HILJ Club: This edition of HILJ club has been prepared by: Eleanor Barker and Veronica Phillips Assistant Librarians, University of Cambridge Medical Library. @barker_eleanor @librarianerrant
The paper for discussion is Woods, H. B. (2019) Expediting learning through peer teaching: experiences with the Jigsaw technique Health Information & Libraries Journal, 36, pp 378-382
DOI: 10.1111/hir.12283 Available login free for 3 months
Background
The Jigsaw method was originally designed for use in US primary schools in the 1970s. It was initially a tool to enable social cohesion and encourage students to interact with students outside their immediate social group, but has since become a tool to promote learning. The method is underpinned by the assumption that if students have to teach each other, they learn better. It is a form of flipped classroom teaching.
Objectives
To use the Jigsaw method to develop different types of library training. To take a new approach to delivering training in a library context.
Methods
This article describes two different applications of the Jigsaw method. The first is “an exercise to identify useful data sources”. The second is a journal club in which the group is split into two, each reading a different piece of writing. The two groups discuss the writing, then participants are paired up with someone from the opposite group.
Results
The feedback from students at both sessions gave positive feedback, that they enjoyed the session and that there were benefits to the active learning methodology used in the session.
Discussion
The advantages of this methodology are that it allows a large amount of information to be covered in a short space of time. As it is an active methodology students are engaged with the session.
The disadvantages are that students become experts in one element and have to do additional work outside the class. It is essential to have a teacher who is confident to lead and facilitate discussions for this method to be effective.
Conclusion
This is a versatile and flexible teaching methodology. It gives the opportunity to encourage the students to take an active part in the training session, even if the session doesn’t involve hands-on activities such as learning how to search a database or use referencing software.
Questions for discussion
This article appeared at a very convenient time for us as we were preparing for a new training session on a subject which we had never taught in a classroom setting before. [Described below.] This is a very simple teaching method and may already be in use by some without them knowing it has a name. The sessions are not taught but facilitated by the trainer, with a focus on active and student-led learning.
What? What do you think of the research methods? Is there anything else you would have liked to have seen included in the article?
This was an interesting article. We were both well aware that teaching information literacy skills could sometimes lead to very dull sessions, particularly if the subject matter didn’t obviously link with hands-on activities or discussions. There is also a temptation to keep doing things the same way they have always been done. It is useful to discover new ways of teaching and some suggestions in the article for how this method could be applied.
We would have liked to see a more detailed analysis of the results of the author’s use of the Jigsaw method. It appears that results were based mainly on qualitative feedback taken immediately after the two training sessions, with a focus on whether participants enjoyed the sessions and found them useful. It would have been helpful if there had been some later follow up, asking the training participants how the training had been applied in the long term, and whether what they had learnt had been put to specific use with, for example, improving patient care, or in the context of their own research or studies.
So what? Does this change your view of teaching? Does it make you critically reflect on your own practice, especially when teaching?
This article has made us reconsider our teaching about how we should actively engage students on what might otherwise be very dry, passive sessions. We continually reflect on our teaching after each session, considering what worked well and what didn’t and making changes accordingly where possible.
Now what? Will you change your practice as a result of reading this article? If so how? If not, why not?
We have already used this method to teach a class of allied health professionals and nurses about the hierarchy of evidence. We were asked to deliver this session by a nurse and a dietician wanting to provide their colleagues a structured opportunity to get involved in research. The intention was to provide a series of sessions covering every stage of the research lifecycle, from coming up with a research question to searching for evidence, critical appraisal, and research dissemination through conference posters and writing for publication. One of the sessions involved introducing the students to the concept of the hierarchy of evidence, and we were aware that just talking about the different levels of evidence such as blog posts, journal articles, systematic reviews and so on could lead to a very dull session. Instead, we used the Jigsaw method. We split our attendees into groups and asked each of them to evaluate one resource, the resources being Google, NICE Evidence Search, Medline, and the Cochrane Library. They evaluated these sources according to ease of use, the kind of information found within them, and in what contexts that information might be appropriate. We were able therefore to use the Jigsaw method to make this a much more interactive session — rather than just talking them through a list of resources, they were given the opportunity to try out each resource itself and teach the other students about their strengths and weaknesses.
Please join in the discussion and let us know what you think of the article and how you have applied the method.
References
ARNOLD-GARZA, S. 2014. The Flipped Classroom Teaching Model and Its Use for Information Literacy Instruction. Communications in Information Literacy, 8, 7-22.
ARONSON, E. 1978. The Jigsaw Classroom. (Oxford: Sage).
EDUCAUSE. 2012. 7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms [Online]. Available: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2012/2/7-things-you-should-know-about-flipped-classrooms [Accessed 17/03/2020].
PANNABECKER, V., BARROSO, C. S. & LEHMANN, J. 2014. The Flipped Classroom: Student-Driven Library Research Sessions for Nutrition Education. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 19, 139-162.
HILJ Club 
This was an interesting article, especially at the moment as we are having to think about alternatives to our normal teaching methods.
The Jigsaw method is a clever model for getting the participants in a training session involved in the session. I have seen it used in training sessions I have been in and did not realise that there was a specific name for the technique/style of teaching. I have definitely taken more away from those sessions. However, I have never known how to incorporate that sort of session into the type of training we do as librarians however; the “bread and butter” critical appraisal and literature searching sessions haven’t seemed to lend themselves to this type of teaching. The Jigsaw method also relies on having enough participants in the training session to be able to break up into sub-groups. There can be as few as 2 or 3 people in group training sessions – not enough to break into groups. You would need a minimum of 4 people to make this type of session work, depending on the topics you wanted them to present on.
The journal club model described in Figure 1 was very interesting. Often a journal club will be dominated by a few speakers in the discussion and the majority of the group will sit and listen. This method gives the opportunity for the whole group to discuss the articles in a way that they may feel more comfortable with, ie not in front of a group. This is something that I would like to try out in journal clubs.
It was interesting that the authors comment on the method feeling rushed and intimidating for some participants and that groups might find it better if they know each other already. I can see that this would definitely apply, having participated in these type of sessions myself.
The role of the facilitator did not come out clearly in the article for me and if I was to use this as a method I would want to know more about how to facilitate these sessions effectively. I think that I would use Jigsaw as a method mixed in with other more traditional lecturing and discussion styles of teaching. This is something that I am going to have a think about as to how it could be incorporated into any teaching sessions that I do in the future.
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We discussed this at a virtual meeting of our regular librarian journal club in our NHs hospital library. An interesting article, it led to discussions on our teaching practice and interactivity of teaching sessions.
What? Our immediate concern was that it can be difficult for users to attend sessions full stop due to work commitments and constraints, and so asking them to find time to undertake work beforehand might be problematic. We’re not against trying it, but we’re not hopeful. We also discussed whether participants might go away as experts in one area, but with a more superficial knowledge in others.
We wanted a little bit more detail on evaluation or comparison to other techniques, and some user feedback. However, we all found the article useful, and felt there were merits to the jigsaw technique and it generated a lively debate.
So What? It hasn’t made us reconsider how we teach in general, but it’s a useful addition. It’s made us think about whether we could ask participants to complete work before a session, and how we might feedback to them after a session.
What now? It’s helped us to reflect on our teaching, and we feel this might be incorporated into our teaching It’ll join our suite of interactive methods. We particularly thought it would be of use to evaluate understanding in sessions, potentially towards the end of a literature searching workshop.
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