Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom:
In Pursuit of Common Goals

The Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom study has changed the viewpoints of teachers nationwide but hasn’t necessarily produced as many positive results as initially expected by social scientists over 25 years ago (Aronson & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 425). This largely has to do with the fact that our nation has continued to diversify itself and has presented itself with that many more prejudices since that time. Many argue that one of the major reasons for the ultimate failure was due to the over emphasis on competitiveness at the expense of interdependence in the classroom setting (Aronson & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 425). In turn, the typical student in a classroom today rarely strives to cooperate with others in pursuit of common goals. This article explains Aronson and Bridgeman describe a program designed for elementary school students forced to spend part of their time in the classroom mastering material in an interdependent structure. The findings showed that this structured interdependence increased the overall self-esteem, the morale and the interpersonal attractions as well as the empathy of students across ethnic and racial divisions (Aronson & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 434). Their program also improved the academic performance of minority students without altering the performance of the ethnic minority (Aronson & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 434). Initially I found the article to be frustrating due to the fact that their research was based from 25 years ago, however after reading the entire study I enjoyed the outcomes. I would have never thought to implicate this program in the first place but I am glad someone finally thought of it. I haven’t been in a classroom setting for several years but I vividly remember being forced to work on group projects and hating every second of it, merely because of the fact that many couldn’t find common goals. I would have enjoyed being involved in a jigsaw classroom. There is no knowing my personal results but I think many of my viewpoints and prejudices would be different than they are today. What I found interesting is that they only implicated the jigsaw method for 20% of the child’s time in the classroom. Aronson states that the data does not indicate the desirability of either placing a serious limit on classroom competitiveness or interfering with individually guided education (Aronson & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 434). This caught my attention because you would think as humans it would be in a nature to not be competitive, and rather find common goals with others, and not thinking about the inferences getting there. This study proved that there is hope for our classroom settings in the sense that less prejudices can be prevented, it’s just a matter of people implicating the program.

References

Aronson, E., & Bridgeman, D. (2011). Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom: In Pursuit of Common Goals. In J. Aronson, & E. Aronson, Readings About The Social Animal (Vol. 11, pp. 425-435). New York, New York: Worth Publishers.