characteristics of their particular animal. In short, to become an expert on the animal.
After the dissections and intense discussion, the experts go back to their home groups. The snail, chiton, clam and squid teammates sit down together and compare notes-each person teaching the others about their beast. They look for differences and similarities, trying to piece together why biologists put these animals into the same phylum. At last, as a team they take an oral exam given by a teaching assistant over the creatures. So you see, jigsawing has a place even in a lab exercise.
But now to their role in cases. Last year, in the case study issue of JCST, we published a case on the Galapagos Islands. In the last part of that case we set up a jigsaw puzzle. Here's the scenario: The islands are a unique part of the world's flora and fauna. Tourists flock there in increasing numbers each year to ooh and ahh over the animals and their tameness. You can walk among the seals and snap photos of blue footed boobies from inches away, and you must watch that you don't trip over the marine iguana's strewn over the lava fields along shore. This isn't to mention the giant land tortoises that lumber about in the uplands and the famous Galapagos finches that Charles Darwin credited with giving him special insight into the concept of evolution.
Not surprisingly, there are scientists aplenty too at the Darwin Research station. And there are Ecuadoran citizens on a couple of the islands trying to eke out a living from the tourists or from fishing. And here's where the trouble comes in. Not all of these folks have the same agenda. The scientists would like it if everyone went home and let them study this amazing collection of organisms. Conservationists don't want anyone there. Tourists want to go everywhere and touch everything and buy tee-shirts. The shop keepers want to keep the tourists happy. The fishermen, who harvest sea cucumbers and exotic fish just want to catch their limit-plus a lot more. In fact, because they weren't allowed to fish the way they desired, they have harassed tourists and taken over the Charles Darwin Research Station and held prize unique animals hostage until their demands have been met. Tension is everywhere.
So, with this setting and some extensive reading on the islands' geology and biology, the students are given an assignment. They are to work in teams. Each group is asked to research and role play a given stakeholder in the ongoing drama. Groups are assigned to play one of these roles: scientists, tourists, fishermen, shop keepers, conservationists, and politicians. Each group sets up a list of demands or conditions that they wish to have met. The teams must research their position and agree among themselves on a strategy of dealing with the other members of their world. During the next class, I give them about 15 minutes to compare notes within their groups. At this point I scramble the teams. I take one member from each group and join them with people from other teams. Now each new group is composed of a single member representing each stakeholder position; there's a fisherman, a scientist, conservationist, politician, etc. sitting together to resolve their differences. The job of each group, under the leadership of the Ecuadoran politician, is to come up with a compromise position paper and action plan for the governance of the islands.
Regardless where jigsawing is used it has several strengths. The chief one is that the students know that they have to become experts on their topic because no one else is there to help them in the final discussion. It's them or no one. If they don't give the information about the squid or present the scientists' view, they are at fault and everyone knows it. Obviously, this can be a problem as well, for everyone is depending upon everyone else's contributions. If they fail to produce, the final report or oral exam will be deficient. But offsetting that weakness is the role playing aspect of jigsawing makes the students intensively involved with the subject matter. That's a nice change from many of our classrooms. So I recommend that you try it like others before have done.
And there are lots of others before you if you count all the folks who have been captured by the magic of bits and pieces and putting them together. When I turn to the Internet I find along with the thousands of puzzle lovers that the name jigsaw has been usurped by dozens of other improbable kindred spirits including Jigsaw, the rock group; Jigsaw, a Web server platform which allows people sitting at remote sites to collaborate; a Jigsaw cottage guest house, a Jigsaw theater company, a Jigsaw remodeling service, a Jigsaw travel agency, and yes, Jigsaw, an alien UFO site. Now I ask you, isn't it time to see that jigsaw gets its proper due from the people who started it all--teachers and a printer named John Spilsbury?
This article originally appeared in the Journal of College Science Teaching. It is reprinted here with permission from NSTA Publications, Journal of College Science Teaching, 1840 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201.
