Implementing the Jigsaw Method

Implementing the Jigsaw Method in Teaching Writing of Descriptive Texts at SMAN 1 Srengat

English has the main courses which students have to be capable with such as reading, listening, writing and speaking. Writing is one of the important courses in the English lesson especially for senior high school students. According to teacher’s guideline, writing courses in senior high school are classified into writing descriptive text, narrative text, report text, recount text, analytical exposition text, etc. The teachers are supposed to have brilliant methods to help the students easily organize the ideas in order to pass the writing courses. One of the methods that can be accomplished in writing course especially in teaching descriptive texts is called jigsaw. Jigsaw is defined as a kind of cooperative learning technique which has a grouping strategy where the members of the class are organized into “home” group. The students are then reorganized into “expert” groups containing one or two member(s) from each “home” group. In this way the students discuss the material (teacher’s hand made material descriptive text about Agnes Monica). By using the jigsaw method, the students can efficiently learn how to write descriptive texts in the form of peer-teaching. The purpose of this essay is to underscore the implementation of the jigsaw method; grouping, sharing and writing.

To start this method, we deal with the grouping step. In this step the students will have dependent activities. The class activities are mostly conducted by the teacher which causes the students being passive in the class. However, in this method, students are divided into small groups to share the material taught without being interrupted by the teacher. The teacher only appears to divide them into “home” group and “expert” group. “Home” group means the original group where the students are given the various topics toward the material that is explained. For example, the teacher divides the class into 8 groups consisting of 5 - 6 students with one title of descriptive text topic, Agnes Monica. In this “home” group, teacher gives each member a different clue. The teacher gives the pictures that symbolize Identification, Description 1, and Description 2 which are the generic structure of the descriptive text (actually the structure is only consisted of identification and description but since it is necessary to have 3 structure so the teacher initiated to divide the descriptive text into 3 structures). Then, the teacher reorganizes each of the group members to gather discussing the pictures related to the topic given in the “expert” group. When the teacher gives 3 topics as our example, there are also 3 “expert” groups. This activity obviously aims to gain the students participation as well. This activity apparently enables the students to increase their self-esteem in writing descriptive texts. As a proof, the writer did this method and it shows that students in SMA Negeri 1 Srengat can easily comprehend the material while they are divided into groups because they learn without being forced by the teacher.

The next step of this teaching method is the sharing step. As soon as they all have got their duties, they move to the “expert” group. The students will enjoy their turn to tell their pictures and shares to other friends in the “expert” group. They feel free to express their ideas about the pictures with their friends in the “expert” group. Here, they are given a chance to talk about the pictures and share their opinion in order to be able to report what they have been discussed to the “home” group. For instance, student 1 is assigned to the Identification where the picture has Agnes Monica photo, her date of birth, original name, address and family. Student 2 deals with the description 1 which the picture given was a photo of Agnes Monica with details description on his appearance, attitude and several questions that aim to lead the students into the paragraph of description of Agnes Monica  physical appearance. Student 3 gets the description 2 which is the description of Agnes Monica career. Many researchers prove that this kind of sharing in using jigsaw method can improve the ability of students in writing genre based text, because by sharing the students can get the ideas of the story easily. The writer believes that sharing in jigsaw can help students to make their ideas of writing descriptive text run smoothly.

The last step is writing. In this step, the students are motivated to write and work together to describe pictures that have been discussed in the “expert” group. After they finished discussing in the “expert” group, they need to come back to the “home” group. In the “home” group they share about what they have got from the “expert” group and combine the each story into a complete story. The each part of the generic structure becomes one unit of descriptive text in the “home” group. In the writing step they are appointed to write down the result of the discussion in the “expert” group. The three students combine the identification, description 1 about physical appearance and the description 2 about career that they got to be written as a descriptive text. At last the students arrange the three different generic structures into one whole text and present it in front of the class.

In a brief, we can simply say this essay that the jigsaw method can be applied in teaching writing of descriptive texts that is sequenced into three steps, which are grouping, sharing and writing. These three steps are actually part of one great method provided by the teacher to decrease the cases beyond students in senior high school that mostly have difficulties in writing courses.